Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Plantronic's Volume Logic kicks some serious ass, but not anymore. A new page on the homepage states:

"No More Volume Logic



Volume Logic audio enhancement software has been discontinued. However, Plantronics commitment to sound innovation continues. Our headset products feature the latest in digital signal processing like Audio IQ intelligent headset technology."

I discovered this because VL stopped working with Leopard and I went to see if they updated it. Not only didn't they update it, they killed it. I wonder if Apple bought it for an iTunes update, or what exactly happened. I've been using VL for a long time, it really does open the soundscape up a lot! Too bad.

I am busy converting a lot of images down from large sizes to more manageable ones - a perfect opportunity to use Actions and a droplet. So I record my action (sizing large images down to a specific size), and now that I have that, set up a droplet so I can drag&drop files -- which processes them using Photoshop and saves them to a directory I chose when I set the droplet up. It all works great, except the images are off dimensionally.

Each image should be, lets say, 800x600. The resulting images are processed and saved as 799.8 x 599.9 and not 800 x 600. Its a small thing, but this should be a pretty simple process. And it's not working exactly right.

A friend let me know about a pretty humorous but reality-based post about asshole driven development, cognitive dissonance development, cover your ass engineering, development by denial, and the get me promoted methodology.

How many of these have you personally run into?

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

link to bungie article about special Halloween-only playlist. ok, who's in? I plan on it.

There have been many bellyaching about the UI for the new dock in Leopard. I am not one of them, but if you want something like Tiger's dock in Leopard, you can get it closer. To remove the glossy and 3D view of the dock, you can use the Terminal and enter this:



Now, what about those glowing orbs signifying launched applications? You can change those as they are only PNG files. The link takes you to a TUAW article about how to do just that.

Of course the two techniques are not exclusive: you can do one, the other, or both. Its up to you. I'll be keeping my dock as-is because its growing on me. But you might find it appealing to play with your dock and customize it a bit (at your own risk of course).

Saturday, October 27, 2007

After a pretty lengthy installation, I have Leopard running on my wife's black MacBook and the first thing that caught my eye was that the menubar has rounded corners on the bottom and sometimes top right corner (submenu item). Thats a super nice touch... you almost don't notice it, but you are aware of it. The menu bar being kinda transparent is almost not worth the effort. Its almost opaque. Spotlight is WAY faster now for me, after a quick re-indexing after updating. Safari seems okay, about the same for me. However I already made a few web widgets with it (NHL standings, etc.) Very nice. I haven't played with iChat much yet, waiting for my parents to get it. And once I get a Mac @ work, I'll be able to do the BackToMac thing and be able to work from one location on the other, etc. Spaces is good, as advertised. Haven't tried TimeMachine as this won't backup using WIFI (pulled). Once I get Leopard on my MacPro, I'll use my external drive and give it a go. I haven't tried BootCamp yet either, although it will be quick to install the new drivers into XP. Overall, I like Leopard a lot, but its not ultimately earth-shattering. Its very nice. Coverflow in the Finder is cool, and QuickLook is a super time saver (already!) I think the networking/screenshare/backtomac functionality will be used the most by me. I am not a big Spaces user, as I don't normally have tons of things open. Mail is pretty nice. I like the new dock a lot. Off to play some more with it.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

I have been using Bridge CS3 for a while now, and its a pretty cool tool to use when working on projects that use a lot of graphical assets. Its a bit slow for me, but generally works well.

I used Acdsee a long time ago and just remembered that its still out there. So I visited and downloaded a trial of Pro 2. And its fast, looks a bit like Bridge CS3, and is packed with features. I like it a lot because of its sheer speed.

I'd like to compare the two to see who comes out on top, and this will take some time. Any users out there who can suggest which is better off the bat? (disregard Version Cue integration). A 2x click won't open stuff in CS3 applications, but it does offer some decent editing tools for some formats.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Packing for a move is certainly never fun. But today was especially hard. We've been packing things for a while now, but today I put many Macs and Apple computers out in the yard to await their sleepy fate. Each of them served me very well and are in working condition. I even have spare power supplies for the Apple ][! But alas, even though we'll have a lot more room in the new house, these friends don't need to make the trip.

I almost want to take some pictures. Apple ][. ][+, ][c, ][gs, 128k Mac, Mac Classic, a bunch of G4s and G5s, a Performa, and some eMates. Its sad, but they take up a lot of room and I never turn them on. Its been cool to know they were in the basement sleeping, more than capable of answering their master's call. But I have a shiny new MacPro that can outperform all of them combined, so it was time to thin the herd down to a more manageable size. As they enjoy some night air, and they are about to go to that landfill and disappear into the obscurity of anonymous history, they know that they are loved and simply need to call it a fine, fine series of boot cycles. Thank you guys.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

His Steveness FTW:

"Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.



It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.



Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.



We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.



Steve



P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch. [Oct 17, 2007]"

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Do you spend your evenings lobbing grenades and smacking foes down? Do you spend your days flashing/flexing/airing/coldfusioning? If you are into the whole Live! aspect of Halo 3 and you'd like to connect with fellow flashers in the community, leave a comment for this post with your gamertag. Mine is "edolecki" -- it would be cool to get a nice big base of flashers together on a somewhat regular basis if possible. I played a bunch with people from work last night, and it was a blast (it got better when I discovered that my headset started working right again).

Update:
I just created a Group called "AdobeDevs" -- no affiliation with the company itself, just the technologies that make our world and the world of users so much better. Apply for membership (its open for now), hopefully this makes things a little easier in Live! If not, then this is a cheap no-way lame way of trying to replace clans (like we had in Halo 2). It would be cool to get contacts in groups in Live! for sure.

Saturday, October 6, 2007

When a hotel tells you it has "blazing fast" wireless internet, chances are they are fibbing. I sit in a *very* nice suite on the outskirts of Philadelphia (somewhere in Bucks county), and you know those ancient machines that dialed up credit cards numbers of authorizations? Its like the internet connection is being pumped through that thing's modem or something. I don't even remember dial-up being this slow, but maybe it was.

Yesterday I saw a big black SUV crossing the George Washington bridge in NYC, and I've only seen her avatar photo in Twitter, but I think I saw stefsull driving... there was one of those white oval'ed stickers with "Flash" in it... so I figured I'd look to see if there was any chance I recognized the driver. Maybe it was her, maybe not. Its cool to think it was her though... looked like her.

Its nice to be back in Pennsylvania again... God's country here. I'm not going to talk much about what's going on here, but its tons of fun, and I'm actually thinking of grabbing a little PA soil to take back with me. Awesome people here. And the light-switches are INSIDE the bathrooms, not on the outside like the are in new england. I hate that. Hope everyone has a cool Columbus Day weekend. I gotta scoot because publishing this is going to take 20 minutes on this crappy connection.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

UPDATE:

Just saw the Sneak Peek videos Peter Elst posted. This has to be said. "Holy shit." The tweens without keyframes is cool, but I don't use frames like that. Many designers will eat that up. Bezier curved paths, drop different displayObjects on the path, etc. Nice. Live video on the stage at author-time is cool. Handy. Now... bones coming to Flash with live preview on stage! How awesome is that? Draw your object, set down your bones with joints in the object, and bamo... kinematic system! C/C++ -> AS3 conversion (showing approximating some multi-threading... side topic not shown, but might FP10 get threads?!?)

THE DUDE PORTED AND PLAYED QUAKE in FP10.





Okay, I've seen the videos aral balkan has posted, and I am really psyched about a number of things. The hydra stuff is going to be very mind-blowing, depending on how its implemented and how we can interact with the stuff. Pixel shaders are super nice. Writing .hydra isn't the easiest thing in the world in my opinion. C-like sure, but if Thermo can do a lot of the heavy-lifting for designers, you'd think that AIF would have a more robust and easy to use editor. I'm sure thats on the drawing table somewhere.

Adding .rotationZ is going to be sweet. You won't be able to use models like you can in Papervision3D, but its going to open up a lot of creative possibilities for those who find PV3D a little daunting. There are a few 3D packages for AS3 (and 2 for that matter), that combining an engine and the rotation stuff Adobe packs in should == coool stuff. Now, it might be cool to add a z axis within the IDE too. Just sayin'. And if FP10 gets .rotationZ, I'd imagine that Flex and AIR will eat that up too. In fact, anything FP10 can do you should be able to use in AIR, Flex & Flash. Would be cool to see FlashLite get some of this stuff too. And then you can stop calling it "FlashLite" and call it something like "FlashMobile."



Speaking of Thermo, it looks f'in amazing. Lots of us have Flex experience under our belts, but we can't crank out code that fast that implements skins so quickly. Thermo is going to save us tons of time getting the look and feel of our applications completed, freeing up more time for heavier logic or creating different applications.

So, perhaps we can see a trend beginning here. Thermo is for designers (primarily) and Flex is for more "code monkey" type developers. They meet at the MXML highway. How long before the Flash IDE is turned into a different kind of beast, one that pumps out Flex/AIR apps too? It seems like things are running towards that Flex foundation, and thats pretty cool. Especially since Flex apps are really starting to look better and distinct. A year ago, you knew a Flex app just by its appearance. And perhaps that loading widget. But now & in the future, the spit & polish is being applied. Things are looking good. And getting things looking & behaving good is going to become easier. I'm not saying the IDE is going to go away, but I wonder if it will turn into a cross-breeding of the IDE and Thermo now. Would that mean that the Library, etc. would go away? No, but the end product could follow the same pipeline path ultimately.

FlexBuilder is getting a price drop I've seen. Very nice. Here's to Flash Player 10, Thermo, Flex Builder 3, AIF & Hydra, and that other stuff (VOIP) that I heard about today. Share you can keep, and the Adobe Media Player has a ways to go, but its kinda cool. In all, Adobe is turning up the heat here. Silverlight may have some things going for it, but it has a long, long, winding road ahead of it if it ever wants to come close the beautiful deity that is the Flash Platform.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

WALL-E

RELEASE DATE: 4th Sep 2008



What if mankind had to leave Earth, and somebody forgot to turn the last robot off?



Academy Award-winning writer-director Andrew Stanton ("Finding Nemo") and the inventive storytellers and technical geniuses at Pixar Animation Studios ("The Incredibles," "Cars,” "Ratatouille") transport moviegoers to a galaxy not so very far away for a new computer-animated cosmic comedy about a determined robot named WALL•E.



After hundreds of lonely years of doing what he was built for, WALL•E (short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) discovers a new purpose in life (besides collecting knick-knacks) when he meets a sleek search robot named EVE. EVE comes to realize that WALL•E has inadvertently stumbled upon the key to the planet’s future, and races back to space to report her findings to the humans (who have been eagerly awaiting word that it is safe to return home). Meanwhile, WALL•E chases EVE across the galaxy and sets into motion one of the most exciting and imaginative comedy adventures ever brought to the big screen.



Joining WALL•E on his fantastic journey across a universe of never-before-imagined visions of the future, is a hilarious cast of characters including a pet cockroach, and a heroic team of malfunctioning misfit robots.



Filled with surprises, action, humor and heart, WALL•E was written and directed by Andrew Stanton, produced by Jim Morris, co-produced by Lindsey Collins and features original and innovative sound design by Academy Award-winner Ben Burtt ("Star Wars," "Indiana Jones," "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial").

Monday, October 1, 2007

We heard bi-directional text layout. Very cool. Column layout with linked text (a'la Quark/inDesign) is very welcome. I'd love to see all the APIs sometime Emmy :) 3D transformations looks nice (not powerful like PV3D or Sandy or etc.) but welcome all the same. Software, no hardware acceleration, but overall cool for those wanting to get into some effects without having to learn a ton of new APIs. Hydra - not sure how one implements them but the demo looked pretty cool. Downloading that beta now.

This is excellent ;) Diggnation vidcast comes to the Adobe Media Player. However, because I can click the preview of it in iTunes and pop out JUST the video, over the top of my favorite code editor, means that I'll be sticking to iTunes to watch the vidcast on a regular basis.

Today Adobe posted a link in the labs for a new online beta application called Share. Its like Google Docs except its using Flex to power the front end. I've been playing with it a bit and its pretty cool, simple & easy to use. From the page:

With Share you can:

• Send documents without email attachments.


• Access your documents from anywhere.


• View all the documents you have shared or received in one place.


• Post a link to your document on a wiki or blog.


• Embed a Flash® preview of your document on any website.


• Limit access to a document to a list of recipients.

There is a full compliment of APIs with this as well which makes it a whole lot more interesting than Google Docs, since you could build apps off the APIs (Flex or AIR or straight Flash). Sweet. I haven't seen anyone mention this yet this morning.

This morning @ Max it will be announced that Adobe is throwing down some wompom to purchase Virtual Ubiquity, creators of the mighty Buzzword.


From their blog:

We’ve been having a lot of fun re-visioning word processing on a new platform. And we benefited from being a small, nimble, self-directed entity to get our vision off the ground. However, we also recognize that in order to tackle this crowded and chaotic new market, we need to work with an established software firm to get the kind of stability and market exposure needed to effectively launch Buzzword.



Adobe was an obvious choice - not only because we built Buzzword on their great Flash platform, but because Buzzword fits so well into the Adobe heritage, which is all about great design and documents that matter. We think we can truly make a difference with Adobe, and help them in a variety of ways. Adobe has some exciting plans for the future, and Buzzword is poised to play an important role in their increasing presence in the area of web applications and collaboration.

Congratulations v.u. people, a well-deserved acquisition. Buzzword is a great online application, and it would make for a truly sweet AIR offering as well. Looking forward to see what moves Adobe makes with you in the near future. Congrats Tad :)