Anna Aflalo

Fab Academy 2015 | Wgtn

WEEK 1 | Principle & Practices






To organize and design my ideas, I've started by using InDesign and Illustrator. Obviously, that was the easiest part of the week!




Afterwards, the biggest challenge was to make the drawings move randomly on my homepage. For that purpose, I had to explore Processing. Hopefully, Bry and Craig helped me for some issues. If you're a beginner, many useful references are available on Processing.
Processing workflow:
- Put the images and the processing file in the same folder,
- Create a new class with your images parameters (position: x & y | direction: x_direction & y_direction) and the related functions (set a random starting point, update the position according to the current position, "draw" the images at the current position).
I wanted the images to bounce on the window's edges, so every time one of the side of an image touches the related window's edge, its direction changes.
- Then I needed to adapt the size of the processing window to the browser's size, this is what I used: "screenWidth = window.innerWidth;screenHeight = window.innerHeight";




Then was the time to deal with HTML and CSS. It was the opportunity to learn how to insert code from Processing into HTML. Here, you will find a very useful link. Download "processing.js" file, add this file as a "script" in html and wrap you processing fil in a canvas.
First interaction with Mercurial
It was so much easier to understand how Mercurial works by actually seeing it. Indeed, that was the first time that I played with a terminal so the tutorial didn't make so much sens to me. To push my website in the Archive I just followed the workflow that Craig showed us:
cd - /Desktop/Archive to access to the Archive folder on our computer
hg pull to pull the last Archive on the computer
hg update to update the Archive on our computer if there are some changes from the last Archive that we've pushed
Add and replace the files in your student's folder
hg addremove to tell the archive that we made some modifications
Check if the modified files are okay: size, name, hidden files from mac computers...
hg commit -m anna: to tell Mercurial who has done this push
hg push: to push the new Archive folder.