Prototyping 2013-09-23 (Networked Media)

This page is currently being worked on.

Sept 23 2013: 1.02 "Turtles & Ducks"

Promiscious bits

Last week the question came up of transforming audio to text and back again. What does it mean to re-interpret bits as another media? Examples.

Promiscous interfaces

Computer languages are naturally "promiscuous" in that the interesting things they do are typically provided by libraries -- which is like a software application that you use by programming through the language.

Python supports a flexible concept of typing sometimes called duck typing. What if we secretly replaced our turtle with another turtle trained to respond in exactly the same way as the one built-in to Python, but with a alternative agenda ;)

Some tools + concepts

Inkscape A free-software Vector graphics editor
XML A standard way of creating (text) documents using "markup" with tags, designed for "interoperability"
SVG An open standard for vector graphics, based on XML
Inkscape Plugin A (Python) program that transforms an SVG file, typically run from within the Inkscape interface

Rough Notes

Inkscape: XML Editor
SVG: Open in a text editor... draw by typing, search and replace

Turtle Vectors

Seymour!

Promiscuity

Inkscape: Apply path tools to a resulting drawing (need good example -- how to join nodes ?!)
Python: Load a JSON feed (following Max's example?)

Inkscape forums

Results for search "Joining nodes inkscape":

Afternoon

Practice with Seymour

Extra: Think about other Inkscape/Python plugins

Examples

http://archipels.be A website I worked on that uses SVG+html plus some other random tools

Putting SVG Online

http://code.google.com/p/svgpan/
http://www.cyberz.org/projects/SVGPan/tiger.svg ... cue 80s music!