daniel shiffman

1-800-Processing from shiffman on Vimeo.

I’m pleased to announce that we’re releasing the first version of The Most Pixels Ever, an open-source Java framework for spanning Processing sketches across multiple screens (developed with Chris Kairalla). This is an early version that has many limitations and needs a great deal of improvement, but it does work. The site isn’t complete, but the source is available, and there are a couple tutorials to help get your started.

I’ll be using the library in conjunction with teaching a new class at ITP starting today!

One more video. . .

Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run Lola Run from shiffman and Vimeo.

IAC Video Wall Day 2 from shiffman and Vimeo.

IAC Video Wall Test from shiffman and Vimeo.

We’re testing the most pixels ever library on the IAC Video Wall. So far it works.

More to come in the next two days. . .

Now, I am rather overdue for an update on my upcoming book. I’ll be posting details soon. However, in the course of finishing up a chapter on String parsing, I discovered that my good friend, the Google SOAP API is no longer being supported (obviously, I’m a little late on the ball here.)

So, I quickly whipped up a Processing library to make use of the Yahoo Search API. Now, you can access the Yahoo! API directly in Processing. There’s even an example here. However, you would have to write your own thread if you wanted to search asynchronously. In addition, if you’re not comfortable diving into outside Java APIs, you might struggle to figure out the syntax. (Switchboard also provides an interface to the Yahoo! API.)

So I set out (as an example for my book) to make a quick and easy bridge to the Yahoo API.

Finally, take a peek at this example code.

// Import the library
import pyahoo.*;

YahooSearch yahoo;

void setup() {
  size(400,400);
  // Make a search object
  yahoo = new YahooSearch(this,"YOUR API KEY HERE");

}

void mousePressed() {
  yahoo.search("processing.org");
  // You can request more results like so (the default is 10):
  // yahoo.search("processing.org",30);
}

void draw() {
  noLoop();
}

// The searches will come in one at a time to here when finished
void searchEvent(YahooSearch yahoo) {
  // You can get the titles, URLs, or Summaries back as an array of Strings
  String[] titles = yahoo.getTitles();
  String[] urls = yahoo.getUrls();
  println("nI searched for " + yahoo.getSearchString());
  println("There are a total of " + yahoo.getTotalResultsAvailable() + " results available");
  println("Here are the first " + yahoo.getNumberRequested());
  for (int i = 0; i < titles.length; i++) {
    println("___________");
    println("Item # " + i);
    println(titles[i]);
    println(urls[i]);
  }

  // You can also access the Yahoo API Directly by asking for the WebSearchResult object:
  // WebSearchResults results = yahoo.getResults();
  // WebSearchResult[] results = yahoo.getResultsArray();
  // In this mode, make sure to import the Yahoo library up topl
  // import com.yahoo.search.WebSearchResults;
  // See Yahoo API documentation for more
}

There’s also a fancier example (mostly uncommented, sorry) that produced the image at the top of this post here.

Thoughts? Helpful? Useful?

We have lift-off for airport-related puns!

Terminally bored? You won’t be, with digital art by Nadja Sayej, The Globe and Mail.

Airport art: Multi-screen, interactive digital art exhibition connects travellers with a disconnected world at Terminal One by Peter Goddard, Toronto Star

Terminal Zero One Touches Down at Pearson by Adam Schwabe, blogTO

Download higher quality quicktime

I’ve been revisiting Voronoi Diagrams after seeing flight 404’s post and continuing amazing work. Started out by duplicating Golan Levin’s portraits (see image below) with the idea of developing some sort of voronoi-esque video filter (see sample above). I’m planning on trying a few things to make the Voronoi cells interpolate nicely as the video image changes. It’s just so spastic looking. . .

Thanks to Paul Chew for a great Java implementation (beat the hell out of whatever I did a few years ago).

TERMINAL ZERO ONE
Digital Art Exhibition at Toronto Pearson International Airport
Terminal 1 – Level 3 Terrace, Departures Level
July 1, 2007 – January 13, 2008

Terminal Zero One (T01) is a site-specific digital art exhibition of five projects exploring themes of contemporary air travel and the architecture of airports. Airports are networks, information is increasingly networked, the T01 exhibit examines people as data, motion as trajectories and the symbiosis of virtual and actual.

Sample images and video from my contribution are below. Happy Canada Day!

watch video

From: http://qrcode.sourceforge.jp/:

“QR Code is a two-dimensional barcode, used widely in Japan. The advantage of QR Code from well-known barcode is larger data capacity (more than 100 bytes, typically) and error correction.”

Thanks to an idea from Tom Igoe, I make a quick and dirty interface for Processing for QRCode decoding. The Pqrcode library page is here.

Also, qrcode images can be generated here.