The number one news source in Germany spiegel online before and after readability:

before:

and after readability:

For further information see what arc90 is blogging, check lifehackers review or see what ReadWriteWeb is saying in favor of this handy tool. Mr. Gruber get’s it right in just one sentence.

BTW: arc90 have a nice weblog, too. Check it out.

Official press release:

Today, on November 24, 2008, we launch the 1.0 version of the Processing software. Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing’s growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics.

Students at hundreds of schools around the world use Processing for classes ranging from middle school math education to undergraduate programming courses to graduate fine arts studios.

+ At New York University’s graduate ITP program, Processing is taught alongside its sister project Arduino and PHP as part of the foundation course for 100 incoming students each year.

+ At UCLA, undergraduates in the Design | Media Arts program use Processing to learn the concepts and skills needed to imagine the next generation of web sites and video games.

+ At Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska and the Phoenix Country Day School in Arizona, middle school teachers are experimenting with Processing to supplement traditional algebra and geometry classes.

Tens of thousands of companies, artists, designers, architects, and researchers use Processing to create an incredibly diverse range of projects.

+ Design firms such as Motion Theory provide motion graphics created with Processing for the TV commercials of companies like Nike, Budweiser, and Hewlett-Packard.

+ Bands such as R.E.M., Radiohead, and Modest Mouse have featured animation created with Processing in their music videos.

+ Publications such as the journal Nature, the New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM have commissioned information graphics created with Processing.

+ The artist group HeHe used Processing to produce their award-winning Nuage Vert installation, a large-scale public visualization of pollution levels in Helsinki.

+ The University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab used Processing to create a visualization of a coastal marine ecosystem as a part of the NSF RISE project.

+ The Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami University uses Processing to build visualization tools and analyze text for digital humanities research.

The Processing software runs on the Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux platforms. With the click of a button, it exports applets for the Web or standalone applications for Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux. Graphics from Processing programs may also be exported as PDF, DXF, or TIFF files and many other file formats. Future Processing releases will focus on faster 3D graphics, better video playback and capture, and enhancing the development environment. Some experimental versions of Processing have been adapted to other languages such as JavaScript, ActionScript, Ruby, Python, and Scala; other adaptations bring Processing to platforms like the OpenMoko, iPhone, and OLPC XO-1.

Processing was founded by Ben Fry and Casey Reas in 2001 while both were John Maeda’s students at the MIT Media Lab. Further development has taken place at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Carnegie Mellon University, and the UCLA, where Reas is chair of the Department of Design | Media Arts. Miami University, Oblong Industries, and the Rockefeller Foundation have generously contributed funding to the project.

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (a Smithsonian Institution) included Processing in its National Design Triennial. Works created with Processing were featured prominently in the Design and the Elastic Mind show at the Museum of Modern Art. Numerous design magazines, including Print, Eye, and Creativity, have highlighted the software.

For their work on Processing, Fry and Reas received the 2008 Muriel Cooper Prize from the Design Management Institute. The Processing community was awarded the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica award and the 2005 Interactive Design Prize from the Tokyo Type Director’s Club.

The Processing website (www.processing.org) includes tutorials, exhibitions, interviews, a complete reference, and hundreds of software examples. The Discourse forum hosts continuous community discussions and dialog with the developers.

Download images and more text about Processing:
www.processing.org/about/processing-1.0.zip

Questions and Answers:

What is new in Processing 1.0?
The most important aspect of this release is its stability. However, we have added many new features during the last few months. They include a new optimized 2D graphics engine, better integration for working with vector files, and the ability to write tools to enhance the development environment.

Who uses Processing?
Processing is used by a very diverse group of people, from children first exploring computer programming to professional artists, designers, architects, engineers, and scientists. Processing has a shallow learning curve to make writing code easier for beginners, but it also allows more experienced programmers to write sophisticated software. We’ve seen the number of people using Processing double each year for the last three years. The increased stability of the software and the publication of six related books in the last two years are the likely reasons for this increase.

What is the future of Processing?
The 1.0 version of Processing focuses on education and software sketching (prototyping). The next major release of the software will focus on professional users while retaining the simplicity that is Processing’s trademark. Specifically, future releases will increase the speed of programs that work with video and complex 3D graphics.

Books about Processing:
Fry, Ben. Visualizing Data. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2008.
Greenberg, Ira. Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art. Berkeley, CA: Friends of Ed, an Apress Co, 2007.
Igoe, Tom. Making Things Talk. Make: projects. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2007.
Reas, Casey, and Ben Fry. Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007.
Shiffman, Daniel. Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction. The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier, 2008.

Co-Founder: http://benfry.com/ http://reas.com/blog/

You can open more than one URL with one single click. Just open FIREFOX > PREFERENCES > and navigate to the first tab. In the “homepage” field enter a bunch of different URLs, each separated by a | – that’s it.

See the screenshot in case you need help.

Just open you morning pages or webmail services with one single click.

[attention long post and horrible english ahead]

A small and useful application out of the big Yahoo!verse – how might that be possible you ask. I will tell you in this post. First have a look at twitter, the next big thing in micro-blogging that makes the whole internet go mad. Sure twitter does a great job. It let’s me post small text messages in to the wild (limited to a 140 characters – think short message system on your mobile) and aggregates the messages that my “friends” (twitter calls them “followers”, visible on your twitter page, e.g. see my page) send out. People can text via the web, by using a whole bunch of standalone applications and even via lots of mobile devices using SMS. But – twitter is buggy. The service is down a lot and people rant about it all the time. To get the idea of a “better” twitter, we need to investigate twitter a bit further first.

Basically it is a messaging system. As said many times the underlying architecture appears to be designed as a micro blogging platform rather than a complex text messaging system. But you can subscribe other peoples’ messages and so can they do to yours. By doing so you build a network of followers. Striped down to naked twitter is nothing more than lots of short text records (your “tweets”), that are either aggregated on your twitter page or distributed to your followers and aggregated into their “stream of voices” – a collection of the different small messages each of their “friends” sent out over time.

Sounds familiar? The whole network and link aggregating concept is nothing new at all. Now we take a look at delicious. Each and everybody knows delicious for being one of the first to bring public link sharing and online bookmarks to the internet. In a really clever move, yahoo! picked them up in December 2005. Referring the headline: how could delicious act as a better twitter style messaging system? It is not that difficult and i will show you. Set up a delicious account only requires a valid email address. After that you can start saving your links or – and that is the point – small notes. Some might contain a link, some not. You can add notes and even tags to your message (More on these tags below). All your messages are displayed in a very bloggy way on your frontpage and aggregated as a RSS feed, too (see screenshot below).

Have some buddy using the delicious system as well? Why not hook up and see what they have to tell… It is a matter of minutes. Just add them to your delicious network. After that all of their messages (let’s call these delis rather than tweets) – so all of their delis will appear on your network page. Again, available via RSS as well.

But it even gets better. A lot of twitter users use so called hash-tags (marked by a leading #) to track topics and conversations over different users. With your delis you simply tag them. Just assign the right tag with every message and people could even follow only some specific (hash)tags via the subscription function in delicious. Possibilities are almost endless. And every set of your subscriptions is aggregates as a RSS feed once more (again, screenshot below).

I don’t know much about delicious API, possible mashups or how quick they refresh your networks page, but to me delicious looks like a hidden competitor and the sleeping dragon in the field of micro-blogging and short messaging. What du you think? Let me know in the comments!

First photo credit (delicious cake): “Scott Beale / Laughing Squid” http://www.laughingsquid.com/

Update: nice post on AppleInsider and a in deep review at RoughlyDrafted Magazine.

By May27th. Google announced a new service called the Google AJAX Libraries API on their blog. Explained in a really simple way by SitePoint everything is about speeding up the entire internet by using shared JavaScript libraries. The following JavaScript frameworks are already available on the google grid:

• jQuery
• prototype
• script.aculo.us
• MooTools
• dojo

There are two possible ways to access the scripts from your page.

FIRST: use a really simple <script src=”…”> tag or

SECOND: use the Google AJAX API Loader’s google.load() method and call the different frameworks directly.

To quote Google: “The AJAX Libraries API takes the pain out of developing mashups in JavaScript while using a collection of libraries. We take the pain out of hosting the libraries,correctly setting cache headers, staying up to date with the most recent bug fixes, etc.”

This really should cut the response time of some websites. But…

Google will continue to track your visitors behavior and even *could* change the JavaScript code doing nasty things like inserting ads, whatever… They won’t but i would prefer a distributed hosting solution. Kind of P2P Framework collection. Until something like that is available i am sure a lot of people will make good use of google’s service.

As a quick work around add the following BOLD lines around your script:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (typeof(_gat) == 'object')
{ 
var pageTracker (YOUR TRACKING CODE)
...
}
</script>

ét voilá.