Hello 🙂
At first, I’m very sorry for the delay but at least it’s getting interesting this time (hopefully). After following tutorials kind of clueless where all this is going, I got a little bit more of an overview of what coding is actually about over the last week. So I was pretty amazed after reaching the topic of object oriented programming and understanding more about structuring code to make a reasonable program. So what happened in the last week?
The past week was a bit of a rush through the areas that I scratched the surface of over the weeks before. The journey went from loops and the similarities and differences of ”while“ and ”for“ loops over functions to classes and objects. I don’t want to get into every detail here but the main thing I realised is what these words are that I used in Processing to do things that happened kind of magically – they are functions that are pre built into the Processing API. Now the fun is starting slowly because now I can start to implement more of the examples of Processing and create larger projects that can really do some interesting things. For example maybe you remember the picture in last weeks blog – this one:
It shows some rectangles moving over the screen and some leave traces behind and turn their directions at some point. The circles are drawn with the mouse and change size depending on the mouse position, the same way as everything changes color depending on the mouse position. In the following examples you can see the progress of the same idea.
The background changed from black to this lovely pattern which is created by a loop. There are also two rectangles that change sizes as they move over the screen and leave their traces. This time they change directions as they reach the edge of the screen and bounce around until they meet each other eventually and trigger the background squares to appear a second time on top and so on. After a while this creates a pretty messy but interesting composition. You can still draw the circles with the mouse and the colours of the moving shapes and circles are still controlled by the mouse position and you can create something like this when you let it run for a bit.
Maybe you think now ”Oh my, that’s all?“, what I could totally understand but what is really interesting about this is that in this picture lies the foundation of a reasonable program that does interesting things depending on one another and this fuels my imagination of where to go with this. Unfortunately is this the exact reason why this blog has no picture for the header yet, even though I wanted to have one at this point for sure but every time I work on the program I find new and interesting things to try out. Maybe I can find a finish line in this week when working on arrays but even if not, I’m sure we will get there.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading till the end and have a nice time until next week.
Goodbye,
Rupert
