So up until this weekend, I had been making some decent progress on my NodeBox hacking. While I’m not really looking to pick up a new tool, especially since I don’t really know the one I’ve got, I keep an eye out on happenings in the space.
The NodeBox folks are threatening to release NodeBox 2, a.k.a. Gravital, real soon now. Looks like it will use Jython for cross-platform support and a performance speedup. On the one one hand, speedups and access to lots of Java libraries (ala processing) is a good thing. On the other hand, the loss of numpy and its multidimensional array capabilities is a downer. Plus, Jython lags Cython a bit in language features.
Then there’s Field, essentially Gravital except it’s here now and it’s focused on live coding. Looks like it has pretty sophisticated audio and music capabilities. I’ll also have to snoop around and see what low level pixel pushing features it has.