04.04.2013 Views

Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

Create successful ePaper yourself

Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.

Help menu<br />

Copy for Discourse: It is very common for <strong>Processing</strong> users, especially those currently<br />

stuck <strong>and</strong>/or confused (which happens to all of us), to paste code snippets<br />

on the <strong>Processing</strong> discourse board. Unfortunately, the pasted results don’t always<br />

look very good, as some of the formatting gets lost. Some of us with HTML backgrounds<br />

simply try inserting HTML tags directly in our code, to fix the formatting—<br />

to no avail. The <strong>Processing</strong> discourse board uses YaBB, a free, open source bulletin<br />

board system. For security reasons, YaBB doesn’t allow the use of HTML tags in<br />

posts. Thus, you’re forced to learn yet another proprietary tag system, called YaBB<br />

Code (YaBBC) to fix your formatting. Or, you can simply select Copy for Discourse,<br />

<strong>and</strong> <strong>Processing</strong> will write the YaBBC for you—cool indeed!<br />

Here’s how it works: when you select Copy for Discourse, your sketch code is copied<br />

to your computer’s clipboard <strong>and</strong> converted into YaBBC for the discourse board;<br />

simply paste to the board to recreate your <strong>Processing</strong> sketch code. In reality, YaBBC<br />

is pretty darn close to HTML, so it doesn’t take an experienced coder much time to<br />

learn it—but why waste the brain cells? To learn more about YaBB/YaBBC, visit<br />

www.yabbforum.com/community/YaBB.pl?action=help.<br />

Archive Sketch: This comm<strong>and</strong> creates a ZIP archive of the current sketch, prompting<br />

you with a Save dialog to choose a location to save the archive.<br />

Figure 5-10 shows a screenshot of <strong>Processing</strong>’s Help menu.<br />

The Help menu contains the following:<br />

Figure 5-10. Screen capture of <strong>Processing</strong>’s<br />

Help menu<br />

THE PROCESSING ENVIRONMENT<br />

Getting Started: This launches your default web browser, loading information on the<br />

<strong>Processing</strong> environment. This functionality does not require an Internet connection,<br />

as the information is stored locally within the <strong>Processing</strong> application directory.<br />

The information is divided into three sections. The first, Overview, covers the<br />

<strong>Processing</strong> development environment, <strong>Processing</strong>’s three programming modes, <strong>and</strong><br />

the different rendering modes. The second section, Platforms, lists the supported<br />

platforms <strong>and</strong> some platform-specific information (both the good news <strong>and</strong> the<br />

less-than-good news). One of the nicest aspects of the <strong>Processing</strong> community is the<br />

transparency <strong>and</strong> lack of marketing hype when it comes to what <strong>Processing</strong> can<br />

(currently) do <strong>and</strong> not do. The last section, Export, provides information about<br />

exporting your sketches as both applets <strong>and</strong> applications. For the very latest information,<br />

refer to http://processing.org/reference/environment/index.html.<br />

157<br />

5

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!