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I recently developed an application for interactive patent database visualization and navigation. It’s still in progress but I thought I’d post a couple screen shots. It’s the standard mass/spring ball/stick network visualzation, which isn’t terribly intuituve or efficient, but it’s a start. This interactive program is written in Processing and uses various online patent databases.

Currently it allows several interesting group selection operations including tag cloud generation, date, inventor and class-based organization.

I’ll post more pictures and an online demo soon.

I’ve had a great deal of success with Cocoa UltraSMS lately. Unlike SMSLib (the java library I’ve been using) this library responds correctly to new message alerts from the phone. So access is immediate. The messages are stored in a MySQL database and are easily accessed with Processing (and any other Java), MaxMSP, PHP, etc.

This little app works really well with OS X. For a Linux, Windows, etc, take a look at the UltraSMS framework.