Last Sunday I gave a small workshop at the MapBox office, where I showed new findings I’ve discovered while working on my last visualization project. We turned a collection of countries into a dance of dots, each dot referring to a country in the collection. In other words: We created a simple animated Scatterplot.
VVVV.js
The VVVV.js project has launched, and joins the game of porting great stuff to JavaScript. Read about what it is, what it is not and what to do to make it become, what it might be some day, in this quasi-artikel.
Character animation in VVVV
As my weapon of choice, the visual programming environment VVVV provides a huge amount of functionality in the area of multimedia and 3D computer graphics - all accessible in a nice non-textual programming environment. While there exist several ways of manipulation 3D geometry in VVVV, right now there are no explicit methods for doing character animation.
So, this project (which was topic of my diploma thesis) aims to create an API, which introduces the terms of character animation to the world of VVVV. In this article I’m giving a little introduction of the developed nodes, and how to use them.
In search of a suitable object model for describing charts
When looking at various charting libraries I usually see the developers using concepts like Series, Categories, Axis, etc.
For some reason I’ve always had troubles wrapping my head around those concepts in order to ‘think’ in those terms.
Quadratic bezier curves for Processing.js
Since Processing and respectively Processing.js don’t support quadratic curves, you are forced to construct them with a conventional cubic bezier curve. I’ve never used bezier curves before, so I took this as a lesson.
Motion Tweening for Processing.js
Creating animations in Processing.js can be a quite hard and repetitive job. Having a simple library for animating graphical objects probably makes the ambitious animator’s life easier.
jQuery UI Multiselect
Whenever you are dealing with Select Multiple inputs, be assured it hurts. Using Javascript you can spice up that unhandy plain old vanilla Select Multiple element that comes with your browser. Inspired by various existing solutions I ended up in creating my own version of a sortable, searchable Multiselect Widget.
Ken - A Ruby API for accessing Freebase
I’d like to introduce a project I’ve been working on since a while. I simply called it Ken. Basically Ken is a data layer for knowledge representation. More precisely it’s a Ruby Library that is being built to access the Metaweb Services supplied by Freebase. Just born, the project’s goal is the provision of a concise API for querying and writing structured data.
