Development

I started off the development of my processing project by simply playing around with some of the things that I had learnt in lessons. Getting objects to move just using inputted values that I decided upon and seeing the effect of these when I changed those values.

Next I added in the RSS feed and made processing pull out data from the title so I knew which feed(s) I was dealing with and the description of the feed which was the number. I made sure that the processing page displayed the name of the feed in the black box at the bottom of the page so I knew that it was working and pulling the correct data.

I changed the description values to integer numbers so that processing could read them as a proper value and changed some of the inputed numbers of the objects to the name of these integers so the program used these numbers to calculate the values of the object. This made sure that the data from the RSS was used to effect what processing produced when it was run.

I assigned these values to the speed of the circles and the colour of the circles so that they were affected when the data changed. The data is not live so it does not change each time the button is pressed but it does change once a day when the new data is uploaded. I also added in text element that showed the rss data in the screen when i did a test run to show that the data was being pulled from the screen. The dots below move across the screen depending on the data and the colours change. 

I played around with some of the different RSS feeds to see which one would look better visualised, I tried hot and cold water temperatures as well as a couple of others. They didn't turn out too well so I ended up just sticking with the Wind Speed. 

I thought this layout with the 4 spots was quite boring and I could make my data look a bit more appealing. Most of the visualised feeds I looked at didn't relate the visualisation to their data but I wanted to as I thought it gave the visualisation some meaning. 

First I changed the background to a sky scene as I thought this would be the best one to do as I was using windspeed as the RSS data. Then I changed the spots to birds flying in the sky, the idea is that the birds fly faster when the wind speed is higher. 

Processing Inspiration

Before I started my processing I had at look at some other sites that had similar work on them.

The Dumpster

http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/thedumpster/index.html

The dumpster is a website created by a group of developers in processing that takes information from a random collection of blogs in 2005. The RSS feed pulls out words in the blogs that are related to being 'dumped' or broken up with and provides the short paragraph in which this information is contained. The website is visualised as small bubbles that the user can click on to open up the paragraphs. The visualisation does not relate to the information it contains but it is still visually appealing.

Fizz

http://fizz.bloom.io/

Fizz was created by the company bloom, built in processing with jQuery. It links to the user Facebook or twitter account and shows the activity on each over the past couple of days. When the user hovers over the circles it shows who the information is from, and when the circles are selected the user can see the information they contain. Each Facebook or Twitter user name has a different colour and post from the same person are collected with an outer bubble. Again the visualisation of the feed does not relate to the information it contains but the bright colours and layout still make it visually attractive.

Abstracto1js

http://mariuswatz.com/works/abstract01js/index_auto.html

Abstracto1js was created by Maruis Watz which uses processing and HTML5 and is designed as an interactive drawing tool. All the user has to do is simply click on the screen and hold the mouse down for how ever long they want. This action creates a picture that can be designed by the user. It can also be left to work on its own automatically to create a random picture. Although this design does not take any data from an outside feed it is very visually appealing and attractive with all the colours and shapes and the added element of the program being automatic means that the picture is always different.

A Mouse-driven Graphic Equalizer

http://bocoup.com/processing-js/docs/?page=A%20mouse-driven%20graphic%20equalizer

This program used processing to create a program that responds to the speed of the mouse on the page by creating an equaliser that gets higher as the mouse is moved quicker. Again this processing does not use any outside data but the equaliser is interesting and is a good style of representation.