Some acknowledgments are worth mentioning and are listed here.

Prior art

In a way, Fnk is nothing new – it only brings a visual programming method that’s been known to a group of people to the web.

In that sense, Max/MSP/Jitter (version 4 at the time) was the first contact I had with that kind of programming and what inspired me to create a platform of my own.

After that, vvvv was, quite obviously, the biggest influence on how Fnk works. I started using vvvv right after I learnt Max, and many of the paradigms proposed by vvvv – data spreads, nonstop execution, lack of “commands”, a more predictable node execution flow – were absorbed by Fnk. This is really a program every visualist must know, and one of the hidden goals of Fnk is to bring more people to the vvvv community.

References

Many documents from MIT’s Laboratory for Coumputer Science were extremely important in figuring out how Fnk should work. These are documents written around 30 years ago, but they pretty much invented the dataflow paradigm. There’s a bit more information about each of those in the commented bibliography.

Development

Fnk is developed using Sun’s free Eclipse (including Apache Ant), Powerflasher’s FDT, and Adobe’s free Flex SDK. You can find more information about Fnk’s development workflow in this developer diary post.

Third-party code

Fnk uses Christopher Martin-Sperry’s MP3FileReferenceLoaderLib for the parsing of MP3 files loaded locally (starting at version 0.1.3654).

Other thanks

Additional thanks to:

• Ricardo Cabello for inspiration and support
• Charles Schiermeyer for helping me understand how frequency really works when doing sound synthesis