I've been on a research kick lately. Trying to find out what I didn't know I didn't know. Visiting the sets of various internet shows and seeing how they run their productions. Major impact on the lab, here. New apps in the pipe. For all you covert operatives out there!

Labels: apple, mac, research

We here at b-l-a-c-k-o-p have been rigorously disciplined about continuing to support Tiger (10.4) even though it looked like everything was moving to Leopard.

Well, we got our answer yesterday when Apple introduced Safari 4.0 for Tiger and Leopard and for XP and Vista. That oughta tell ya that Tiger is still a widely used platform for the PowerPC and 1G Intel macs.

We want our apps to run on as many Macs as possible.

Feedback.

Labels: apple, leopard, mac, snow leopard, tiger, windoze

It seems like almost all Mac applications these days are requiring administrator access to install. It's outrageous! WTF are they doing with their installers? We have, what, 6 apps and no admin requirements. CatEye notwithstanding (it has an option to install for all users).

Unix. Get clear on the concept.

Labels: apple, mac, unix

There is a challenge within the Mac community to innovate within the field of UI design. Hidden cultural biases about what is 'good' or 'Mac-like' keep developers marching along the straight and narrow.

DotMatrix is a bit of an oddball among graphics applications. And it borders on being not "Mac-like". We know that, but we're holding a vision of a new kind of graphics tool: something that opens up creative possibilities for people who previously may have shied away from making art.

And we also wanted to avoid dropping down into bad design cliche or reams of pre-designed templates that held little possibility for real customization.

So the choices we made with respect to how DotMatrix is organized around bookmarks, color customization and an over-abundance of sliders (as opposed to other kinds of UI elements) -- well, let's just say there is a method to this madness.

The little square "grabby handles" that 99% of all graphics programs "expose" to their users as the primary means of interacting with the canvas are for many kinds of people, intractable. This includes people with poor hand-eye coordination, people who are disinclined to pursue traditional art such as drawing and painting and people with physical handicaps.

So in DotMatrix we restrict the user interactions to two primary modes: button clicking and slider-dragging. Our palette of pre-designed templates are merely convenient jumping-off points for exploring the programmability of DotMatrix.

The aim of DotMatrix is to get people out of the thinking/analyzing mode of consciousness and into the exploration/experimentation mindset. The combination of the template selection and the live camera feedback make it possible, we think, for non-artists to approach the creation of fine art for the first time.

By fine art I mean the creation of art which could possibly hang in a gallery.

Both Andy Warhol and Victor Vasarely held a belief that "art was for everyone". Because, within the fine art world there is a cyclical tendency toward elitism. Both Vasarely and Warhol worked to break that down.

In making DotMatrix our goal is to provide the user with an alternative means for the creation of fine art. One that is approachable by the non-artists of the world. By people who might have avoided art classes or considered themselves "bad at drawing". Or even bad at photography.

Because with the masking, posterization and access to geometric patterns of shapes, the actual underlying photograph that drives a DotMatrix design is of secondary importance. You can start with a found image grabbed from a web page or youtube (use GrabberRaster).

Sample and remix the visual world. And use DotMatrix if you find it handy.

Labels: apple, cocoa, dotmatrix, mac, quicktime, vasarely, warhol

In honor of the man who wrote instant camera.

Labels: apple, cocoa, mac, polaroid, quicktime

Here's another one. Last one. Promise.

"You can't USE instant warhol generator, I WROTE INSTANT WARHOL GENERATOR".

To understand this post, read further, below.

Labels: apple, cocoa, mac, warhol

There was this one "famous" computer scientist, Edsger W. Dijkstra, who lived out the end of his years as a professor at UT Austin. Lucky guy, I mean, if you've ever seen the kind of blonde coeds that wander around the campus cheering Go Horns. But I digress. The subject of this post is a Swiss, not Dutch "famous" computer scientist, Niklaus Wirth. Wirth is famous for his notion of programming by contract.

Some people will tell you that operating system war is about shiny translucent windows and pre-rendered Photoshop buttons with faux 3D drop shadows. Nothing could be further from the truth. The current market leader, Microsoft, understands what makes a successful operating system better than anyone else. Hence their leadership. What makes an operating system successful is the extent to which it adheres to the principle of programming by contract, Wirth's idea. A public interface (we call it an API) and private behavior (we call it an implementation).

I have some software that I wrote in 1989 for a little used operating system called Windows 2.1. I didn't care about Microsoft's private implementation, I simply "fell for" their promise of a stable API with reliable behaviour. The last time I checked, which was in the early XP days, this software, which hails from a day before Windows ran in protected mode, when double-clicked, would boot up and run just fine on XP. So it is with everything I've ever written for Windoze. In fact, I had to remove one piece of freeware from the internet because too many people were downloading it, 10 years after it was written, and I didn't want to answer the emails about it. Of course, not a b-l-a-c-k-o-p App per se.

I write this after having discovered that Apple made specific changes in QuickTime 7.3 to keep our virtual camera plug-ins from loading (within Apple apps). They continue to work just fine with all the other vdig clients out there. Thanks a lot guys. We really appreciate it. Love to see you supporting ISVs that supported you through the dark years. Yeah, I own a 603e, a G3, a TiBook, ad nauseum.

NeXT TIME, while you're kicking back thinking about how clever you are, you can contemplate why there are 300 million computers running Windows and only 3 million running Leopard. Maybe Niklaus Wirth was right. But since you're a Canadian on the QuickTime team, you probably went to school at Waterloo, and so you definitely know that already. And since you watched the DOJ vs. Microsoft trial with great interest, and cheered when M$ lost, you know that big companies that do this to small companies end up paying big prices, not small prices. Which is probably why Microsoft paid $600M to Eolas and not some paltry sum, like, say $300K.

Automatic background removal? You can't USE automatic background removal, I wrote automatic background removal.

Does any of this really matter anyway? The desktop is dead, long live the desktop. The new desktop is called DHTML, another Microsoft invention. However, invented by Microsoft, Google is the only company that really understands it. And yes, we write to Google APIs.

Labels: apple, cocoa, mac, next, quicktime, windoze, yellowbox