Mr. Black's RAW Cocoa Nibs

What You Don't Know You Don't Know

2009-06-20T01:28:00.001-07:00

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!

MEOW! Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard

2009-06-09T15:33:00.001-07:00

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.

Administrator Excess!

2009-03-19T14:33:00.000-07:00

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.

Subtle UI Bias

2008-11-10T22:10:00.000-08:00

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.

Spectra, Aged

2007-12-30T14:49:00.000-08:00

In honor of the man who wrote instant camera.

Last Beat of That Drum

2007-12-21T09:48:00.000-08:00

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.

Programming by Contract

2007-12-20T12:58:00.000-08:00

TBD

I Wrote Hello

2007-12-19T12:33:00.000-08:00

One time I saw Robin Williams in an interview on TV. He was talking about how young comics really didn't like it if he came to see their shows. They were afraid that Mr. Williams was going to steal their jokes.

Mr. Williams riffed on this idea for the interviewer, (imitating young comic): "Hello? You can't USE Hello, I WROTE HELLO"

You can't say instant camera, I wrote instant camera.

And since we're on the subject, I have a hardware device called "Digital Eyes" for my NeXT Dimension cube. You think you wrote instant camera? Think again.

DotMatrix -> Qamera, A Personal Favorite

2007-12-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

Holy new OS release Batman, two CPU architectures, and two QuickTime releases. That's errr, 2x2x2 or a matrix of eight different testing scenarios. I'm dizzy. Or perhaps it's from looking a my sphere rotating in space.

Naturally, when developing the damn stuff, you don't really get much chance to play with it, however, during testing of DotMatrix w/ Qamera, I stumbled across piping the DotMatrix effect "International Man of Mystery" into Qamera's "Planetoid", which is simply video mapped onto a sphere.

Well, I took one look at the results, and I'm in love. Here's a hint: for the sphere effects in Qamera, try and send an image from DotMatrix that has a nice solid border color wrapped around the edges. Then the sphere will be, well, spherical.

Cats Meow Redux

2007-10-08T10:19:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me/us that there might be some viewers out there who believe we borrowed some ideas from the recent Apple WWDC07 conference to use in our own pre-Leopard applications. I'm referring to the features of CamCamX which obviate the new QuickTime 7.2 APIS which provide for non-exclusive access to the video digitizer. First off, the only reason anyone here knows about those new APIs is that they are referred to specifically in a press release for an application which is part of our compatibility testing matrix.

Now the background. Nobody from our team went to the WWDC this year. In fact we didn't go last year either. However, I did attend several of the ones prior, starting with the Jaguar conference.

Regarding CamCamX, keep in mind that we were working on applications for built-in (and external) iSight at least a year prior to the release of DotMatrix, which is well before WWDC06. (Not to mention that we were working with shared memory and video on the desktop well before Apple acquired NeXT). To say that we have more iSight applications in the pipe would be something of an understatement. And, one of my jobs is to make sure that all our applications fit together in some kind of cohesive strategy, or architecture. Some of our DotMatrix customers had requested we include CamTwist-like capability to DotMatrix. So we were getting it from all angles. It doesn't take a genius to realize that exclusive access to the built-in camera is a big limitation.

CamCamX was never initially intended to be a system utility, rather, we had planned a robust video mixer for providing the glue that makes all our iSight applications work together. We also want our applications to "play well with others", which is why CamCamX both mixes standard QuickTime sources (both camera and movies) and outputs the mixed feed as a QuickTime-compatible camera. The feature which shares the camera output systemwide is just a byproduct of the design.

As far as the idea for a video mixer, well, you can dream all you want, but in the late 80s I was primarily into live audio and lighting, but one time someone needed some help broadcasting a college hockey game, and I found myself in this little trailer outside the icerink looking at a bank of monitors. The system had buttons for selecting the video input and a big handle to smoothly fade between the inputs. "Cool, I thought to myself, it's just like an audio mixer."

We did see one thing from WWDC07; the keynote. We were already anticipating Apple's move away from Aqua toward the "black look", so we did adjust the UI to be more familiar to iMovie 08 users.

Rock Matrix 1.004

2007-05-03T05:56:00.000-07:00

We bit the bullet and decided to add the vector art modulation effects that we had planned for a future version. Boy was it worth it. Between the modulation effects and the addition of mask combination operators, our little image synth is making some waves.

Factory Girl Premiere

2007-02-08T19:39:00.000-08:00

We missed the Premiere due to the fact that we were busy getting our 1.0 releases out the door, but the leader of our special forces unit was so happy with our roll out that he arranged a black helicopter to fly us from DC to LA for the first run of "Factory Girl" at the Arclight in Hollywood.

Cocoa Nibs

2006-10-05T14:19:00.000-07:00

We like 'em.