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Conway’s Game of Life in Nodebox

erik — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:31:05 +0000

I was reading Ben Fry‘s thesis, Organic Information Design yesterday, came across the section on Conway’s Game of Life, and thought it would make a nice NodeBox demo.

Here it is: conway-life.py

There’s not much to it, but it does show a software pattern I’ve been using frequently with NodeBox. Many of the NodeBox examples make heavy use of non-namespaced, global variables. I suppose it makes simple code easy to read for those new to programming, but it’s a habit you’ll want to break before your code starts getting more complex.

What I’ve found helpful is to create a World/Universe/Controller/Stage object that drives the rendering. Instead of using multiple globals in draw(), the controller object keeps the main parameters as local properties, and instantiates any needed objects in it’s __init__(). This approach prevents global variables names from clashing, and allows for creative reuse of rendering components.

Enjoy!

Lily: Visual programming in JavaScript

erik — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 06:19:24 +0000

I have an odd fascination with Visual Programming languages, and while I’ve gotten so far as sketching out some UI concepts and object models for a text-processing focused, web-mashing, visual programming environment, I’m a long way from having anything that works. Much to my surprise then when David Ascher dropped a link to the Lily project on his blog today. Holy cow this is sweet. Think PD or Max/MSP written in JavaScript, running in a browser, with modules for popular Web API’s and JavaScript frameworks (ex., “Amazon, Flickr, Wikipedia, Yahoo; UI modules that wrap widgets from YUI, Scriptaculous, JQuery, Google Maps….”)

Check out one of the demo’s here:

(Via: Lily: JavaScript, visual programming, fun.)

Video: “Web 2.0… The Machine is Us/ing Us”

erik — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 20:03:33 +0000

Here’s a great video on the evolution of the Web:

[Direct link, for the feed readers.]

(Via Gizmodo.)