The Strake ( ? )

Processing and Yahoo!

I’m not sure how I never knew about the Design Innovation Team over at Yahoo. They’ve got several cool projects going on and a nice blog that would be even cooler if they fixed their RSS feed.

I came across this after reading Jeff Atwood’s recent post mentioning Processing. The Yahoo Design Innovation Team is making heavy use of Processing and it’s long been right at the top of my “To Play With” list. People are doing some amazingly cool stuff with it and it would appear to be a perfect fit for my interests (high-level coding, graphics, design, visualization techniques, etc.). The one thing that just doesn’t sit well with me is having to deploy the final product as a Java applet - that just feels wrong this day in age.

On a related note, I just noticed that the upcoming O’Reilly book, Visualizing Data, uses Processing for it’s visualization techniques.

I really want to get involved with some sort of cool visualization project(s) this coming year and I’ve been trying to decide where to invest my few saw-sharpening cycles. Option 1: Learn Processing, figure out how to pull in external data (which the new O’Reilly book no doubt teaches), and get over the applet thing. Or Option 2: dig deeper into ActionScript 3 and Flex, brush up on AIR, and investigate some of the cool AS libraries like Flare.