Category: Expression

Changing Processing’s Look and Feel

processing-lnf-metal

The Java Look and Feel that Processing uses by default on Linux can get a bit wonky. Depending on the GTK theme you are using, menubars can actually become unusable!

processing-menubar-adwaita-x-dark
Where’s the menu?

You can change the Look and Feel to something that works by editing the file:

/home/USERNAME/.processing/preferences.txt

Be sure that Processing is not running when you do this. To use the standard Swing Metal Look and Feel, change the lines that read:

editor.laf=com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel
editor.laf.linux=com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel

to:

editor.laf=javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalLookAndFeel
editor.laf.linux=javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalLookAndFeel
processing-menubar-lnf-metal
Metalized menubar

Metal may not be pretty, but it seems to be pretty robust!

Note that because Processing uses its own JRE, it will ignore LnF and other settings you may have configured for your default JRE.

Processing: Capture is a PImage

Ds8_roll

Something the documentation on Processing’s Capture class doesn’t mention is that Capture is derived from PImage. I went digging into the Capture source code to figure that out:

public class Capture extends PImage implements PConstants { ...

This means all the methods and fields available to PImage objects should also be available to Capture objects. This makes video processing a lot easier!

Arduino and Bio-inspired Design

A week ago Monday I did a guest lecture on Arduino for Marc Swackhamer and Neil Olszewski’s graduate architecture course on bio-inspired design. It was an awesome experience–lots of bright and enthusiastic minds. We followed the lecture up with a studio on Wednesday, and later today I will be assisting with reviews. Many thanks to Marc for letting me participate in this inspiring process.

FPAleksandr

FPAleksandr is a theme for FlatPress that I am porting from Mat Wiseman’s insanely awesome Aleksandr, originally made for Textpattern.

It’s available in my Bitbucket, and there’s also a FlatPress forum discussion.

I tried to remain as faithful as possible to the original, but some things were just not going to translate directly—the footers, for instance. The best solution I was able to arrive at for the footers takes away some of the elegance of the original, but given the limits of the platform I don’t think it’s all that bad.

There are still some bugs to squash and lipstick to be applied, but it’s basically usable as-is.