kylestew/acorn

Acorn

Minimal Creative Coding with a set of opinionated environments.

1. Choose an environments (i.e. 2d, 3d, animation, interactive, music)
   • Some commands become available, a standard set are always available
2. Write Script
3. Iterate and enjoy!

Manifesto

Creative coding should be about exploring ideas in computation, not about tripping over tools. Just the essence of the idea (or close to it as possible)

Environments

At the beginning of your script, select an environment and set its options. Environments give you script more features and functionality. They are also in charge of setting up variables and function calls behind the scenes. Also, a core set of robust commands exist on all environmentes (worth memorizing)

Goals

• Easy to integrate into HTML
• Hostable anywhere with sufficient resources (web browser, app, desktop, rPi)

Anti-Goals

• JS NPM package
• Requires 3rd party packages
• Web only

Neat features to Add

1. Shortcut key to popup environment docs (current available commands)
2. Save as image / video
3. Input controls X. Flush out more environments and their spec

Building Library

npm run build

Using Library

???

acorn's Issues

Expose current Environment Info on shortcut key

Going to need to collect doc strings for any active functions or variables in some sort of container first
Then expose them in some sort of HTML/CSS setup

Doc view exposes information about the current environment

Name, settings, params
Currently attached HTML element (other info needed)
Current palette
Currently active functions in global scope
???

Animation environment

Create examples list landing page

Layout examples page template

Example gets the entire view to work with (except exit/home button and GH link)
Expose Source and info on shortcut key

How to cut a release download or CDN link

Host examples as a Github pages website

Implement examples from sketches library

Website building script

Script will read JS files and compile them into subpages in the examples directory as well as creating an index of all examples

Other website files are static

Show script source on page along side execution output

How to extend library with 3rd party module?

What if someone wanted to write an extension to the library

Getting started page

Create page documenting manifesto and justification for library

Explore debug tools

Better visual debugging of variable contents that adapts to the libraries data types

It would be nice to not have to rely on the Console.Log so you can debug visually in the browser anywhere

Design some environments

• 2D Canvas
• 3D Canvas
• Interactive
• Animation
• Music / Sound

Interactive Environment

Create an offline bundle

Zip file containing library and template HTML file