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It’s been a long time in coming, but as of today Processing is no longer in beta. Congratulations to Ben Fry, Casey Reas, and the countless contributors to the Processing community! Here is the press release from Reas’ blog:

We’ve just posted Processing 1.0 at http://processing.org/download. We’re so excited about it, we even took time to write a press release.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. and LOS ANGELES, Calif. - November 24, 2008 - The Processing project today announced the immediate availability of the Processing 1.0 product family, the highly anticipated release of industry-leading design and development software for virtually every creative workflow. Delivering radical breakthroughs in workflow efficiency - and packed with hundreds of innovative, time-saving features - the new Processing 1.0 product line advances the creative process across print, Web, interactive, film, video and mobile.

Whups! That’s not the right one. Here we go:

Today, on November 24, 2008, we launch the 1.0 version of the Processing software. Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing’s growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics.

Students at hundreds of schools around the world use Processing for classes ranging from middle school math education to undergraduate programming courses to graduate fine arts studios.

+ At New York University’s graduate ITP program, Processing is taught alongside its sister project Arduino and PHP as part of the foundation course for 100 incoming students each year.

+ At UCLA, undergraduates in the Design | Media Arts program use Processing to learn the concepts and skills needed to imagine the next generation of web sites and video games.

+ At Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska and the Phoenix Country Day School in Arizona, middle school teachers are experimenting with Processing to supplement traditional algebra and geometry classes.

Tens of thousands of companies, artists, designers, architects, and researchers use Processing to create an incredibly diverse range of projects.

+ Design firms such as Motion Theory provide motion graphics created with Processing for the TV commercials of companies like Nike, Budweiser, and Hewlett-Packard.

+ Bands such as R.E.M., Radiohead, and Modest Mouse have featured animation created with Processing in their music videos.

+ Publications such as the journal Nature, the New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM have commissioned information graphics created with Processing.

+ The artist group HeHe used Processing to produce their award-winning Nuage Vert installation, a large-scale public visualization of pollution levels in Helsinki.

+ The University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab used Processing to create a visualization of a coastal marine ecosystem as a part of the NSF RISE project.

+ The Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami University uses Processing to build visualization tools and analyze text for digital humanities research.

The Processing software runs on the Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux platforms. With the click of a button, it exports applets for the Web or standalone applications for Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux. Graphics from Processing programs may also be exported as PDF, DXF, or TIFF files and many other file formats. Future Processing releases will focus on faster 3D graphics, better video playback and capture, and enhancing the development environment. Some experimental versions of Processing have been adapted to other languages such as JavaScript, ActionScript, Ruby, Python, and Scala; other adaptations bring Processing to platforms like the OpenMoko, iPhone, and OLPC XO-1.

Processing was founded by Ben Fry and Casey Reas in 2001 while both were John Maeda’s students at the MIT Media Lab. Further development has taken place at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Carnegie Mellon University, and the UCLA, where Reas is chair of the Department of Design | Media Arts. Miami University, Oblong Industries, and the Rockefeller Foundation have generously contributed funding to the project.

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (a Smithsonian Institution) included Processing in its National Design Triennial. Works created with Processing were featured prominently in the Design and the Elastic Mind show at the Museum of Modern Art. Numerous design magazines, including Print, Eye, and Creativity, have highlighted the software.

For their work on Processing, Fry and Reas received the 2008 Muriel Cooper Prize from the Design Management Institute. The Processing community was awarded the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica award and the 2005 Interactive Design Prize from the Tokyo Type Director’s Club.

The Processing website (www.processing.org) includes tutorials, exhibitions, interviews, a complete reference, and hundreds of software examples. The Discourse forum hosts continuous community discussions and dialog with the developers.

Relentless, The REV from flight404 on Vimeo.

Audio-generated landscape 2 from flight404 on Vimeo.

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

Weird Fishes: Arpeggi from flight404 on Vimeo.

Bodysnatchers - Zeno Music Visualiser from Glenn Marshall on Vimeo.

Metamorphosis from Glenn Marshall on Vimeo.

Music Is Math from Glenn Marshall on Vimeo.

Mind-blowing visuals generated in Processing by Robert Hodgin and Glenn Marshall, respectively. I first saw Robert’s work at Flashbelt this past year and was completely blown away, which led me to seek out other such talented individuals. This work has been a constant inspiration for me and a major driving force behind my desire to learn Processing.

I was researching dynamic site update options for a project at work and stumbled upon Damien du Toit’s blog. Damien has developed a plugin for jQuery that allows you to pull in data from Twitter. Naturally I had to try it out for myself, so it’s now featured in the sidebar of my blog.

From Damien’s blog:

Introducing jQuery plugin for Twitter v1.0 - View Demo
A simple, unobtrusive and customisable client-side method for easily embedding a Twitter feed into a web page.

To begin, download the source files (.zip) and familiarise yourself with the necessary JavaScript and CSS files that need to be included in your page:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="jquery.twitter.css" type="text/css" />
<script src="jquery.twitter.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Next, add a div element with id “twitter” to your page, wherever you want the feed to appear:

<div id="twitter"></div>

Lastly attach the plugin to that div with the following jQuery code (the customisation options are pretty much self-explanatory I think):

$(document).ready(function() {
	$("#twitter").getTwitter({
		userName: "jquery",
		numTweets: 5,
		loaderText: "Loading tweets...",
		slideIn: true,
		showHeading: true,
		headingText: "Latest Tweets",
		showProfileLink: true
	});
});

It’s obviously a little more involved, but that should be enough to get you up and running!

Today I feel something I’ve never felt before: pride in my country.

I’ve been ashamed of the U.S. for most of my life. When I’ve traveled abroad I’ve done my best not to “out” myself as an American out of embarrassment. For the past 8 years we’ve had a bumbling idiot representing us to the rest of the world. I seriously considered, on multiple occasions, packing up and denouncing my citizenship—jumping ship seemed a rational action when faced with the reality of a drunken cowboy-buffoon at the helm, his coked-up crapulence sure to steer us into the gaping maw of depression at any moment.

Today I’m proud that we elected an inspiring leader that has united Americans across boundaries of class, race, gender, age, and religion in unprecedented numbers. I’m proud that children around the world awoke today to possibilities that in their parents’ lifetimes had seemed unattainable. And dammit, I’m actually optimistic that the archaic, obtuse attitudes that have shrouded U.S. history in shame may be fading into obscurity.

It’s a pretty good day.

Got to the polls this morning at 6am thinking I’d be smarter than everyone else and avoid long lines. The line was already wrapped around the block. 90 cold, rainy minutes later I finally got inside to cast my vote.

My man better win this thing or I’m gonna be pissed.

Am I completely out of touch for starting a blog this late in the game or incredibly hip for shunning the trend this long?

A little about myself:
I’m a designer, web developer, musician, and father living in Richmond, VA. I’ll likely be blogging frequently about generative art, Flash/Actionscript, Processing, music production, and Ableton Live. I’ll attempt to bypass the cliché personal diatribes (you really don’t care what I had for breakfast, do you? [tomato bisque]) and just post about things that I find interesting.

The blog design is pretty minimal right now in keeping with my current infatuation with progressive enhancement techniques. As I have time I’ll be adding some bells & whistles.