Here’s a peek of what’s to come, hopefully quite soon. I’m hoping to use SWFAddress on this project, which will be fun to learn. (Here’s my current portfolio.)

I took part in Reporter’s (RIT’s campus magazine) Cover Challenge for their crowdsourcing issue, due out later this month. It’s like Layer Tennis, but with more than two people, and for magazine covers. That’s my cover, up above! I made it with Processing and Photoshop. Check out the link to see all the other covers that have been made thus far.

For my final project in Processing, I’m trying to make a dynamic Sankey Diagram generator (I may be wrong in calling what I want to do “Sankey,” more research is needed on that). What I would like to end up with is a program that can take numeric data like a budget and turn it into a diagram like this. Ideally it would be able to handle more branches than just the one “in” and the one “out.”

Today I started playing around with data input. I spent a while trying to make sense of Governor Paterson’s recently released state budget, which was obviously extremely overwhelming to a common man like myself. I found a different document that will suit my needs for now, but eventually I will have to figure out a way to handle some of the intricacies of the state budget.

What I did get was the foundations of the data input and visual proportions parts of the project. It doesn’t look like much yet, but it works! On the left are the receipts (money in) and on the right are the disbursements (money out). The next step will be to add monetary values (it sure doesn’t look like a $120 billion budget) and get the more attractive curvy aspect in. More on that later.

For my second project in Processing, I was hoping to do something with maps, a la Ben Fry’s All Streets or Zipdecode. I was playing around with some of the data I had gathered from my Energy Independence project (which included a lot of zip codes and coordinates), trying to come up with a ZIP code map, the results of which can be seen above. Obviously this isn’t anything different than what Ben Fry has already done, but it was my first experience with Processing’s supreme ability to handle so much data.

After spending a night trying to make sense of the TIGER/Line files (the road files that were used for All Streets), I decided not to pursue road maps for my second project. I did finally find a program that showed me all of the data in a way I could bring in to Processing, which was exciting and definitely worth the time, but I was having a tough time trying to think of what to do with them once I had them in Processing. I may come back to this idea later, since, let’s face it, I love maps.

Instead, I’m going to try and make a Processing-driven dynamic Sankey Diagram / flow chart generator. I’ve spent plenty of time doodling these things in my notebook before last year when I found out that they actually had a name (and a purpose). Since then I’ve wanted to make a program that will take an XML file of say, the US Budget, and pump out one of these guys, and will do so over and over for any relevant set of data. I’ll be posting progress work on that as it happens.

I’m very quickly starting to like Processing after some trepidation earlier on. At first I found it difficult to get over what I am used to in AS3 – having one object move around the screen – and replace it with a new image being drawn every frame. The more I think about things like that, though, the easier it becomes, and the more I can make my projects look like what I want them to. There are a lot of pictures in here, so to keep the front page clean, I’ll put them after the break.

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iTunes has a list of Larry David’s favorite Curb episodes. They are:

• The Doll
• Mary, Joseph and Larry
• The 5 Wood
• The Ida Funkhouser Roadside Memorial
• The Ski Lift
• The Survivor
• Opening Night

All great picks. The Car Pool Lane, Krazee Eyez Killa and Trick or Treat also come to mind as some of my favorites.

Pepsi: If the only reason you’re going to use Flash is so you can play annoying music and click through a “3D” interface (look! the square is slightly distorted!), then you should probably reconsider your approach to this whole website thing.

(It also throws a ton of errors with the debug player.)

Ugh… the grunge… ugghh! The YouTube celebrities… the spinning text… I think I’m going to throw up…

(The preview movie will probably go away once this thing starts, so to really capture the horror, visit soon!)

I’m very happy with my additions to the project. I got a lot of good suggestions from critique and added some stuff I wanted to see as well. Here’s the link to the final (for reference, here’s my blog post on the first version). Some of the new changes include:

• Dragging the objects: Because my windmill animations are made up of PNGs, the draggable area was actually the whole square PNG when it should have been just the windmill. My first approach to solving this was to do a pixel hit test, which proved very frustrating. I consulted Matt who referred me to the InteractivePNG class, which very easily told the mouse to ignore the PNG’s alpha. The problem it didn’t solve, however, was to then let the mouse pass through the alpha and target the next PNG behind it. As soon as I was about to start coding a nice big for loop to fix this, I realized that all my problems would be solved if I just drew the windmills in Flash using the pen tool. Which I did. Victory! So now you can have two or more objects overlapping, and be able to drag the one that the mouse is over, not always the one that is closer to you on the stage.
• Draw Attention to the Clipboard: Another suggestion from crit. Whenever you add an item to the stage, the clipboard glows for a second. There’s also an animation of a marker circling the price, which was a great suggestion from Laura.
• New Buttons in Item Selector: There’s a new button that lets you buy the object and one that lets you clear the stage of everything you’ve added to it. There’s also a tooltip when you roll over the item’s thumbnail that gives you some extra information.
• Change Location: Pretty much a nice ol’ reset button.
• Sound: I didn’t want to overwhelm my project with rollover clicky noises, so I put a few in on the item selector. I considered putting in a “ch-ching!” sound when the cost changes, but opted not to with all the other stuff I have going to draw your attention over there. There’s also ambient noise, which is fairly quiet, but it is different depending on the weather (currently four sounds: day, night, rain and snow).
• Fixed Stage Resizing: On the old version, if you resize the browser window when there are objects on the stage, the objects will move, which they shouldn’t. This was because I was adding them to the stage of the item selector, which moves up and down with the window. I fixed this by passing the DisplayObject up to the Manager and adding it there instead.

That’s all for now! There will be a new version sometime in early December.

Excuse the yet another post about Wilco, but I am very excited that my copy of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on vinyl arrived today (and it comes with a CD too! For only $13! I think I’ll be buying everything on vinyl now…). This is also the first new LP I’ve ever bought (the used records at the Ronald McDonald Sale don’t count, though all of Beethoven’s 9 symphonies for 80 cents is a steal), so I’m pretty chuffed right now.