An image of Dylan

Jonathan Bachrach designed the image on the cover of this book. He played with the meaning that Dylan has for him by creating colorful tiles that appear to take off and fly. Each tile has its own vibrant color, unique personality, and individual strength. The tiles fly independently, but tend to flock with other tiles to achieve harmony within a community. Each tile could represent a Dylan component, or a Dylan programmer. Once Bachrach was satisfied with the still image, he took the next step, and built an animation of the tiles flying gracefully through space, flocking together, and creating a dynamic new world.

Bachrach wrote the animation and physical-modeling portions of the program in Dylan, using Open GL as the three-dimensional rendering substrate. Steve Rowley provided the physics equations. Bachrach demonstrated his animation at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in 1995.