>> Hi, welcome to this new video. We're going to start learning how to
install our learning environment. We are going to be working on a learning
environment which is called processing. Processing. It's traditionally been known to
be a Java language application, but it also has a Python mode that
we're going to be implementing. And it's a place where, actually,
it's a very good place for learning how to write code because it has
a very interactive environment where you can just press play and see graphically
very quickly what you're writing. At the same time, it has, as we discussed
for designers, a graphic output that it makes it very palpable what you're writing
code when you're thinking of coordinates, when you think of graphics and images. It has great support for
all sorts of graphic content. It's both two D and three D. We're going to be mostly focusing
on 2d content in this course, but you can certainly expand and
work in 3d as well. This is how a canvas looks. You're going to have a window
that has a play button that would allow us to execute
any code that we produce. As I mentioned,
processing works with JavaScript or Java as a main programming language, but
we're going to be using a Python mode that is going to allow us to write
Python within this environment. So let's see how to install it. Some of the caveats and things that we
might want to consider the different versions that are available,
and we'll take it from there. I invite you to navigate
to the processing website. So that's processing.org. You can go here to
the Downloads tab here and let's just go ahead and
download version 4.3. I'm just going to install this and show you how it works, but
I'm going to also give you a recommendation of an alternative
version which might be also very useful. So let's go to the download folder. We have processing 4.3. We can double click here and we have
basically processing available to us. In Windows the process is very similar. You have to unpack a zip file, you're
going to get a folder, and within that folder you're going to have an executable
which is going to be your processing file. Once we run processing by
double clicking on that, processing is going to launch. This is our welcome screen, and you're going to have this kind
of programming environment. This is where we're going to write code,
right, so we're going to be writing
all sorts of code in this area. The important thing is that you can
see on the top right here is that we are using Java as a language. If we click here, we can select the
language, but we only have Java available, so we can actually go to manage modes. And as you can see here, we can
actually select a few other modules. We're going to install Python mode for
processing 4.0, right, let's install that. You'll see this is downloading and
once this is completed, we will be able to switch
the programming language that this software allows for and
we will be able to write Python code. We wanted to make the installation
process as simple as possible. Python sometimes could be a little
bit difficult to download and start writing code. So we wanted to kind of bring
that barrier of entry down by using one of the simplest environments. It's a beautiful environment developed for
learning how to code and doing really beautiful graphic output. So now that we have Python Mode for Processing 4.0 installed,
we can go back here and switch from Java to Python as our
programming environment, right. So that should be it. We have right now our Python
environment ready to go. We can actually look at
the file examples and we can see basic examples such as color, let's see, hue for instance here. And you can see that these examples
are written in Python, right. If we press play, right, you can see already an example of
an interactive canvas. It's a beautiful graphic output that it's
already been demonstrated by this example. So there's a lot of great examples, there's a lot of great resources out
there in the processing community and your work will be able to contribute
to that community as well. So it's a really great place to learn. So let's talk about a few
issues that you might face. So there's some known bugs with Python
mode within processing 4.3, right? So let's say you might have an error here,
right? Let's say that you misspelled something
and you might try to execute the code, and you'll see that the code didn't
execute and there's no message. There's nothing really very clear. And that makes it a little bit difficult
to track where your errors might be, right. We're going to give you a recommendation. We will be using processing
4.3 because the canvas, we can actually alter these colors. You're going to see us work with slightly
different colors that have the biggest contrast possible so that you are able
to read the code in the simplest way. So we're going to be using 4.3 for
that reason. But we invite you to try
a different version of processing. So if you go to the website,
if you go here to the different version, sorry, let me just go
back a little bit here. You can see where the download button is. You can go down, down, and you'll find
that there's older versions of processing. You can see a list of stable releases. I'm going to invite you to download for
any operating system the version 3.5.4. Why is that? Because this version,
it's a little bit more stable for Python. You're going to have a lot more
information on when you type and have some errors, you might actually
have more feedback of, which is the line that has an error, which are the kind
of issues that you might want to face. It's going to give you more information. So I invite you to download this one. Once you download version 3.5, which is
installed the same way that version 4.3. Once you go into tools and modes,
you'll see that you have to remove. If you haven't installed Python Mode for
Processing 4, do not install it for processing 4. Install the version that it's for
processing 3. That's the only difference. There's two different Python modes,
one for processing three and one for processing four. So you can actually, if you first try
version 4 and maybe there's a bit of frustration because you're not
being shown where the errors are, try to uninstall first
processing 4 version, download version 3.5 and
then install Python Mode for Processing 3. And you should have an environment that
it's giving you a lot more feedback on where you might have errors. But with that in mind, I think that
we're ready to start writing code, to start working within this
environment and get started. So I'll see you in the next few videos.