I love Processing in a way that’s almost unseemly for a gentleman and a programming language but there’s something about Java that feels, how can I put this, a bit inelegant and crufty. Lots of braces, lots of type declaration and so on. That feeling put me on a search for a way to do cross-platform graphics in a tidier language. The options that I’ve come up with so far are:

MidiOSC, the MIDI to OSC bridge that I’ve been beavering away on for the past couple of months, is now available for download on GitHub. I wrote it in response to the messed up state of MIDI support in Java on OSX. I do a lot of work with Processing and external hardware that talks MIDI so having things break at random when the OS was upgraded wasn’t a good thing for me.

I was digging through some of my old Processing sketches to find something to generate the background for this page when I stumbled across an experiment in particle systems that I’d been working on. The sketch generates a crude approximation of a gravitational field and then drops a load of particles on that change velocity according to their location. As you can see in the video this can lead to some nicely chaotic behaviour.

A New Year resolution