Cinder – Begin Creative Coding

Krisjanis Rijnieks is a new media professional with a background in painting and multimedia. He holds a BA in painting and parallel to his painting studies he has been doing a lot of things related to print, video, web, Flash, Flash coding, and coding in general. It is not possible to name all the different categories of work, but through all this a strong interest towards interactive digital media has been developed. Creative coding is a new field that brings the art and design fields much closer to coding. As Krisjanis has been doing projects on both sides, the combination of the two seemed natural. It is a way of using ones creative visual and logical skills together without worrying that an unsolvable conflict between the left and right side of the brain will occur. For the past two years Krisjanis has been involved in many projects that include creative coding with technologies like Flash ActionScript, openFrameworks, Cinder, iOS, Unity 3D, Kinect, Augmented Reality, Quartz Composer, VDMX and projection mapping with MadMapper. Experience gathered throughout these projects requires searching for new and more powerful tools and skills constantly. Cinder a tool that allows one to combine the hottest topics of today's computer science (computer vision, gesture recognition, etc.) with the craziest ideas and make them work real-time without acceleration lags. Currently Krisjanis is studying in the New Media MA program at the Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture, also known as the Helsinki Media Lab in Finland. He is also doing freelance commercial projects and taking his first entrepreneurial steps by managing his company called Skematic. This is the very first book Krisjanis has written, and it was fun and rewarding in terms of knowledge and experience. First, I would like to thank Pack Publishing and the people behind it for the offer to author this book. To Irina Spicaka for being patient and supportive while writing. Huge respect to Reinis Adovics for being a mad scientist, living the dream of the creative coder through his own company Warp, and for agreeing to be the technical reviewer of this title. Finally I would like to thank Nuno Correia (Lecturer and Researcher of the SOPI Research Group at the Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture) for tips and possibility to combine this with my studies, and the whole Helsinki Media Lab students and crew for showing their interest towards this topic.