On my way to TweetMountain

I am using twitter now for quite a while. It has been a never ending source of inspiration and a great tool to implement and communicate some of my ideas. In the last few days I somehow realized that there are times in which the output of my twitter timeline just gets "somehow" overwhelming.

In the last view months I also started to dig a little into a programming language called processing (see processing.org). It is basically Java tweaked in a way that allows easy access to all graphic routines. Surfing thru the examples on OpenProcessing.org (a site built to share and exchange processing projects) I stumbled upon this cool sketch by antiplastik. I shows how simple physics and the use of OpenGL are in processing. This is a screen shot of the sketch in action:
Both inputs (the twitter overflow and the stacked boxes by antiplastik) fermented in my backbrain for a while till they came together in a small processing project I call TwitterMountain:
It uses little boxes that fall from the ceiling to create a pile of letters. The input is taken from my twitter timeline tweet by tweet, split into little boxes/letters and dropped onto the pile. Every now and the letters are lost and their boxes get deleted, but as twitter keeps on generating output the pile never vanishes.
My first implementation looked like this image above. The physics where there and I got the letters in the image. Twitter was connected and kept sending input.
Today I reworked it a little. First of all I added some limitations to box creation so the pile never fills my sketch completely. Secondly I created a nice sprite map that I can use as textures for the blocks. This way now the letters rotate correctly with their boxes.
So for now the TweetMountain is running and running, flooding my screen with an endless stream of tweets and letters.
There is some work left to do:
- clean code, write comments, use logging (gna gna gna... you know the routine)
- there seems to be a newer (and faster) version of jbox2d that I should check out (jbox2d is the library that does all the physics simulation in the background)
- build an Applet that can by used by everybody to watch his own twitter timeline

Maybe I even come up with some more ideas to put into the algorithm as well... I will keep you up to date with new versions.

Unterwegs: Händewaschen HowTo

Hmmm.... wieder mal ohne Worte

Unterwegs: Wurzelgemüse, politisch inkorrektes

Man beachte bitte, dass "Kanacke" und "Pastinake" eben NICHT zur selben Wortfamilie gehören.

Unterwegs: Männeressen?

Okay, "Sauce Robert" zaubert nicht unbedingt jedem ein Lächeln ins Gesicht. Aber man muss sich irgendwie eingestehen, dass "Ozenkartoffel" schon SCHWER am Rand des dreckigen Grinsen liegt.

Wieder mal ein schöner Beitrag unserer Lieblingskantine...