teaching machines

Annotations in Twoville

June 18, 2019 by . Filed under public, twoville.

Software for creating digital media tends to be driven by a mouse or stylus. The user directly manipulates shapes until they feel right. Twoville and Madeup, on the other hand, are programming interfaces for digital media. While code opens the door to algorithmic generation, programming interfaces tend not to give as much feedback as direct manipulation.

Some day I would love these tools of mine to support both programming and direct manipulation. In the meantime, I’ve added a little feedback in the form of shape annotations to help Twoville programmers better visualize the path they are constructing. The starfish below is made from 10 arc commands, and the arcs’ circles are automatically previewed:

The annotation system also plots the control points of quadratic and bezier, as shown in this guitar pick-like shape:

Maybe some day you’ll be able to click and drag on the handles to change the source code.