PARTICLE, SCHMARTICLE

I’ve been looking for some time at the stuff that Daniel Shiffman, author of the upcoming book The Nature of Code, have written about Processing. One of the things being his particle system (Wikipedia article here) and I’ve figured that, with Scriptographer’s support of animation within Adobe Illustrator, it could be possible to achieve something similar.
After a quick internet browsing I found a javascript particle system class using HTML5′s canvas (try it out, very fun indeed) by Jarrod Overson which should, after a quick peek at the sourcecode, come very much in handy.

This will, no doubt, be the biggest undertaking – with regards to the complexity of the code required – I’ve done to date so there will probably be a lot more posts around this topic in the future as this was more of a mission statement than anything else.

A NEW TOY, CAN I PLAY?

Jürg Lehni, the creator of Scriptographer, have together with Jonathan Puckey developed Paper.js.
What it is? Well, I would say it’s a mix between Adobe Illustrator and Scriptographer on HTML5 Canvas.

Simply put, it allows you to do pretty much everything you can do with AI + Scriptographer in terms of scripting vector graphics, only this time through your web browser.
The best part is that it is highly compatible (save for a few revised and added features) with your old scripts as it is largely based on Scriptographer.

It even seems to be working on my iPhone 4.
It is very slow, though.