Personal Productivity Update.

In the vein of a special day, the CS3 Suite will most likely get released and I was planning some big updates on my work in Cocoa (yeah, ‘Expert and Praetorian), I wanted to do a little post to tell everyone what I’m up to right now, and what helps me get the job done faster. First of all, a brilliant article, really the eye-opener of the day. I encourage you to digg the article. It’s about Quicksilver, my favorite productivity application. I never even figured, that you can store Quicksilver actions, and using the comma switch (you can add multiple items into a selection that way) you can actually run all those actions parallel! I’ve got a few personal uses for this, like;

- Make an action that opens my blog’s control panel, MarsEdit (I post with MarsEdit) and the main Yojimbo view (for my blog snippets). Open in one click.
- Open my incoming torrent folder, open Azureus, and make Quicksilver open Finder and do a (CMD+3) to get a convienient list view.
- Save my current working reference documents with comma, save the action to open them with preview on my desktop.
- Open xCode with GrowlCode and Interface Builder, all one one desktop (VirtueDesktops PyObjc plugin).

and those are just the few I just made. I can probably find some more innovative methods with the image actions, like scaling and reformatting my images. Ankur, you’re a veritable genius.

Now, I just heard the nice words over at Surfbits’ Macreviewcast, and I am very flattered to have that much attention for my little app. The nice words are a real boost to my working drive. At the moment, I am considering an early preview version, but I really want to give my testers something very feature-rich and stable. I’ll lift a bit of the veil of things to come here…

Whazzallthisthen? Well, since I got more than just iSight Expert coming up, and I don’t have all the time in the world to organize reported issues, I decided to build a site that allows you to do just that. You will be able to report your issue, and back other issues so I can see how many people are experiencing the same problems.

Why am I so non-verbal about my applications right now? Well, I got website work to do, you know? I just finished the complete design of the two websites, (Praetorian and iSight Expert) and I’ll release them by the end of this month, also replacing my blog’s current header, and, by massive request, adding a black-on-white layout (comments ranged from “I’d prefer a black on white layout” to “AHH! My eyes are burning!”). So, design-wise, you’ll see a lot of changes. And then what?

I might start releasing the first béta of Praetorian before iSight Expert (Praetorian’s been in development and active testing for much longer than iSight Expert), and then giving out a limited promotional alpha for several reviewers, pod-casters, developers and academia, before the stable 0.5 public beta. Anyway, as it stands, I have less than a hundred béta testers, so there is room for more. You know the address, just let me know if you want to get in, and of course, any more comments on why, your hardware, are all welcome and encouraged.

I want to thank Ars Technica and Macreviewcast for the very nice words and publicity. I’ll be sure to keep you up to date…

21st Century Musings.

We should really stop making obsolete technologies. Some people just have the right mentality lately when it comes to hyper-modern cutting edge technobabble-esque inventions. For example, take making a cure for cancer. Sure, you could do all that boring stuff in a lab, with proteins and… biology, but hey, Antimatter is cool! Why not use antimatter to cure cancer? Anyway, while all this may be a bit over the top, we -are- pushing our technologies to the next level, whether it is necessary or not, we always want to explore new frontiers.

Take, for example, Resolution Independence. I’ve seen the KDE 4 icons today, and well, they are svg’s! For those MIME-Type challenged among us, that means Scalable Vector Graphic, which means as much as that you are now officially able to print out the icon for whatever in whatever format you want, there is no quality loss in the traditional sense of pixelation and distortion. Now, GNOME 2 can do this as well - it’s GNOME icon set has a very nice scalable set that works great in small and big sizes, but these icons, well, let them speak for themselves;


Courtesy of the Oxygen icon suite - in SVN repositories near you! Anyway, this is awesome stuff. The Iconfactory has a post on resolution independence, but they used a PDF standpoint, which did offer a huge speed disadvantage. These streamlined SVG’s are superfast in rendering, and the detail is considerable. Of course, things are moving towards the resolution-independent UI now, with Leopard probably being the first OS to ship with a truly resolution-independent UI in April or so.

In the meantime, Microsoft is doing their usual ‘innovating’; attempting to introduce a new image format; HD-Photo! Buzzwords, anyone? The format, which is already obsolete, is supposed to be some sort of JPEG replacement, and of course, has nothing to do with High-Definition at all. I think this is very much in line with Microsoft’s confusingly-named OO-XML ‘replacement’ (slash competitor slash killer) for the Open Document Format, which is being required by law soon. For those new to the war, we don’t want .doc files littering public services anymore, as they are not public formats, but proprietary, courtesy of daddy Bill. So, there is an initiative to store -all- office document data in one format, so that would be your contemporary Powerpoint, Excel sheets, Word documents, anything, in an XML container. And the good thing is, everyone can read it! Unless, of course, Microsoft finds some way to get into the legislation. It’s the war of the times, and I strongly hope this is a war Microsoft doesn’t win, because the implications could be dire.

Flight404 and Trentemoller

Neat, eh? This is the ‘gravity orb’ script by Flight404. I hope he goes out of his way and publishes the code, that would be cool. I should look more into Processing, it’s API has grown so considerably. Processing is a toolkit that was inteded for musicians, artists, and other people to make artistic coding more accessible. It spits out Java code, or so I am told. Of course, our Flight404 here uses OpenGL as well.
I am a user of Drawbot and Nodebox myself, because I just love Python — even some baby steps in PyOpenGL taken in the last month, but OpenGL is something new to me and I hope to harness a lot more of it’s power in this year. This is a prime example of how cool it can be.