I wrote the AU Library ("Andrew's Utilities") for Processing because in the course of making animations I found myself writing the same sorts of routines over and over again. So I've written them just once, made them efficient and easy to use, and now I'm sharing the library with you.
Above are four examples of little gif animations that I made with my library; consider these just a taste of what can be done.
Here's an ultra-short summary of them all. See Imaginary Institute Technical Note #3 (here) for an overview.
Flip a fair coin and report whether it came up heads or tails.
Support for creating animation loops where objects come and go over time.
Choose one object from a list. The objects can have different probabilities for getting chosen.
Tools for computing distances so that you can freely change the size of your graphics window and things will still look right. Also, a bunch of cool and unusual ways to measure distance.
A variety of ways to control motion so it looks smooth and even natural, rather than jerky or mechanical.
Routines for making smooth, natural-looking motion and blends of colors, shapes, or anything else.
A variety of incredibly handy, repeating patterns for controlling almost anything in space and time.
Makes it easy to create great-looking movies and animated gifs. The results even include high-quality motion blur, so everything moves smoothly and looks natural.
Generate evenly-spaced points along either Bezier or Catmull-Rom curves in 2D, 3D, or any higher number of dimensions. You can also include more data of your own at every curve point, and that gets blended along with the curve's position.
A 2D array of floats with many handy operations built-in. Great for stroring things like height fields and density maps.
A group of AUField objects with tons of support. Perfect for color images with and without transparency. You can read your data into or from the screen or an off-screen buffer, modify the colors, compose (overlay) one image on another, and much more. It's perfect for storing any amount of floating-point information on a per-pixel basis, from colors to N-dimensional points, vectors, temperature data, etc. all at once.
Return the elements of a list, one by one, in random order. When they've all been used, shuffle the list automatically into a new order, and then resume returning them.
A simple but powerful tool for easily creating animations composed of several distinct steps.
A smooth and highly controllable curved blend between two circles.