So, as you can see, I’ve been playing with generative graphics. Nodebox is a pretty sweet, and free, program that I’ve had time to explore since contracting a series of infections. [sidebar: being sick in the summer is especially lame because who the hell expects to have a sore throat in June?] It’s aimed at graphic designers, which is reflected sort of interestingly in the way they present the concepts involved in writing code; I haven’t seen “hello world” or “foo” any where in their documentation yet.  Nodebox is python based, so it’s extremely intuitive and a really good way to spend your afternoons rather than watching endless blocks of television, and I recommend you all fool around with it at least a little; people have done some really neat things with it.

That there was my way of feeling out the program…it has a little bit of everything, code wise: gradients, for loops, randomized values [cool!], curves, text etc. It was fun and it took maybe half an hour, including getting the leaf to look right. Not bad at all.

Now here is something a little more interesting.. While I’ve been sick, I’ve been playing with a few ideas for the look of our toolkit [AJ and Barry are working with the functionality]..the draft is pretty self explanatory . Edit nodes and node-code [heh] in the center, view outputs of nodes on the right, and we haven’t quite worked out what options are going to be available on the left bar, but we’re thinking something along the lines of qualitative information about selected nodes.

The really nice thing about nodebox is it allowed me to write overhead so I could generate each node and its color, shape, etc. easily, and moreover, I imagine this will be very helpful when I begin working with GTK’s graphic’s library,Cairo.

I’m planning on doing a few simple animations to demonstrate usage of the program,  and as soon as possible, begin either porting or wrapping what I have for use with what AJ and Barry have been working on. Hopefully AJ will have his post on that soon…

Have fun.