Processing derives its power from its use from Java, and using Java applets, you can run Processing sketches in a browser. (You can even use 3D — OpenGL included, with some trickery.) But what if you could use Processing syntax with JavaScript — even just for the heck of it?

John Resig has done just that, porting Processing’s syntax and basic functionality to JavaScript, using the browser support for the Canvas element:

Processing.js

Incredibly, the whole project fits in a svelte 5000 lines — a 10kb compressed download. Now that it’s done, is there any advantage? Well, I can see using it for simple, lightweight JavaScript visualizations in the context of a Web design in which an embedded Java applet didn’t make sense. You will want to keep your expectations realistic: you lose out on some of the performance and functionality advantages provided by Java, and John has the additional warnings:

NOTE: I highly recommend that you use the latest Firefox 3 beta to view the demos. Most will work in the latest WebKit Nightly and a majority will work in Opera 9.5, but all will work in Firefox 3.

Note again: A lot of these demos will peg your CPU. As I mentioned above, I’m trying to squeeze the most out of the browser, as possible - be ready for it!

That said, I’m running Firefox 2 on a modest CPU and most of the demos are actually just fine. Anyone out there who, for some reason, has been waiting for this, I’ll be curious to hear more about how you think it might be used. But for the rest of us, it proves that some of the power of Processing is in the underlying concept and syntax, not just the literal implementation — and that’s a cool thing. As for those crazy hackers out there, well, keep on hacking!

For a previous example of this kind of in-browser insanity on Create Digital Music:

Lily: Browser Beatboxes and the Rebirth of Max-Like Patching

Play the NY Times Website Like an Instrument, and Other New Lily Tricks

We asked earlier this month if you’d be using Flickr for videos? Here’s one answer — and in this case, it seems perfectly-suited to the medium. Accent Creative used a short video spot — tweaked to Flickr’s microformat length constraints — as a way of promoting an upcoming event. That works nicely, as lots of people already use Flickr streams to store photos promoting events and the like.

And, of course, the Create Digital Music side of our heart loves the sound-making box that shows up in there.

Brokenbeat Night - MoGraph Promo

Here’s another example, in this case using a short video as a kind of micro-showreel:

Via the CDMo Flickr Pool - thanks to everyone for all the eye candy you’ve been sending! Why blog when I can just watch the lovely stuff you’re doing?

This really illustrates what could start to happen with media on the Web: rather than littering everything everywhere, and rather than seemingly-redundant sites interfering with one another (Flickr for video?, asked users), we get content tailored for the venue. In fact, vids like this really don’t necessarily belong on Vimeo — and likewise, I’ve come up with short snapshot videos I wouldn’t want as part of my video pool.

Promising stuff. And as video proliferates, the visualist and motion graphics artist become king. Get ready.

No matter how committed you are to some of the alternatives, Google’s YouTube will remain part of your online life. So we continue our look at how to make it more livable.

Readers wrote in with some tips and impressions of YouTube’s new "higher-quality video" mode:

Make Your YouTube More Livable: I Have a Fast Connection Setting

Richard Lainhart, a regular on Create Digital Music (attention, Buchla modular fans!), had some specific tips on which upload settings to use and how to force high-quality playback:

One of the things I’ve really grown to appreciate over recent months is the rich communities on Flickr and Vimeo — Flickr for stills, Vimeo for videos. Each of those, incidentally, has very active groups around free visual tools vvvv (for Windows) and Processing (for everything). Unlike "big bucket" sites like YouTube, Vimeo in particular has had some really terrific niche crowds of people.

Of course, now Flickr has gone and added video. I don’t see this becoming anyone’s primary video uploading site, given a more restricted feature set, the mixture of videos and photos, and the 90-second length cap. But as a supplement to, say, Vimeo, it’s interesting — especially given the number of times I’ve wound up in someone’s photoset staring at a still image and wondering what the thing looks like in motion.

Personally, I could easily see doing long-form or "feature" videos on Vimeo and adding photos to Flickr where it makes sense in my photostream — it’s all about context for me, rather than dumping lots of random stuff everywhere.

How do you feel about Flickr video? Are you using it? Are you staying away from it? Any first impressions? Videos you’ve got I’m you’d like to share with the CDMotion community?

Don’t forget the CDMotion Flickr Group; we’ll be watching for videos there.

At top: one the first people in my contact list to use Flickr Video is interactive artist ("slash" many other things) Jaki Levy, who is doing HD video for Ralph Lauren’s flagship store here in New York — see his blog.

We really prefer Vimeo.com around here, but that doesn’t stop people from uploading video to YouTube — meaning you have to live with the results.

You can make YouTube slightly less painful, however. Old news — the setting popped up a few weeks ago — but if you’re like me and haven’t changed your settings yet, now’s the time. Here’s how:

You’ll need to be logged in. Go to Account > Account (the header on your My Account Page) > Video Playback Quality and choose “I have a fast connection.” You don’t need a terribly fast connection, because the upshot of all of this is that you bump up to 480×360. (Yeah, I know — be still my beating heart. Vimeo, Blip, and others already have HD, and YouTube has 480×360.)

Oh, and it gets worse: not all videos have been converted to the new format.

And worse still: the content uploader apparently has no control over this whatsoever.

Did I mention how much I hate YouTube? Still, it’s worth the 30 seconds it takes to change the setting.

For more discussion:

Watch Higher Quality YouTube Videos [Wired.com How-to Wiki]

Videohelp Forum Thread

Anyone with uploading tips for taking advantage of this, or how we can lobby Google to give us something that doesn’t suck — just let us know.

Vague Terrain, a journal on digital technology, has put together an issue surveying the global state of VJing, edited by VJ, sound artist, and designer Carrie Gates of Saskatoon. (Saskatoon, the place, though that’d also be a great name for, like, an edgy Web animation firm or something…)

Vague Terrain 09: Rise of the VJ

Blogged by Vague Terrain’s Greg Smith @ serial consign

The issue is fully of great stuff, with VJs Ana Carvalho, Kelly Bolen & Jake Hardy, Defasten, Francis Theberge, Jackson 2bears, Lara Houston, Leeane Berger, Michael Betancourt, Mo Selle, Neubau & Kero, Ryan Stec, Tim Jaeger, VJ Pillow & VJ Mademoiselle, VJzoo and Chrism & Fenris, Xárene Eskandar and Ziv Lazar, and an interview of Jaygo Bloom by Michelle Kasprzak. I contributed our interview with Solu.

Why? Because…

…live video mixing performances certainly address a hunger for immersive and synaesthetic sensory experiences where aural and visual elements work together to create a whole that is something beyond the sum of the parts.

From video turntables to political messages (Singapore riots), deconstructed vehicles to guerilla visual actions, vintage gear and VJ history to modern digital techniques, they run the gamut. And it’s clear that the range of expression and subject matter in VJing is far deeper and broader than what many people recognize.

Let us know what you think, and if you have any favorite bits.

Hong Kong, seen through the eyes of vj pillow & vj mademoiselle (Thien Vu Dang and Yasuko Tadokoro).

In case you haven’t seen it, several readers wrote in to tell us about how the “journalists” at Gizmodo went around CES disabling video screens. The invention used to do it — the TV-B-Gone — is capable of far more worthy goals, like disabling the invasive crap on Fox News at an airport. (Addendum: unless anyone mistakes me as someone brave enough to operate a TV-B-Gone, see comments. I’m not. I’m a wimp. But just for the sake of argument, let’s assume this could be used for good.) Here, Gizmodo simply tortures presenters at press events they were invited to. Cool? Uh, no, not particularly.

Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES

Now, we like mischief us much as the next guy. But randomly killing displays? Consensus of the CDMers I’ve talked to is that this is more wrong than funny — not to mention, we don’t need any special technology to have fancy flat-panel displays stop working. Worse, bloggers fighting for credibility have to deal with the antics of the Gizmodo crew (see cnet Crave’s take on that) — and this could unfairly vilify a wonderful invention. After all, the beauty of TV-B-Gone is that it gives people control over invasive TVs in their environment. This prank did the opposite.

I think we need a code of TV-B-Gone ethics: disable the TV screens that are asking for it, folks.

Dan Reetz points out that a previous blogger at Gizmodo (we can’t say whom, as it seems to date from a period without bylines in 2004), said of the TV-B-Gone creator “Mitch Altman is an asshole,” and that “the TV-B-Gone has a single purpose: to power off televisions whenever the user feels like being a dick.” Prophetic words.

Stores like iTunes (and all those Windows Media-based alternatives, if anyone ever uses them) aren’t just the domain of major labels. Indie artists and smaller labels are finding their way onto these services, courtesy the power of distributors and other conduits. (For music, tools like CD Baby have been a big boon.)

But part of the potential of all of this technology was supposed to be video content as well as music. TuneCore has stepped up to the plate with a beta service that lets artists sell music videos via iTunes. Many artists, I suspect, will prefer to use videos as promotional tools only, but what’s nice here is you get iTunes to cover bandwidth for higher-quality downloads and get a little revenue stream, to boot. TuneCore explains the arrangement:

Delivery of the video will be completed with a flat, upfront fee paid to TuneCore and, as always, TuneCore customers receive 100% of the revenue from the sale of their music in a non-exclusive agreement that they can cancel at any time.

Here’s one example, a music video from Grammy winner Ziggy Marley, “Love is My Religion”, now available for purchase via TuneCore. (And I expect this could be commonplace: promote on YouTube, sell on iTunes, etc.)

TuneCore

Ever miss 1995? In 1995, this passed for online entertainment: static web pages, some 20-somethings hanging out in casual- and swim-wear, and the ability to talk back to the “cast.”

Welcome to the Spot. We’re a bunch of friends sharing a beach house in Santa Monica, California.

Everyday we put up this website and tell the world about our lives through our daily journals.

We can also interact with you - but only if you come in!

The Spot, at the Internet Archive

Well, okay, actually, it didn’t really pass; I remember checking out its launch that year as a novelty but think few people really stuck with it. It returned, undead, in 2004. No one cared (wisely). Well, now The Spot is back again. Except it’s on the Rupert Murdoch-owner MySpace, has video, and has actually widened, not narrowed, the gap with trashy reality TV shows like Laguna Beach. (Ha! See, manufacturing Cheez Whiz isn’t as easy as you thought, is it?)

Roommates (Don’t click that. Really. I could believe Roommates could cause gastrointestinal distress even for a die-hard trash TV fan — maybe especially for them.)

But, somewhere out of this hideousness, is there a lesson for how we think about “new media” (as we called it in 1995)?

Boy, there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think how much more productive I could be if every single one of my creative apps ran online.

Wait.

Scratch that. No, I’ve actually never thought that.

Online applications can be fantastic. I’m using one right now. Having Flickr for photos and Vimeo for videos, and so on, can vastly expand the potential of what you can do with media. And I certainly see casual users of those applications preferring online services in some cases. (On the other hand, I also know even a lot of casual photographers who would rather sit in Aperture or Lightroom and tweak their photos than struggle with a Web app — for them, the Web is about uploading and sharing, not editing.)

It’s just really hard to see why pros would need to do everything online. And here’s the fundamental problem: why are we talking about taking applications online rather than taking online to applications? Witness Adobe’s Bruce Chizen making vague predictions about the far-off future — ten years, to be exact. By that point, we might as well start talking about how we’ll all be flooded by global warming and under attack by the Mutant Bug People who have dominated the Earth. But in ten years, says Adobe, their products will be fully online. Why? Uh … haven’t figure that one out yet, evidently.