I just stumbled across Scratch.

Ok, it’s meant to be for kids, but I like the idea. It’s basically a visual programming environment for creating animation and music.

I found this via a post on the Google research blog about “Android app inventor“. They’re planning to make a similar graphical block-based programming environment for writing android apps.

I like the idea of visual programming. The traditional code-compile-run-test-stop-change-compile-run sequence is a little boring and time consuming. I want to change something “on the fly” and see what it does.

This programming style often seems to be associated with education. Greenfoot and Alice are two examples. If I was a real engineer, I may find myself playing with LabVIEW for programming microcontrollers and whatever else real engineers do.

But anyway. A couple of years ago I started working on a visual programming environment for creating video/audio/frame based processing applications – FraMMWorks. The idea is that you have a collection of building blocks (video sources, face detection, edge detection, etc) which you join together to generate an overall video processing “chain”. You can then save the resulting code as an executable and run it anywhere.

If there’s any interest I might just spend some more time on it.