Feature Updates: Embed Sketches Everywhere, Adjust Text Size, Prevent Freezing Sketches
Summer had been super-hot, so we spent some air-conditioned quality time launching a few high-demand features on OpenProcessing.
Sketch embeds on Medium, and elsewhere!
Sharing projects with the community as easily as possible is one of the fundamental pillars of OpenProcessing. This not only includes sharing with other users, students, and teachers on OpenProcessing, but also showcasing your work on your website, class blog, or many other platforms out there today.
That’s why we implemented oembed and embed.ly support this past week: Now, you can embed your sketches in thousands of websites by just copy/pasting the URL of your sketch. It includes Medium.com, the content publishing platform we all love and use. Once embedded, visitors can interact with your sketch, or check out the code without leaving the page.
OEmbed support means that you don’t have to worry about iframes or embed codes: All you have to do is paste the URL of your sketch to the content area, and OEmbed will automatically convert the link into a fully interactive sketch live within the page.
Increase text size in a snap to go easy on the eyes
Sketches on OP quite often are projected in front of an audience, whether a fantastic meetup or a class of students learning creative coding, and one common situation I saw that speakers went through:
“Let me zoom in so you can see the code... Wait, how do I zoom in this browser?
⌘ + ? I have a PC! What?
Now, it is much easier to change the font size in the coding editor so you can focus on your code.
This should also help those who prefer not to treat their eyes like slaves of the hyper-resolution screens of today. But that’s weird. I mean, that’s why we have eyes, right? Right?
Preventing infinite loops, finally
We all know you mean no harm when you type while(true){}. Browsers, however, take offense, and being faced with the complexity of computing towards infinity, they startle, freeze, and become unresponsive.
Now, each time you press play, we check for any potential infinite loops (lasting more than 5 seconds, to be exact), and stop the execution if we find one. This way you can fix the problem without losing any progress.
Coming soon: Sketch recommendations
Today, it is super exciting to browse over 300k sketches on OpenProcessing, with topics ranging from Machine Learning, Particle Systems, Art, Drawing, Math and Geometry, L-Systems, and many others I don’t even know about. To surface all this content better, we are working on a few new ML related projects.
One of them is building a recommendation engine, using various characteristics which may capture the essence of sketches written by analyzing at its code. We are experimenting with some interesting ideas here, that are beyond today’s standard movie-recommendation type algorithms. Jeff Cui from NYU is taking over some work that is done by NYU Tandon IDM Program fellows, Alex Yixuan Xu and Sally Chen, over the summer.
The ultimate goal is to be able to surface all these great sketches better on the website and let you find the sketches you are interested in much easier. We’ll share more on this as we have more progress. Meanwhile, continue coding beautiful sketches or teaching classes on OpenProcessing, and let us know how it goes!
