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August 17th, 2006 . 4 comments

• I think the editors at Blendernation.com are stalking me. Should I be scared?

• Added curve shrinking/fattening to Blender, to help making tapered curves nice and quickly. Coming soon after I also added Mac tablet pressure support (there’s X11 support now too, still no Windows yet :/ ), Campbell had a nice idea about a freehand curve sketch tool that could support adjusting the curve taper radius with pen pressure.

• Finally, after a few months of searching, my friend Julien, his friend and I have been accepted for a reasonably nice terrace in south Surry Hills. The location is fantastic and I spent the last couple of afternoons cleaning and fixing up my old bike so instead of sitting on buses for hours I can ride it around just like back in Amsterdam! Yay! Move-in date is slated for the 26th, lots of packing to do by then!

WWDC video thoughts and notes

August 8th, 2006 . 8 comments

There’s been the usual flurry of reporting around the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference keynote address. I watched the video this evening and subsequently found a few interesting tidbits that haven’t been mentioned that much in the big internet news, and I might as well post them here, this site being my insignificant outlet to the world :)


  • I want a Mac Pro. Though I’m not too keen on buying upgrades for Photoshop and Illustrator just to run them natively on Intel. No, GIMP isn’t even close to being an option for me.
  • Finally, we (well, Ton) can start work on a 64 bit Mac version of Blender.
  • Although nothing was said about it in the talk, there’s an ominous, and positive RSS Feeds icon in the new Mail. Unfortunately they still have the horribly ugly, hard-to-differentiate and inconsistent blue bubble buttons, ugh. Oh well, I use Mail Fixer anyway.
  • They made Mail even more bizarrely inconsistent. Note the non-standard arrow-button-less scrollbars on the note view (in the video here) and on the stationery pane. I don’t mind the new style at all, but choose something and stick to it, for crying out loud! Note: Yes I’m aware that Blender is worse, having two types of scrollbars, both weirder than Mail’s here. I’ve got other things to work on now, so pay me and I’ll fix them ;)
  • There are some interesting looking icons in the dock on the Xcode preview page. One’s Xcode, one’s Dashcode, one seems to be a new Interface Builder, but I’m not sure what the one with the green A is.
  • The new Dashboard ‘Web Clips‘ feature looks mind-bogglingly great. Such a simple concept, but very original, and well implemented. But what on earth is up with that ridiculous black icon on Safari? How did Apple’s usually excellent UI designers let this crime against visual hierarchy and gestalt theory take place? The back/forward and stop/refresh buttons are generally far more important to users, than Web Clips, and making that button stand out like a lacerated bleeding thumb, in colour, contrast, and style is a terrible decision. Leave the advertising of new features for the web site, not the UI!
  • Although it’s utterly inconsistent with the rest of the OS, I really like the look of Time Machine. I think it actually works quite well presenting a clearly different view of the system, to distinguish against normal use, and besides, who doesn’t want a wormhole in their computer? :) People online have been wondering about disk space usage, but on the preview page it says “Time Machine only backs up what changes, all the while maintaining a comprehensive layout of your system”. I’m not sure if that means it stores changed files, or does diffing of files. Even so, at Orange when we used Subversion version control system to store all our art assets (mostly binary), the Subversion repository with all the revisions actually took up a fair bit less space than a full checkout, due to compression. So if they do something similar, Time Machine may be quite acceptable in that regard.
  • The new Leopard server OS now comes with wiki software built in, which is cool. The icon is just lovely. I’m also curious to see what Apple have done to the Wiki interface itself, since MediaWiki and friends are still highly technical, somewhat clumsy, and have a lot of room for improvement. Who’s going to make me a nice Wiki that uses contentEditable, eh?

SIGGRAPH 2006

August 3rd, 2006 . 0 comments

Right now, some of the Orange and Blender contingent are living it up in Boston at SIGGRAPH 2006, the premier Conference/Festival/Tradeshow for the digital graphics industry and community. This year, we’re lucky enough to have a booth on the main tradeshow floor, the ‘Open Source Pavilion’, shared with people from other open source graphics projects like Inkscape, GIMP and Verse. The booth was sponsored by a few sources, but largely by an extremely generous private donation. We’re right there in the trenches just next door to Houdini and ZBrush.

Unfortunately I’m not there myself, I really wish I was. But the next best thing is the fantastic video blog coverage that Bart from BlenderNation is producing each day. It’s giving the event a great feeling of community involvement, so do go and check it out and see some of the faces behind the internet aliases!

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