TODEPOND TIMES: SPLASH: LIVE

Yes, it's time for another weekly edition of the...

🐸 TODEPOND TIMES 🐸

What's new this week?

SPLASH: LIVE

A while back, I submitted a submission for a tech conference called SPLASH. Specifically, I submitted a workshop for LIVE, which is all about "live" and "interactive" visual programming.

The title of my submission is "CellPond: Spatial programming without escape". As you might guess, it's about CellPond, which I've made three videos about.

And I got accepted!!! So I'll head to Portugal in October for that.

As part of the submission process, I also received some very helpful feedback from the reviewers. They gave some great advice on how to make the workshop as effective as possible.

I've certainly got a lot of interesting challenges to consider now! I'm looking forward to it! I'll keep you updated on how the preparation goes.

Mess

The inner engine of Arroost is completely finished. This means that I've been working on its user interface again.

When I started the project, I thought that I'd have to make everything together, as 'one big thing'. This means that everything had to be both elegant and expressive.

Not long after this, I decided to split them into two:

⭐ The elegant engine.
⭐ The expressive user-interface.

So now that I'm back in user-interface land... It's so nice to be able to rip out all of its elegance. There's something so cathartic about making a mess out of something clean. It's a relief!

This is letting me keep everything simple, at the cost of making it ugly. Thankfully, it's working out! (for now at least)

Split

There's another reason that I'm happy about the split of the engine and user-interface:

It'll be easier to re-use them for future projects.

Projects like...

⭐ CellPond 2.0

Arroost could be used to upgrade CellPond. Both interfaces work in a similar way, but Arroost is just... better. It allows for more fun and more complex interactions. And it's easier to maintain. No need to do that any time soon, but... maybe one day...

⭐ SandLab

Do you remember SandLab from ☁️ Define Define?

Recap: SandLab is an alternative take on how CellPond could work. Instead of choosing how cells behave, you choose how their edges behave. This gives you greater freedom when exploring the fractal nature of CellPond. But it would require a much wackier user-interface.

Anyway, Arroost's user-interface would be a great tool for building SandLab.

⭐ TimePond 2.0

The inner engine of Arroost could be used to make a better version of TimePond, from the 🌀 Time Travel video.

Arroost has time travel built-in, and it's much more powerful than TimePond. However, it happens at a slower rate. Arroost advances at 120 beats-per-minute, letting you see each frame unfold in front of your eyes. TimePond tries (but usually fails) to run at 60 frames-per-second. To get Arroost to run it, I'd need to boost its performance a lot. But I think it's do-able! I haven't done any optimisation yet, and it seems ok.

⭐ Fractal Bucket

The previous examples make use of just one part of Arroost. Either the engine, or the user-interface. Fractal Bucket would use both.

"Wait a second, what's Fractal Bucket?"

Fractal Bucket is a new engine/tool/toy that I've been figuring out ever since I started work on ☁️ Define Define. Originally, the plan behind the video was to make a new kind of thing for each definition. BerdLab, SandLab, FishLab and LabLab.

In the end, it was taking too long to make, so I just turned LabLab into a normal mandelbot fractal. But I got quite far on designing a visual way of making that sort of thing.

🧹 Fractal Bucket would use an Arroost-like interface to make some trippy and psychadelic fractal visuals. And this is how it works:

Unfortunately, we've run out of time again. Tune in next week to find out more! I want to thank you, yet again, for supporting what I do. I'm really pleased to be taking CellPond to another conference, and it's your support that has allowed that to happen. Until next time, I hope you have a great week 🐸

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