I started to blog about this the other night, but quickly realized there was more to NodeBox than meets the eye. And believe me... once you visit this website, a lot will meet your eye! Basically, NodeBox is a spinoff from the DrawBot project, which uses Python as a kind of automated drawing tool to create beautiful images and patterns limited only by your imagination. DrawBot originated in 2003 as a program called "DesignRobots," and has since "evolved into a Cocoa application with a powerful API and image export functionality." Besides NodeBox, there are several other interesting DrawBot offshoots: - LTR Pytho Robot, a set of python-robot-designed fonts from the fascinating LettError group
- RoboFab, a Python software tool that's great for doing robo things with fonts and type
- DrawBot with Renaissance
And you know what else? All of this cool work in Python is being done on Mac OS X. Someone is working on porting DrawBot to Windows! Oh, if only I had the time to play around with NodeBox and RoboFab... such play rewards superficial attention, but you could really get immersed if time would permit. In the meantime, thanks to the creative Mac Python geniuses who put all this cool technology together!
If you do nothing else with NodeBot, be sure to get a load of the Gallery these folks have put together... displaying "interesting experiments in NodeBox." Clearly, the authors want NodeBox to be used and enjoyed... hence the great documentation, a set of tutorials, and more.
