My Blog

New py5 Release: 0.10.2a0

I'm pleased to announce the release of py5 0.10.2a0 and py5jupyter 0.2.1a0. Both are small releases with a few bug fixes and enhancements.

PyCon 2024

But before talking about the release, I want to share the py5 recordings from PyCon 2024. I delivered a presentation titled Creative Coding with py5, the Python version of Processing. Alexandre Villares led py5 tutorial Learning Python while making drawings and animations. Both were well attended and a lot of fun for both of us to organize and deliver. I'm grateful for the opportunity to meet so many people from the py5 community and the Python community! I hope to see you all again soon.

Please watch the videos and give both of them a thumbs up!

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Underfoot / Overhead

Recently I realized I should be doing more with my blog than posting about py5 releases. I can and should write more! Here's a post that's also a small step in that direction.

I have the privilege of working with Marina Zurkow to create digital art. She's an amazing artist with much experience and knowledge. I'm grateful for the opportunity to work with her. Over the past few years we have made several digital art pieces together. You can see documentation of the work in the Art section of this website.

Recently we put together a gallery show alongside Jasmine Murrell titled Underfoot / Overhead. The show is at Wasserman Projects in Detroit, Michigan, USA. It opened on April 20th and will be up until June 8th.

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New py5 Release: 0.10.1a1

I'm pleased to announce the release of py5 version 0.10.1a1. It is a small release with two new small features and several bug fixes.

These past few months I've been swamped between preparing for a gallery show opening this Friday and managing family healthcare issues. Each of those things by themselves is a lot of work and together they are overwhelming. Nevertheless, I persevered and was able to get this release ready for you.

Numpy Version

The main reason why this py5 release is happening now and not later is because numpy will soon have a major release that is not completely backwards compatible. Version 2.0 of numpy will be released soon and library maintainers have been advised to pin dependencies to numpy<2.0 and then test with numpy 2.0 when it is available. This is to ensure that py5 and every library py5 depends on is ready for the new version and does not cause users any problems.

Once the new numpy version is released and I verify py5 works well with it, I will do another release of py5 that removes the numpy<2.0 pin.

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New py5 Release: 0.10.0a0

I'm very happy to announce the release of py5 0.10.0a0. It is a major release with many new features and bug fixes.

This release was an enormous amount of work. In particular, over the past two months I had been testing and fixing the new features and writing pages and pages of critical documentation to explain the ways py5 integrates with other Python libraries. On top of that, I had a trip to Miami, family health problems, and the holidays to deal with. Plus, I caught COVID a week ago (and am still testing positive.) It's been a difficult time.

Nevertheless, I am pleased to have this release available for you to start exploring. I'm very excited to see what people do with these new features.

New Features

The major theme of this release is expanding and improving py5's Python ecosystem integrations. This release includes new features for working with matplotlib, Shapely, and Trimesh through the new convert_shape() method and the upgraded convert_image() method. It also includes a new color mode called CMAP that is built around matplotlib colormaps.

The documentation for these new features is extensive. There is now a new section in the documentation called Python Ecosystem Integrations that explains how py5 integrates with other Python libraries. This covers the new features in this release as well as existing features that perhaps some people didn't know about.

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New py5 Release: 0.9.1a1

We are moving back to py5's previous release frequency of a release every 2-3 months. This is minor release with one important feature to support Thonny users, as well as a handful of bug fixes and other improvements.

Imported Mode Code Importing feature

Python projects with moderate to large amounts of code will be typically split into multiple files that will be imported from from one file to another. However, due to the way py5's Imported Mode works, this couldn't be done with py5 Imported Mode code. This new feature changes that, supporting the ability to import Imported Mode code from one file to another. How to do this is described in more detail in the documentation page Importing Imported Mode Code. In addition, the documentation also describes General py5 Importing Guidelines for writing importable py5 code in that supports all of py5's programming modes.

Other Changes

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New py5 Release: 0.9.0a0

It has been over 5 months since the last py5 release, which is a long time compared to previous releases. The main reason for this is the time and effort that went into completing two new features that I am very excited about: Hybrid Programming and Processing Mode. More on that in a moment.

This is a major release with important new features and many bug fixes. Thanks as always to Alexandre Villares (@villares@ciberlandia.pt) for finding many of the now fixed bugs and for helpful design discussions. Thanks to @AsadNizami for two pull requests, thanks to @dmorenog01 for a pull request, and thanks to @marziabil for inspiring the enhancement behind issue #247.

Hybrid Programming & Processing Mode

Hybrid Programming refers to the ability to add your own Java (Processing) code to py5. Think of it as a way to add custom Processing extensions to py5. Hybrid Programming is useful for boosting py5's performance and making Java libraries more accessible to py5.

Processing Mode is a completely new way to use py5. This feature is built for the Java Processing users. It allows py5 to function as a bridge, connecting the Java code users write for Processing sketches to the Python ecosystem. Processing Mode gives Processing users a new method callPython(), which gives everyone an easy way to call Python code from Processing.

Both Hybrid Programming and Processing Mode are documented extensively on the py5 documentation website. There's also a GitHub repo with example code. As these are new features, the documentation and example code will grow as questions come up and issues are raised. Stay tuned!

I'm thrilled to finally be able to share these new features with the py5 community. I hope you find them useful and easy to use. I'm looking forward to seeing what people do with them.

On the subject of documentation, there is now a page explaining how py5 actually works. I've wanted to write this documentation for a long time. This information will be useful for advanced coders who want to better understand how py5 works and for developers who want to contribute to py5. More documentation does need to be written about py5's internals, but this is a good start. The documentation will evolve as readers ask questions and I make improvements to the text.

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New py5 Release: 0.8.3a1

This is a minor release with a handful of bug fixes and small enhancements. Most of the bug fixes are small improvements to the documentation or error messages. Thanks again to Alexandre Villares for raising the majority of the now fixed bugs.

Enhancements

  • New methods for saving and loading data. The new methods are load_strings(), save_strings(), load_bytes(), save_bytes(), load_pickle(), and save_pickle()

  • New join_thread() method

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New py5 Release: 0.8.2a1

This is a minor release with a handful of bug fixes. Some of the bugs were serious issues affecting Thonny users, such as # 117 found by Alexandre Villares. Many thanks to him for uncovering these problems. The other changes were small improvements to the functionality or reference documentation.

Since some of the issues were serious problems affecting Thonny users, I didn't want to make anyone wait to get the improved version.

Pull Requests

There was one pull request from Alexandre Villares to improve py5's reference documentation. Thank you!

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