I was certainly still scared of JS when I made those scripts linked above so I’m sure there’s lots of room to improve them.
Regarding the anti-aliasing you mention, this is entirely the same as what you already know from photoshop / vector edge display. Basically interpolating across multiple discrete points, with variable intensity, to create the impression of a value in-between two discrete states. If you look at monome_sum the ‘beams’ patch is a bank of anti-aliased bars to help visualize the values sliding around in a continuous state.
In general these types of interfaces are uncommon because they’re generally not suited to the highly discrete nature of the grid (why build a fader with only 8 levels, when you could just use a real fader), but it’s a nice workaround for situations where you want some kind of mixed functionality between the precision of separate grid keys, but need to show some kind of smoothly varying display.
///
As an interesting aside - the first foray into this kind of display was @tehn’s ‘returns’ which uses an anti-aliased pointer on the arc. This obviously makes much more sense as the 64 leds are showing a continuous value spread out around the arc ring. My versions for the grid were mostly a personal challenge to help learn a bit more about javascript and interfacing with the variable brightness capability of the grids of recent years.
