This past year I gave my “Programming Art” talk at five different conferences: Multi-Mania Belgium, FlashBelt, and FiTC in Toronto, San Francisco and Edmonton. I think the two things that stood out the most for people were Context Free Art and Structure Synth. If you haven’t checked into these two tools, you owe it to yourself to try them out. Neither one is something you’re going to base your future career on, but both will change the way you think about programming and creating graphics.
And if you looked into Structure Synth earlier, you might want to go grab the latest version, 1.5.0. More info here:
http://blog.hvidtfeldts.net/index.php/2010/11/structure-synth-1-5-0-hinxton-released/
The two big new features are the integrated raytracer and the JavaScript integration for animation.
These are both features that have been in the works for a while, but were just released now. I can’t wait to play with them.