If you have spent time trying out the endless opportunities contained in the art of programming you know how frustrating testing can be. Endless nights and days with an endless amount of  changing variables and recompiling. A missing semicolon, a misspelled word, well, the reasons to frustrations are many.  I know how it is, and I feel with you, you have my sympathy when you trying to clear up a for-for-for-for loop with ten different curly brackets, and that’s just for the search algorithm. When you then have additional twenty logic switches to check the conditions of your variables and maybe alter them, then life can be quite hard. If you are working on a big project, you probably have test functions, and ways to find and correct these problems without much hazzle, but what if you want to change the values instantly? Or if you are just making a little sketch after an idea and have no intention spending lots of time on the “run-stop-change-run” iteration? Too much flickering can easily remove the fun from your projects, and what about instant gratification. Everyone love some instant gratification, and here is a little program which can give you instant gratification and probably make your life a little bit better, or just give you a moment of joy. I do not want to promise you anything, but hopefully this little fix can help you with your testing inferno.

The program is inspired by the possibilities of Open Sound Control which we implemented into our Digital Media Studio Project to control sound signals sent from Processing and played in Max MSP. This little experiment consists of Processing sketch with a listener, waiting for variables to arrive over port 4000 (you can of course change all the parameters as you like), and a Max MSP patch with 5 sliders coding values from 0 to 255 and sending them.
Files:

Max MSP patch

Processing Sketch

Picture from test1

Picture from test2