UltraIteration in GLSL

Some time ago my friend and colleague Ben Paschke showed me this awesome Android app that he was using called 'Shader Editor'. Its source (by Marcus Fisch) is available on GitHub, and not too hard to build either, given a bit of gradle'idge! I got an apk made on my Gentoo Linux workstation at home without too much bother, which I personally regard as a minor miracle!

Shader Editor is an Android editor app for GLSL shader source, that can be set to compile as-you-edit and runs the shader on your phone. You can also make the shader the phone wallpaper! It's a bit like ShaderToy, as an app, perhaps not as full-featured as ShaderToy, but still quite comprehensive! (mouse, pointers, back-buffer, camera, other sensors, etc) and I think it generally works brilliantly!! And open-source too?! how can you argue with that!? :)

At the time I installed Shader Editor I was still spending every spare second (that I wasn't reading HackerNews while commuting) playing Ingress (agent Enkling, level 16, retired). This happened to also be around the exact time of the Ingress Prime switchover. I have still never played the Prime edition (pay to win? Not interested.)

When I realized that I (finally!) had a platform for dabbling with programming on my phone whilst riding the bus/train, I immediately quit Ingress, and have not looked back. After all, why be a mere observer of cool GLSL/graphical effects? why not try to make some of them yourself!? :D

Without additional hardware (that might work well on a bus, with a phone) you end up using a smartphone keyboard to edit the source. I have found that most default onscreen keyboards are far from ideal for coding purposes, but I now think that swapping to a more appropriate keyboard app can be a very worthwhile thing to do!! I am currently using 'Hacking and Developing Keyboard', in which the presence of arrow-keys, both backspace and delete (left and right of the cursor) and multi-buffer-clipboard - all make a gigantic difference! On top of this I also had to upgrade my phone recently, I went to a Note9 and I have to say: Editing with the pen is another significant step up in edit-speed on top of a good on-screen keyboard! I reckon I can nearly go up to half as fast as I could if I were using a real keyboard, and that is saying something when working on a smartphone!!

Alright so here is one that is ingress-themed, just some noise and pointer-based  warping and distance stuff, I enjoyed it as a background for a while:

Glsl source

Screenshots:

This setup evolved into another thing that I called 'SpotOfBother', which I think is also nice, and a variant of this is my current background on Android:

Glsl source

Screenshots:

I'd love to hear from you if you use or play with either of them! :D
Enjoy!

If you love this kind of stuff so much that you'd even like to encourage it, I now have a Patreon, go nuts.