A British company called Faber & Faber is doing print on demand books with a wrinkle: each book has its own distinct cover that's generated at print time.
Generating the borders was just one, if major, task of the final solution, though. The custom software written in Processing, straight Java and PHP works as an internal webservice at Faber which receives new batch orders and then generates complete, print ready PDF files with all copy, branding, spine, ISBN, barcode and optional high-res JPG preview using the book details supplied. Generating a single cover only takes about 1 second, but due to its iterative and semi-random nature can sometime require hundreds of attempts until a "valid" design is created which is judged to be "on brand" by software itself.
What a day it will be when software can determine whether all of us are "on brand" or not. (thx, david)
by Casey Reas and Ben Fry
Casey Reas and Ben Fry, inventors of the Processing programming language (that's Proce55ing to you old schoolers), have just come out with a book on the topic that looks fantastic. In addition to programming tutorials are essays and interviews with other heavy hitters in the programmatic arts like Golan Levin, Alex Galloway, Auriea Harvey, and Jared Tarbell. The site for the book features a table of contents, sample chapters, and every single code example in the book, freely available for download. Amazon's got the book but they're saying it's 4-6 weeks for delivery so I suggest hoofing it over to your local bookstore for a look-see instead.
Syllabus and notes from an ITP class called The Nature of Code, which focuses on "the programming strategies and techniques behind computer simulations of natural systems". Lots of good notes and Processing code examples.
Processing applet in which an adaptive population plays tag. "If a member plays tag well (when they're it, they tag others), they'll live longer." Prettiest game of tag I've ever seen. (via proc blogs where you'll find lots of neat Processing-related things)
The letter-pairs analysis application reads in some text and displays a graphical representation of distribution of letter pairs used in the text. Love the aesthetics of the information display.
