So I created a podcast player.
Creating a project where data needed already exists in an open and available API is very rewarding. You can focus on the fun parts and make huge leaps of progress in a short time.
For creative rendering and digital art projects, the Java framework Processing is my go to tool. It also has its JavaScript counterpart p5.js that I haven’t actually used, but certainly looks to be very capable.
Today, however, inspired by my plain JavaScript and Canvas venture in the previous post, I wanted to recreate some of the basics of my generative art procedure without any tools apart from what’s already available in the browser.
I had a game dynamic idea quite a few years ago that reoccurred in my mind today. It’s quite simple, so I decided to recreate it in vanilla JS rendering to a 2D canvas. I even wrote it in ES5, compatible even with Internet Explorer (from version 9, I suppose, but only tested in IE11).
There is something oddly satisfying about writing some plain JavaScript in a .js-file and just have it work everywhere without setting up any build process. I’m not a JavaScript purist, by any standard, but modern JavaScript development is quite tool heavy. It’s easy to forget how quick it is to just write a small little thing and have it run happily by itself.
I went looking for a Chrome New Tab extension with React related content and found none, so I decided to create my own. An easy and obvious source of related data is the GitHub API, so I decided to show popular, new and fresh public repos tagged with the react topic.
Not too advanced or complex, but a nice little side project.