Book Image

Processing 2: Creative Programming Cookbook

Book Image

Processing 2: Creative Programming Cookbook

Overview of this book

Processing is probably the best known creative coding environment that helps you bridge the gap between programming and art. It enables designers, artists, architects, students and many others to explore graphics programming and computational art in an easy way, thus helping you boost your creativity. "Processing 2: Creative Programming Cookbook" will guide you to explore and experience the open source Processing language and environment, helping you discover advanced features and exciting possibilities with this programming environment like never before. You'll learn the basics of 2D and 3D graphics programming, and then quickly move up to advanced topics such as audio and video visualization, computer vision, and much more with this comprehensive guide. Since its birth in 2001, Processing has grown a lot. What started out as a project by Ben Fry and Casey Reas has now become a widely used graphics programming language. Processing 2 has a lot of new and exciting features. This cookbook will guide you to explore the completely new and cool graphics engine and video library. Using the recipes in this cookbook, you will be able to build interactive art for desktop computers, Internet, and even Android devices! You don't even have to use a keyboard or mouse to interact with the art you make. The book's next-gen technologies will teach you how to design interactions with a webcam or a microphone! Isn't that amazing? "Processing 2: Creative Programming Cookbook" will guide you to explore the Processing language and environment using practical and useful recipes.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Processing 2: Creative Programming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Installing tools


Processing tools are little applications that extend the PDE. Processing comes with a standard set of tools: a color selector, a tool to create fonts, a tool to create movies, and some other useful things.

Getting ready

There is an overview of available tools on the Processing website at http://processing.org/reference/tools/. This overview includes all standard tools and tools made by people from the Processing community. At the moment, there aren't that many tools available, but the number of quality tools might grow in the future.

How to do it...

Processing 2 has a new feature to install tools in an easy way: the Tool Manager. You can find the Tool Manager by going to Tools | Add Tool…. The Tool Manager works the same way as the Library Manager we've discussed in the Installing libraries recipe. Just like with libraries, not all tools are available in the Tool Manager. If you find a tool online, you can install it manually in the tools directory. This procedure is the same as installing a library manually. The Tool Manager looks as shown in the following screenshot:

How it works...

Tools are installed in the tools directory in your sketchbook. Each tool directory usually contains two directories, one for the tool, which contains the tool JAR file, and one with the Java source code. This JAR file is executed from the tool menu.