Intro
This blog post will talk about my experience learning how to use APIs and JSON as well as describe my visit to Rockwell Group, as well as comparing the visit, with the visit to Second Story, which I described in my previous blog post.
Exchange Rates
Unfortunately, what seems to be a bug either from P5 or from my computer or either an error, made me lose my whole afternoon trying to figure out why. So, every time I would use the println command in P5, in order to print the whole JSON URL, the command line was just saying [Object : Object], which was incredibly annoying, since I could not find out what was going wrong. I even had registered to a website and obtained my API Key.
Initially I though that the problem could be the URL itself, even if the JSON Chrome extension made it appear normally. Next, I used another currency exchange website with the following API: (http://api.fixer.io/latest), in which I had exactly the same issue. Then, I tried trying the weather API we used today in class and gave me exactly the same result. Suddenly, I decided to try the code you uploaded, where you created ellipses, with their size being dependant on London’s humidity. To my surprise it worked, despite the fact that I could not see the JSON commands on the command line of P5 and then I realised that my previous APIs would work as well, so I stuck to the second Currency Exchange API. My next aim, which failed was to make the user type the currency he wants to compare with the Euro and then the screen would show him the exchange rate.
In order to achieve that I wanted to use the createInput DOM, but for some unknown reason the following error was shown: “Uncaught not yet implemented” on Line 7. For that reason I will show you the code tomorrow in class in order to help me figure out what the problem is, since I am really interested in this field of coding.
Rockwell Group Visit
Today’s visit to Rockwell group was really interesting, since Rockwell seems to be a firm that works in awesome projects as well as quite prestigious ones, since for example they had to design for the Oscar Awards etc. The company other than the architectural part, seemed to be quite Similar to Second story and manage to integrate art and technology in an amazing way.
The main difference I could distinguish between the two firms is that Rockwell seems to be a more “commercial” company that seems to produce projects quite amazing but at the same time they also seem to be restricted, because of the fact the technology team seems to be overseen by other departments and mainly the one of the architect’s, which is the firm’s main focus. On the other hand, Second Story seems to be a more “free thinker” and seems to operate quite independently and focusing mostly on the artistic part of technology and not just on the architectural/design counterpart.
Furthermore, both of these firms seem to have a huge similarity as well, other than their projects. They both seem to be connected to people from many disciplines, who might affect the final products. For example, Second Story as they told us, operate with clients who do not seem to have any idea about technology, while Rockwell lab cooperates with its architects, who seem to dictate a big part of how many projects will be done, in order to fit their design.
On the other side of the coin, there seems to be no denial that Rockwell is a larger company and therefore it makes sense to be working more strictly, since they seem to work with quite prestigious hotels, restaurants and night clubs and therefore, they have be more careful and less free in what they produce. Furthermore, I personally know how big their projects are, since I myself happened to have visited one of the bar restaurants they made in Mykonos, an island that hosts some of the world’s most exclusive hotels bars and restaurants.
Conclusion
In conclusion, both of these firms produced really interesting and different projects and for that reason I would really like to work with them someday, because I really enjoy the way they manage to combine technology with art and design and produce amazing works, that sometime require state-of-the-art technology in order to be built.
Thanks for reading,
Christos