Beta release of new JES (Jython Environment for Students) now available: Media Computation for Python IDE

Veronica Day and Audrey Zhang are two undergraduate researchers with whom I have been working here at University of Michigan to update JES (Jython Environment for Students), the Python IDE for Media Computation.  We last updated it in 2015 (see announcement post here), so it’s long overdue. The last version has been downloaded over 50K times (see counts here). I’m grateful to Veronica and Audrey for their hard work.

Besides working their way through the bug list on GitHub, and adding contributed features into the main trunk (like Ben Shapiro’s support for Mac retina displays – many thanks, Ben!), they have added support that I’ve been wanting for awhile. We can now create pictures from a collection of pixels and sounds from a collection of samples. This allows for a more functional style of media manipulations. In the example below, we makePicture by filtering for only certain pixels with a list comprehension ([px for px in getPixels(p) if getRed(px)<120]).

Please try out the beta version of JES and let us know of errors. Thanks

http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~mjguz/uploads/jes-5.02b5/

We plan to update a few more parts of this version before the 6.0 release. In particular, we’d like to upgrade to the latest Jython and the latest JMusic. I’m expecting some of our regression tests to fail on that, so there will be some tweaks yet.

This may be our last release of JES.  Jython is no longer in development (see post here). I’ll have to try again to get Media Computation to work in CPython (see last try here) and/or move to one of the browser-based Python implementations.