Processing is a framework which lets you do all kinds of extremely cool graphical wizardry and visualizations. It’s kind of hard to explain what it is, so just head over to their exhibition and see what’s it all about. It’s worth repeating that those works were created with Processing. And, for many of them you can find source code as well.

Now that you’ve seen what it can do, maybe you want to try it out yourself. Have a look at the API and then study the the examples. There are many libraries too, for example this particle system physics engine.

When I first heard of Processing, I was somewhat surprised how it could provide such varied and highly amazing and very aesthetic-looking things. First of all, the API did not seem very complex – I was kind of expecting method calls like “makeCoolAntialiasedLensFlareBlobs” and “operateTheWholeWorldAsAKindOfTwistedDonut” and “twistTheUniverseInFrozenHyperspeedLikeWow” and so on. My surprise only grew after checking the source code of some nicely graphical gadgets. The programs were not so complex, really – there was a clever algorithm and at least an equally clever idea behind the whole thing, and, well, that was it. Examining the source code was like a fiesta of “a-ha!” and “of course!”.

I shall let the results of Processing speak for itself, as my words can only approximate the visual aesthetics one can create with it. A good place to start is to check out the “Exhibition” at Processing site.

There are actually a lot of people working with Processing, and there is no point to try to list them all here. However, I do want to point out one work in particular, not because I think it would be the best program ever done with Processing (that’s not the case), but because I think it would be fun to have such functionality as a built-in feature to all PIM and e-mail programs.

Check out My Map by Christopher Baker. Mr. Baker did a visualization of the relationships of people in his address book, using information from his e-mail traffic. Now how cool is that! Imagine, if you had it in your e-mail program… What would your data look like?