An Introduction

This blog will help to give an overview to the use and development of a piece of creativity and thought mapping software I have been working on for the past six months. I feel that it is time to start showing some of the progress I have made and Soon to post alpha version builds of the development software.
I am writing this software in Ruby. I have had a good experience with learning Ruby and would recommend it to others who want to embark on learning a programming language. Ruby is flexible free and there is a lot of documentation on the web and resources to get you through problems and questions. Sites I use constantly are

http://www.rubycentral.com/pickaxe/builtins.html
http://pleac.sourceforge.net/pleac_ruby/
http://www.zenspider.com/Languages/Ruby/QuickRef.html

and here to install ruby itself

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

I use Notepad++ for code editing

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

and good old fashion Ghostscript, and Imagemagick for making my images from the commandline and visualizing my programs output

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php

All of this stuff is straightforward and can be used by anyone. I dont mean to be patronizing by making this all sound easy, because its isnt. However it is very doable and if you are and artist who wants to incorporate automation, processing and digital visualization into your work, these tools have been very useful for me.