The Text live coding workshop went really well, surprisingly well considering it was the first time anyone apart from me had used it and (so I found out after) most of the participants didn’t have any programming experience. The six participants took to the various combinators surprisingly quickly, the main stumbling block being getting the [...]
Text update and source
by Alex on January 31, 2011
I’ve updated Text a bit to improve the visual representation of higher order types (you’d probably need to full screen to view): I won’t be touching this until after the workshop on Saturday. I’ve also made the source for the visual interface available here under the GPLv3 free license. To get it actually working as [...]
Test run of Text
by Alex on January 28, 2011
I’ve been rather busy writing lately, my PhD funding runs out in April, and I hope by then I’ll have finished and will be looking for things to do next. I have had a bit of time to make Text, a visual language I mentioned earlier, a bit more stable, here’s a test run: A [...]
Text
by Alex on December 13, 2010
Text is a experimental visual language under development. Code and docs will appear here at some point, but all I have for now is this video of a proof of concept. It’s basically Haskell but with syntax based on proximity in 2D space, rather than adjacency. Type compatible things connect automatically, made possible though Haskell’s [...]
Visualisation of Live Code
by Alex on May 29, 2010
I wrote a paper with Dave Griffiths and Nick Collins on the visualisation of live code, exploring ideas around live coding interfaces, accepted for the EVA London 2010 conference in July. A HTML version is below, or see the PDF Preprint. Alex McLean (Goldsmiths), Dave Griffiths (FoAM), Nick Collins (University of Sussex) and Geraint Wiggins [...]
Pure dyne
by Alex on January 20, 2010
I’ve been through a few linux distros over the years, neatly getting progressively easier to install and configure as I get less willing to spend time recompiling kernels, culminating in ubuntu, enjoying the attention to detail and simplicity of use. Recently though, I’ve had to give ubuntu up and go back upstream to the rather [...]
Patterns of Movement in Live Languages
by Alex on November 11, 2009
I’m giving a paper at the CHArt conference in Birkbeck tomorrow. I’ll edit it a little after the conference for publication, but here’s a draft of the paper, here’s the presentation (which I’m currently editing) and here’s the abstract: Programmers do their work by writing — a piece of software is a structure made from [...]
Transferring
by Alex on October 2, 2009
Tom Armitage wrote a nice wired article interviewing us (slub) about live coding. I’m still working on my upgrade, hoping to be a proper PhD student by the end of this month… I’m excited to be organising an evening called transfer at Goldsmiths, London on Friday October 16th. It’ll be fantastic with all my favourite electronic [...]
hackpact week 4
by Alex on September 24, 2009
Ok the third fourth week of hackpact actually started yesterday, but I didn’t think my contribution then warranted a new entry. hackpact23 Bit of an error with the screencast, see if you can spot the problem. Pretty happy with the sound though. (will take a while to appear due to vimeo’s encoding queue) I’m musically [...]
Hackpact week 3
by Alex on September 16, 2009
It’s the third week of the hackpact. A few have fallen by the wayside, others are doing impressively well. Adam is doing great learning supercollider, Sam is cracking away on a diverse range of ideas, Joe has put a lot of himself into his involved hacks, poetry with a smell of solder, Gabor pushing fluxus [...]