haven't posted an update in a while, here goes:

casey is cranking away on the book and we're working to get a new draft out to the publisher sometime soon. it's pretty exciting that we'll someday have something "official" out!

most of the work on p5 has recently been dealing with some of these nastier "save" issues, as well as some work on beginRaw()/endRaw() and beginRecord()/endRecord(). for instance, last week i finished an updated version of simon greenwold's dxf library that grabs all the lines and triangles from a P3D or OPENGL sketch so that they can be rendered using any app that supports dxf. pretty cool stuff.

casey and i are also currently discussing the fate of PSound. the hope was that we could build simple sound playback into the p5 api by making use of javasound. however, our good intentions have been thwarted by the cross platform disaster and bug cavalcade that is javasound. whether running on mac, windows, or linux, or with java 1.3, 1.4 or 1.5, we have a completely different set of issues that come up. working these out will require a broader implementation of the sound api, along the lines of something like ess or sonia, and so we're currently leaning towards leaving PSound out in favor of just recommending that people use ess or sonia for their audio. this is a combination of 1) not wanting to bloat the file size of core.jar any further and 2) not causing further bloat to the amount of code that i'm maintaining, when there are perfectly good alternatives out there.

other work on core and the pde on the horizon:

+ the big thing is to bring back P2D so that we can have the fast pixel manipulation ala 0068/0069. java2d is just complete crap in this regard. we may in fact just remove the pixel stuff from java2d once this is done (and maybe leave only get/set) so that we can get rid of loadPixels/updatePixels. we'll still need loadPixels for opengl stuff, but maybe that can be handled more gracefully.

+ the other big things are some nasty threading issues (rumors of a slowdown in speed, and problems using things like sonia with more recent releases), image file i/o issues (jpeg is slightly broken in some later java releases on windows! yay!), and other random stability issues that i'd like to get sorted before adding more.

+ my intel mac mini arrived the day after it was announced (wee! fedex!) so i've been dinking around with getting opengl to work properly on the intel macs. it looks like we'll have to update PGraphicsGL for the new jogl api that's being introduced (known as jsr-231). it's not clear how much work this will be, but will at least require a day of sitting down with it and giving it the love. unfortunately the newer jogl is still in beta, so we may need to have an alternate version of the opengl library, at least temporarily as we straighten out issues with it. blech. the intel stuff is targeted for sometime in advance of fitc in toronto, cuz we need for robert to be able to put something together that'll hurt everyone's heads.

these next few months, we should see a lot of improvement to things as i get more time set aside to work on it (you can thank the ars electronica jury for funding my exploits at least for a short bit...)

that's all for now...

yeah, one significant upshot of the new jogl is that sun actually signs the jar files themselves and has an applet launcher, so it'd be easier to do the whole export to web thing in a more standard way.

the risk, of course, being that it hoses everyone's gl stuff and they stick with an older version of p5 until the jogl improves. beta programming environment times beta libraries i think equals alpha quality stability, but i'm not sure of the actual math.

i got sick when i /worked on/ psound too, just one more reason why it may have to go...

Code:

cuz we need for robert to be able to put something together that'll hurt everyone's heads.
 

Oh, Im a gonna hurt more than your heads.  I am going to wound the very soul.

-robert