Archive for the 'Generic Stuff' Category

Some advertisements, and here is why.

Published on March 23, 2012 in Generic Stuff and News. 0 Comments

I started putting some advertisements here and there on the website today. This is in response to generate more income in addition to donations to support the website hosting and maintenance (and to reduce the burden on my wallet). Still, OpenProcessing is serving to a growing but a niche community but trying to do this with a vimeo-like quality. Because Processing users do not deserve any less! It is an amazingly creative community and OpenProcessing is committed to provide a great social platform for Processing users. And of course, this comes with a cost (you can read the $ details on this post).

I also feel like the ads might not fit the look and feel of the pages on which your sketches and portfolios are displayed, so I will soon implement a plus subscription option that would allow you to hide any ads displayed on your pages (a vimeo-like approach it is). As I hope you would welcome these updates to the website, I would love to hear any feedback you would have.

Easy source code viewer by Emoc

Published on February 11, 2010 in Generic Stuff. 4 Comments

I wanted to give a quick plug to a great tool that allows you to see any source code on OpenProcessing in various formats:

OpenProcessing Source Reader by Emoc

This great tool allows you to see the source code of a sketch in a single page, using whether raw text, geshi or syntax highlighter formats. You can also generate the source code as a PDF file from this tool! Emoc also made it easy to use this tool through its URL: just add the visualID of the sketch to the end of the url, as in http://emoc.org/opcode/2292 or http://emoc.org/opcode/2292pdf. Check it out!

How to attribute/give credit to the owner while using the sketches in other platforms?

Published on July 15, 2009 in Generic Stuff. 0 Comments

I recently received an email from a user who would like to use some sketches in a gallery space, on how to give attribution to the owners of these works. It made me realize that it is not necessarily clear how to do this on the website, and according to Creative Commons, anyone should attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor. As OpenProcessing being the licensor in this case, I would like to provide such information in the footer/every sketch page, I thought of this text to be used for attribution:

%Title% by %fullname%, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.
Work: http://openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=%1234%
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Of course, because the license is share-alike, any alteration, transformation, or build upon this work should be distributed only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

Please help me to refine this text by commenting on this post, if you think any additions, updates necessary. I will put a similar text to the website as soon as possible, and I will update it per your feedback/discussion under this post. Thank you, again..

“All rights reserved” sketches?? Looking for your feedback!

Published on March 1, 2009 in Generic Stuff. 11 Comments

Hey everyone,

I wanted to create a post in response to Charles Dietrich’s comment on the previous post, and I am taking that comment and conversation here so that we can have a more focused discussion on this issue. His comment was:

Since you brought up the license issue, I’d love it if the user could specify the license they want to use, including ‘All rights reserved’, ‘BSD’, and ‘GPL’ for code (which pretty much covers the bases, since none of these things are libraries) and the licenses that Flickr lets you choose among for content (or a subset including ‘All rights reserved’ and ‘creative commons sharealike’, since it’s a big list):

None (All rights reserved)
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
Attribution Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons
Attribution-NoDerivs Creative Commons

I guess the big change that I’m asking for is the right to say ‘All rights reserved’.

Thanks for your response on this. Actually, I have been thinking about the ‘all rights reserved’ option for a while, and sincerely, couldn’t find a definite conclusion on what to do.

As you mentioned, Flickr (the website I am taking a lot of inspiration on handling of shared creativity) provides those options, and it wouldn’t be hard to do it on OpenProcessing. And providing people options to select their preferred license really make sense. However, couple of things making my feet itch:

  • -> An All-rights-reserved (ARR) sketch doesn’t really make sense if it is provided with its source code option, so I think, a user who wants to ARR his/her sketch wouldn’t prefer to display the source code either. This makes sense, and I totally understand it. But as a result, I can imagine OpenProcessing becoming a deposit for interesting Java Applets, but much value being lost… From the comments, I observe that sketches really become valuable along their source code; an example comment I like seeing is “Very nice sketch with very short code!”. What makes a Processing sketch different from a flash animation is its source code approach. And I am trying to keep OpenProcessing a place to make that difference obvious, get prospective processing users interested and encourage them to learn by going through the code.
  • -> Without source code being shared, I believe the website wouldn’t be any different from a Flash exhibition website, from the point of someone who doesn’t know about processing…
  • -> Also, I believe this community had ever been better since Ben Fry and Casey Reas (and many supporters like Daniel Shiffman) had strictly tried to keep things open source and CC. You know, the Processing application is also under Creative Commons. They don’t restrict people to share their sketches under CC, which of course gives us a lot freedom. But at this point, if OpenProcessing allows for ARR sketches, I would feel that my efforts on this project wouldn’t return that much value other than providing a service for people to exhibit their sketches without any intention to improve the community.

Let me know what you guys think. This is definitely debatable, and can be tried; I can try to provide such a feature for testing purposes, to see how it goes. But, my worries are in the paragraph above. So let me know what you think.

Interaction issues, common issues, bugs, all the weird things in the www world that makes us unhappy…

Published on July 15, 2008 in Generic Stuff. 2 Comments

So here is a list of all the issues in OpenProcessing, that comes to my mind (thanks for all the feedback that reminds me those issues):

  • Basic navigation issues
    • nothing many to navigate, but navigation isn’t well structured
      • no status feedback of where people are (no, I will not use breadcrumbs, ever!)
      • browse page doesn’t help (did help in youtube before? in flickr? any good examples?)
      • where the hell is search button?
  • image size issue (I need to implement a thumbnail generator or a server-side image sizer), need to get those huge thumbnails 100×100 pixels, otherwise they slow down the page load time, and they look ugly when resized by the browser (and windows)
  • somebody please replace the (rss) word on the homepage with an rss icon, yes the little shiny orange one
  • that very somebody, please push me to post to the blog more often
  • change the main theme color to pink and turquoise (????) (that’s gonna be awesomee!)
  • more visual tabs for code browsing
  • more visuals generally, nice icons for example…
  • improve the communication between users (users, with more functional profile features) (that’s big deal out there!)
  • fix utf-8 issue, people’s names show up weird… (does anyone know how many dots are there in my last name??)
  • comment post information (oh, that’s important to improve communication) (I don’t know how to)
  • design and user test group structure (students of a class get together under a group, collect their applications under one hood, sleep happy)
  • ‘previous’ ‘next’ buttons are cool, but should be more meaningful, I need better wording..
  • browse page visualization (the sneaky joker smile |) )
  • anything to add ??? huh??? put as a comment below. that’s why comments are there! thanks already!

Happy Firefox 3! Damn you firefox 3!

Published on July 15, 2008 in Generic Stuff. 1 Comment

I also welcomed Firefox 3, which is the browser that I always take as a base in developing OpenProcessing. Buuut, it broke my heart! They didn’t fix that OpenGL issue (so OpenGL pieces don’t show up in browser), and java applets seem to load slower (need to find some ‘loading…please wait till you die’ solution for that)…
I was never meant to be a web designer… I was supposed to be an actor… Am I too old to switch careers?

Where does it go?

Published on June 22, 2008 in Generic Stuff. 0 Comments

OpenProcessing has two main focus:

  1. to get Processing community together, to share, comment and collaborate. We are already quite open-minded people, displaying our works on our websites, sharing our codes. So OpenProcessing is trying to be a common portal for this collaboration.
  2. to be a good channel of awareness of Processing, and to support the educational uses of Processing. Processing is being used widely to teach visual oriented programming, and in these groups, code sharing, exhibiting and working collaboratively is a necessary component.

In short, two big goals of OpenProcessing to open up the necessary channels for Processing community to communicate over their sketches, and to provide the tools to teach/learn Processing better, easier.

Where does it come from?

Published on June 22, 2008 in Generic Stuff. 0 Comments

So, a little bit history of OpenProcessing for those who are interested..

Everything started with OpenVisuals.org, which was my thesis project at Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU. It was about getting interesting data sets and visualizations under one hood, and making it possible to map any data set to any visualization. It was inviting any visualization artist to pick a data set and build a visualization on top of it. Within the framework, I created the website, openvisuals.org, which was supporting easy uploading and sharing of Processing Sketches. After getting website live, I started getting a lot of feedback about the necessity of such a website within the processing community, but one without a focus on data sets and visualizations. Basically, people needed a place to share their sketches (of any content) on the web, exhibit their pieces and comment on each other.

As a response to this Processing Forum thread, I saw that OpenVisuals already included many technical components that people were expecting to see (tags, easy upload, profiles, etc..), I put up OpenProcessing.org, copying pretty much the same content and design that OpenVisuals had. I stripped all those data set and visualization focused sections. And here came out OpenProcessing.org!

Yes! OpenProcessing needs a blog!

Published on June 14, 2008 in Generic Stuff. 0 Comments

In the end, I was able to setup a blog for the website. This will be the place that I will let you know about what I am working on and future developments. I believe, this blog would also be very helpful for me to get feedback from you; your feedback is veeery important for me.

1. Because I am an interaction designer and respect the “user centered design” principles a lot.

2. Because there might be many different uses of this website, so the more I learn how you are using, what kind of features is important for you, the more I will be able to make this website valuable for our community.

Anyways, this is just a first post.. gotta keep it short!

Coming very soon: the history of OpenProcessing, where it is heading to, new features under development…