Writing

Processing 0176 (pre-release)

PooI’ve just posted revision 0176 of Processing, a pre-release of what will become version 1.1 or maybe 1.5, depending on how long we bake this one before releasing the final. A list of changes can be found here.

You can download the release at android.processing.org, which (as you might guess) is the eventual home of the Android version of Processing. The Android support is very incomplete, as you can see from the warnings on the page.

But ignore for a moment that it says “Android”, the download is hosted there because at the moment, most of my energy is focused on the Android extensions. While the build also includes the incomplete Android tools (just pretend they aren’t there, unless you’re willing to read all the caveats on that page), there are many bug fixes for the regular Java version of Processing in the download too. It’s been a couple months since I’ve done a proper release, so there’s a backlog of fixed bugs and things I’ve been adding.

I’m posting the pre-release because so many things have changed, and I don’t want to do a 1.1 release, followed by an immediate 1.1.1. So please test! Then again, it’s taken me so long to explain the situation that I should have just posted it as 1.1.

And by the time you read this, it’ll probably be release 0177, or 0178, or…

Saturday, February 20, 2010 | processing  
Book

Visualizing Data Book CoverVisualizing Data is my 2007 book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. When first published, it was the only book(s) for people who wanted to learn how to actually build a data visualization in code.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. Amazon also has an edition for the Kindle, for people who aren’t into the dead tree thing. (Proceeds from Amazon links found on this page are used to pay my web hosting bill.)

Examples for the book can be found here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. Next is (chapter 3) is a simple mapping project to place data points on a map of the United States. Of course, the idea is not that lots of people want to visualize data for each of 50 states. Instead, it’s a jumping off point for learning how to lay out data spatially.

The chapters that follow cover six more projects, such as salary vs. performance (Chapter 5), zipdecode (Chapter 6), followed by more advanced topics dealing with trees, treemaps, hierarchies, and recursion (Chapter 7), plus graphs and networks (Chapter 8).

This site is used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.