Once upon a time (1999), John Maeda wrote a book, Design by Numbers, which was meant to assist readers in "acquiring the skills necessary to write computer programs that are themselves visual expressions". The "programming system" that he developed, DBN, is still available at Design By Numbers. It's a Java program run from a DOS window, so it starts from a .bat file, if you download it to use on your computer.
In the book, Maeda allows the reader to construct simple programs using straightforward commands. As the book progresses, the commands become more complex, involving a lot of typing if you want to follow his instructions exactly.
The first program consists of only one command - Paper 0, Paper 1, etc., up to Paper 100. Each program, when run, shows one "sheet of paper", consisting of whatever solid colour, or shade of gray, plus black and white, is requested. While the program will do this faithfully, it doesn't provide a way to show this result, except in the display area.
This animation is my attempt to show the 99 shades of gray, plus white and black, by using a program which will produce and display them more or less properly. Not as easy to do as I first thought, since I had to find a program with a colour set option for black to white, with 1-increment steps, which could then export to a video file which could handle the subtle changes of shade. I used Corel Rave 3.0, which I don’t believe is being made anymore - I got it as part of CorelDRAW Graphics Suite. Rave has a very convenient colour palette named ' percent grey' which shows all 101 shades that I wanted.
The next problem was to find a format to save in that would show all 101 shades. Flash works well but Blogger didn't like it. A .mov file doesn't show the shades. So I chose .avi, even though it is a large file, and the numbers are blurred a bit. A lot of fussing, I know, for something that is sort of 'geeky' but I like doing finicky things.
DBN wasn't developed any further than beta version 4, although I could find only version 3.01, but Processing, "an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions" sort of carries on the same idea in colour. I like the simplicity of DBN though, or I will until it gets too complicated.
This is a screen shot of the program in action. Very simple and very quick.
