The open coding tool Processing has many, many libraries. Some deserve special mention. So I’m going to shift into infomercial mode for a second. Imagine video images of knives cutting through concrete blocks, etc.

Tried searching used book tables for math books because you can’t work out how to do vector math for illustration and the last math you remember is (barely) how to add?

Clueless about whether or not your sphere is intersecting your spline?

Wishing you could export an OBJ file?

Wait! Don’t waste valuable CPU cycles on sine and cosine calculations when your Processing sketch could run much faster with a lookup table! Don’t manually calculate pixels to mm conversions or wave generators!

Karsten Schmidt’s toxiclibs does all this — and more! It’s not just one library — it’s a whole bunch of libraries, each sharpened to slice right through one specific task.

Act now, and you also get tastier-than-ever particle physics using verlet integrators. (No clue what that means? You don’t read this site enough! It’s like other particle systems, only more awesomeish.)

It slices! It dices! It sorts color palettes! It spells color colour!

How much would you pay for this kind of useful library? $100? $200? $500? What, do you think this is Flash? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) It’s free — free as in beer and as in speech. In fact, someone go buy toxi a beer.

Ahem.

Okay, I promise never to do that again. If none of that made any sense, go pick up Processing. And try those lookup tables — they really are a good thing. If you were a CPU, you wouldn’t want to keep calculating sine and cosine functions, either.

http://code.google.com/p/toxiclibs/

Side note: of interest to CDMotion readers, you’ll notice that JMF video support library is not there. That’s no loss — no fault of toxi’s, Java’s JMF library from Sun has long been abandonware and falls squarely in the “scream and run the other direction” category. I hope to revisit the issue of how to make video work right with Processing over the coming weeks. And having talked to folks at Sun, I am optimistic that, after years of waiting, video on Java is finally getting back on track. I’ll be talking more about that soon.

Flash Player 10 beta is here, and it sports some impressive new visual tricks — further illustrations of what I mean when I say the "rich" part of rich media is so important, whatever the JavaScript coders may tell you:

• 3D "effects" and API: this isn’t true 3D, as you can get with direct OpenGL access in Java (and thus Processing), but it does allow some basic 3D effects and greatly-simplified movement on the Z plane
• Pixel effects: custom filters and effects via the Pixel Bender technology scripted in After Effects — rejoice, AE fans!
• Advanced text: This is what I really miss in Processing, and the gap just got bigger. (Hmm… anyone want to code a ligature library?)
• Newer drawing API: Badly-needed improvements for drawing shapes
• Better performance: More GPU acceleration, all automatic, for drawing and video alike

I still think there are plenty of reasons to go with Processing as a visualist, and I’m excited to see how JavaFX, the new Java-based multimedia scripting language and platform from Sun, progresses. But Flash 10 should be very good news for people who like the things that make Flash Flash (video support, for instance, and things like tweening classes), and it means we should be seeing great new things in the awesome open source, Flash-based visual tool Onyx VJ in the near future.

Thanks to Glenn for the reminder!

You can check out some demos or even download the preview of the player itself:

Flash Player 10 @ Adobe Labs

What about Flash and open source? Well, the picture is a little clouded.