The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them
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Alex Lovett
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Tags: - 2D - Games
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Found some brilliant tools for simulating lens flares in AfterEffects, works surprisingly well, It's not physically accurate or anything like Maxwell render but It's can recreate a lot of the cool effects with added bonus of tons and tons of manual control.

It's called Optical Flares and is quite quite good

:-)



Link: www.videocopilot.net --- opticalflares



Sadly again this helps me little (not at all) in making actual textures or art for lumen, but is cool still.







Show comments for 'Lumen - Light Dispersion P2'
Tags: - Flash - Programming - Interactive - Apple - Unity - HTML5 - Web
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Adobe Flash, Apple iPad and iPhone, Unity3D, HTML5, FXG, Chrome and Webkit 2... where is this all heading?


Flash is Dead

Ok, no not really, but It's wounded and bleeding and to no sudden surprise to me and many others.

Apple you see has very firmly put the last nail in the coffin for Adobe Flash on the iPhone and the iPad with recent announcements.

Steve Jobs was visibly gushing at the recent iPhone OS 4.0 event, demonstrating his vision for iAds, little animated interactive adverts that don't suck, all made in HTML5, throwing round numbers like BILLIONS and 'have you ever seen anything like this before!!... I havnt'
All at the same time slightly rubbing his genitals in the face of Flash, and rightly so.
This of course followed by the announcement that the new appstore policy would most certainly exclude all Adobe Flash powered apps. *gulp*

Link: www.apple.com --- specialevent0410




My Logo for HTML5

Link: apirocks.com --- html5



Apple have been and are increasingly persuading people to use HTML5 instead of Flash. This is partly because Apple/Steve Jobs hates Adobe for being such a sloth and are no doubt internally fuming that It's taken until Adobe CS5's release (coming out soon) for them to finally use the coding frameworks Apple have strongly been advised them to use since OSX was in very first development. And partly because they don't want anything like that kind of situation ever happening on their new light weight modern mobile operating system that is the iPhone/iPad OS.

Personal disgust aside, Looking purely at the technical reasons, multitasking, battery life and low level hardware features... it makes perfect sense and over time will hugely benefit consumers. Flash on the iPad/iphone is a bit of a shitty citizen and Apple demands higher standards, I suspect they don't much like the idea of the already crammed AppStore being Flooded with quickly ported buggy slow and battery draining shovel ware. This hurts some of the genuinely good apps but if the developer is genuinely good and the app is genuinely good then they would have no trouble justifying porting it properly and re-releasing it. Anything worth doing on the AppStore is worth doing right in Apples opinion.

The reason they didn't let Adobe know that they were going to uhm ban all their efforts is likely because:
A: Apple have always said and persuaded people to USE the proper development tools to make apps and doing anything else will result in your eventual demise.
B: Apple thought it would be bloody hilarious to kick Adobe in the teeth for all the shitty lagging they did back when the Mac was struggling for support and they just floundered about with lazy stop gap measure partial ports of Photoshop right up until the release of CS5.

'Creative types don't care about technical lingo, cross-compiling or the compatibility layers.'

Link: tekkie.flashbit.net --- creatives-should-remind-apple-they-exist



And It's because they don't care they are not aware of how damaging a 2nd class citizen like Flash could be to a mobile platform if it promotes lazy coding or ports opposed to the hard work that goes into making First CLass native applications. And First class is what is needed to facilitate things like multitasking without increasing power consumption.

For every Flash developer that isn't on the iPhone it makes room for native programs and the people who code those, and that is a good thing. Even if it means people have to go out and actually learn another language or invest more effort and energy into something. No ones complaining theres lack of choice on the AppStore, if anything it needs pruning.

--

SproutCore SquirrelFishes and more?

There are many interesting developments around JavaScript now that it it performs so well in modern browsers thanks to engines like GlassFish.. wait now SquirrelFish.. no wait they renamed again to Nitro

For people used to coding for Mac or native iPhone apps you can use frameworks like Objective-J or Cappuccino which allow you to use similar coding to produce nice JavaScript code.

And theres SproutCore

Link: www.sproutcore.com



Which is what Apple actually used to produce It's very polished web apps for MobileMe with a fully featured Mail client as one example.

It has tools coming to visually build 'rich' user interfaces using all kinds of elements you'd expect for building desktop applications, buttons, panels, sliders and so on.

Link: touch.sproutcore.com --- hedwig



And Apple looks to be enjoying a good deal of involvement with these products too given their vested interest, It's proposed iAds will start off as a creative service ran by them alone but it will release tools/frameworks/javascript code to the masses to roll their own. For example I believe the help documentation on the iPad is written with such unreleased libraries and runs entirely in HTML+JS, and presents a fluid panel based interface with the sliding and bouncing and basically all the feedback and physics you'd come to expect of a native iPad/iPhone app... but in the browser.

Object orientated programming in JavaScript indeed, oh how I love abstractions on top of abstractions on top of ....



Adobes: FXG - Open advancement/replacement of SVG for storing animation/vector graphics in a way that doesn't suck hard

Link: www.andersblog.com --- flash_on_the_be



It's not all doom and gloom for Adobe of course, they are implementing HTML5 tools and conversion from Flash/Illustrator via Dreamweaver. And it looks pretty good too using FXG the open format they designed. They tried to use open SVG for their purposes but SVG turns out to be ass backwards so they tweaked it and improved it and called it FXG.

This is great as lets face it, no creatives were looking forwarded to creating things like Apples new iAds and animating HTML5 using a graphing calculator and a spreadsheet.

Link: www.9to5mac.com --- Flash-html5-canvas-35409730



--

Adobes Flash Player was one of the more impressive things Adobe have developed (the AS3 runtime engine not the horrible IDE) and It's still pretty inefficient (the graphics part) especially fullscreen on a iPad like device with limited RAM and battery, the IDE's and Tools Adobe make to edit content are generally antiquated and bloated by todays standards too, regardless of how established they are and how monumental they may have been decades ago, Adobe appear to try and get away with as little effort and work as humanly possibly when it comes to Mac support, maximize profits and cut corners, they are slow moving and dogged down by too much baggage and legacy. And they will pay dearly for this as they have visibly pissed Steve Jobs off and rightly so. Saying that though, there are still strong forces for good inside Adobe trying to change things for the better, to open up formats like .FLA and generally promote freedom and choice and interoperability all things this creative professional likes greatly.

But they are moving perhaps too slowly, we shall have to see with CS5 if they have grown enough to stay relevant

It really is time to get on board with open standards and make money from creating GREAT content creation tools, not making mediocre minimally updated content creation tools that rely on locking people into popular but closed systems for distribution.


Link: www.google.co.uk --- chrome


With my new custom icon cus the default one is a gay. Really gay

Flash was a force for good when JS execution was awful and rendering HTML was guaranteed for failure in one browser or another. But that landscape has now changed drastically thanks to Apple with Safari/open WebKit and Mozzilas Firefox and now Google with open Chrome.

Link: webkit.org



And during a tough time like this what you don't need are official Adobe Evangelists spouting complete bollox and looking rather childish:

Apple Slaps Developers In The Face

Link: theflashblog.com



I had to wipe a tear of laughter from my eye to the recent addition of:
[Adobe would like me to make it clear that the opinions below are not the official views of the company and are entirely my own.]
Yah I bet they would, you raving lunatic

It's a fair first reaction to have, but as an Adobe representative and a grown Adult you're supposed to maintain the company message not confuse matters more with your own reactionary blabbering and name calling. Plus being in that position you'd think he'd actually be required to know anything about what he's talking about. I know more than him and Adobe don't pay me anything.

'let me put aside my role as an official representative of Adobe for a moment' = you just fired yourself, you can't do that and get paid at the same time (I presume he gets paid?)

This kind of oh mummy Apples bad to me crying does nothing to help me take Adobe seriously
It's a tough world, you have to innovate to compete, not recycle, fortunately I believe this is just the idiot few at Adobe (that should be removed) and Adobe as a whole are not collectively as stupid as It's few vocal bottom dwellers.

More laughter ensues: An additional claim that "Apple has timed this purposely to hurt sales of CS5" has been redacted from Brimelow's blog entry at the request of Adobe.
Yah that basically concretes my initial conclusion that he is a massive tool. I wouldn't be surprised if the next redaction turns the site into a big blank page saying they are experiencing technical difficulties as he is forcibly dragged away screaming and sucking punctuating by him sucking his thumb.

"The primary reason for the change, say sources familiar with Apple's plans, is to support sophisticated new multitasking APIs in iPhone 4.0. The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can't do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn't behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app."

"[The operating system] can't swap out resources, it can't pause some threads while allowing others to run, it can't selectively notify, etc. Apple needs full access to a properly-compiled app to do the pull off the tricks they are with this new OS," wrote one reader under the name Ktappe."

maybe he can find the guys from Adobe Dimension and Adobe Livemotion and form a support group -_-


Unity3D - a forward thinking 3D engine and toolset for creating games for Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, Wii (and PS3 soon I think)

Link: unity3d.com



I do hope none of this impacts Unity3D in a negative way, these guys seem to really 'get it' and produce good tools and good solid performing code.

They seem hopeful that it won't effect them. So fingers crossed for them.

--


Above: The mighty Apple has seen it all before

Some people have short memories

There are many that think Steve is some kind of control freak who wants the world to revolve around his finger, well, this is maybe partially true but It's also the no.1 reason why Apples products are so unusually interesting and fun and easy and joyous to use, Apple have had a long history of throwing out the old while everyone else is still getting used to it. It has allowed them to remain nimble and grow fast where everyone else is still talking about it and showing concept images.

It's the fundamental way they work, a driving principle behind their success, sure they don't make any friends doing so, and in the past this worked to their disadvantage on many occasion but these days, with Apples power and influence (market/mind share) it doesn't really matter, as Apple now sets standards all by itself. If Apple wasn't this way there would be no reason for them to exist as we already have plenty of mediocre reactionary companies to choose from.

I remember an old Apple Keynote, where Steve jobs revelated in the thought that when Apple and Microsoft join forces they are 100% of the market and anything they decided to do IS standard. This shortly preceding Bill Gates big goofy mug filling the presentation screen to a chorus of boo's as they helped bail out Apple for their own ends.

How things have changed since then, now Apple sets the standards by itself on It's own platform with a complete end to end solution and a freakishly dominate market share.

Apple got the chance to do what they dreamed of for the Mac with the iPhone, unhindered, unrestricted.

I applaud Apple for their vision, they were given the chance to do exactly what they wanted and they TOOK IT like they always have done, but this time without any worry of backwards compatibility or having to court and ass kiss slow moving software corporations to port software.

And now everyone is fighting to make software for Apple devices, and the consumer wins big time, and the creative artist and programmer wins big time too (the good forward thinking ones who don't cry baby that their investment in Flash is dwindling)

And I say all this as someone who has 1000's of hours investment in Flash... *gulp*

--

Now can we have the same revolution for the Mac Desktop?

Applications that resume where you left off and resume FAST no matter what computer or device your use, preferences and documents that go where you go.

A regulated organised application store for games and tools promoting modern code and good design.

Instant content/document search from a modern metadata file system like ZFS

A Finder capable of leveraging the modern filesystem with organising and displaying all kinds of media, documents, images, photos using modern concepts of stacks and tags and other logical groupings

Resolution independent GUI for high resolution LCD displays of the future, complete with modern GUI widgets and tools for creating powerful easy to use programs around standard components.






Show comments for 'to Flash or not to Flash'
Tags: - C4D - Vray - Maxwell - 2D - Games
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My R&D into Splitting Light / Dispersion/ Chromatic Aberration using Vray and Maxwell render

These are tests done in Photoshop:








These in Maxwell and Vray:

Could be animated and used for weapon sprites













































Show comments for 'Lumen - Light Dispersion P1'
Tags: - Apple
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I love Stars: a Very Nice/useful tool to show current playing iTunes songs Rating in Stars in the menubar:



It's the best one out right now, simply click on the star and it will rate it as such very elegant, uses almost no cpu and it vanishes when iTunes isn't playing.

Link: www.macupdate.com --- i-love-stars



--

Also of note is Unsanity's Menubar MemoryCell


Which shows the frontmost programs memory usage which is great for spying on Adobe apps followed by the inevitable drop of jaw and gasp of 'how much!!?'

Link: www.macupdate.com --- memorycell



--

I've been googling long and hard for a way to effectively create OSX Icons with the proper size variants. As OSX Icons are made up of several sizes so that an icon may use a different image for different sizes, reason for this is so that a small icon is still readable/legible and remains sharp and iconic.

And I'm pretty much there, It's a bit of a dark art to do it really.

Firstly generating an icon is tricky enough as you need to generate an .icns file from several images.

And then you need to get that .icns onto an actual icon! which turns out to be quite tricky -- till you find the right tools

A list of tools and sites regarding this will be linked at the bottom:

The end result is I can now generate my own icons dynamically and apply them pretty damn fast.

You could use this for example to change the actual Icon color for folders/files based on label color

Change folder icons based on how many items are inside

Make folders dusty if they haven't been used in a while... etc

I have also made my own Icon template in Photoshop for generating stamped folders, and a photoshop action to go with it so that with one keypress it extracts all the different sizes and outputs them to a folder as separate image files

The Photoshop template:


And this allowed me in minutes to generate these label colored icons for folders.
It took a few more minutes to write a script that finds all the labelled folders in a specific location and change the icon to match the color of the label it has on.


I can also generate folders based on the contents, I have a script that takes the first image it finds in side a folder and applies it to the folder icon like so:


Or if it finds an image inside the folder called ICON, it will use that and make the image file invisible so it doesn't get in the way.

I use it for my work folder to help me navigate and make it look spiffy:



And while I'm talking about this, I just improved my application switch script. I hate the Dock, It's useless for application switching. So I instead wrote a small script that leverages DragThing to draw a ApplicationSwitcher with favorite folders and apps inside it also.

The main advantage are it has more room and make better use of space.
It can be triggered by a mouse button press, so you hold down a button on your mouse to show it and let the button go over the item you want to open.
Your mouse typically will be in the middle of the screen and so is this dock, unlike the built in dock which is all the way down the bottom of the screen making it further to travel. Fitts law and all.

Heres what it looks like when It's triggered:



Along the top left are some statistics that only show when my AppSwitcher is showing, they help me see stats like how much disk space I have, how much VM I\'m using and the list of application shows me how much time I've spent and in what programs I've spent it today/

The menu bar is also dimmed using 'Menu Eclipse'

And on the right is Adium, the program I use for Instant Messaging with AIM/Yahoo/MSN etc.
The text list next to the Trash icon is my todo list. And applications that are open that are not part of my favorites are shown next to the trash:


I also just wrote a script to help create folders and empty documents

This has always annoyed me, when you are in list view in the Finder and your half way down a long list of nested folders opened up infront of you, and you want to create a folder inside the one you have selected, press the new folder keypress creates one at the top level of the window!! not much help! so I wrote a script to create a folder in the current selection and remapped it to replace the normal new folder keypress.

Also If I press command-alt-N it creates an empty text file in place which I find handy.

And another pet peave is when in icon view you can select a file/folder and press command-delete to throw it in the trash, but when you have throe away everything in side a folder there's no way to throw away the folder your in, so I made a script that checks if the folder your in is empty if so it trashes it when you press the same command-delete shortcut, It's really handy actually.

And yes I did have a fair bit of time to kill, Spring cleaning and tidying up in general have been my dedication for the past few days... I spent about 2 days sorting through my sort folders.. not sorting what's in them just sorting all the different sort folders

:-P



And reorganizing my infinite todo list with some much needed prioritization

--

Links to ICON related gear:

The tool I use to generate an ICNS file from multiple images (using code from IconFamily)

Link: www.amnoid.de --- makeicns



SetIcon is part of osxutils and It's a command that lets you copy an icon from one file/folder to another
And if you use the -d option you can set a file/foldes icon to the contents of an icns

Link: sourceforge.net --- osxutils



--

A not quite fully functional command line tool:

Link: www.macgeekery.com --- setting_an_icon_from_the_cli



A web based system for making Icons:

Link: www.eisbox.net --- iconvert



Libicns:

Link: icns.sourceforge.net



IconFamily: is a Cocoa/Objective-C wrapper for Mac OS X Icon Services

Link: iconfamily.sourceforge.net




Show comments for 'Customization'
Tags: - 2D
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Great Portfolio of work by Peter Jaworowski:

Link: www.behance.net --- 55599


Link: www.hejz.com


Link: 2photo.ru --- novye_raboty_grafichsekogo_dizajjnera_peter_jaworowski

















Show comments for 'Fluids'
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