Where ya been?
I know, I’ve been lax in posting to the ol’ blog. I present, for your enjoyment — or irritation — a few excuses:
- being sick (twice in the past six weeks)
- lengthy parental visit (unrelated to above, really!)
- iTunes, the great time-waster (though happy to report my entire CD collection is now online and looking good)
- photos, photos and more photos (processing/organizing/printing the last year’s backlog)
- Photoshop — I finally decided I needed something for “creative visual fun” (directly related to the above). I evaluated a few different packages for features and price (including the free GimpShop, which is a bargain (at $0) but paints painfully slowly with large brushes on my iBook!) I settled on Photoshop Elements 4.0 (5.0 not on Mac yet). It allows me to do masking (the most important thing), even though it’s a bit of a workaround compared to full Photoshop. But works perfectly for my needs, and is fast. I fired up the old Wacom tablet and started editing like an old pro (hmm, why the obsession with “old”, I wonder?)
- all this “visual creativity” stuff got me excited, and I started playing with programming (first time in a while). Figured out XCode, experimented with OpenAL, got an OpenGL and audio program up and running on my Mac. And then I discovered…just last night…
- Quartz Composer!!! This may just be the next killer app from Apple (yes, I’m serious). I don’t think many people know about this gem, but I stumbled across it in the developer tools included with OS X. If, like me (no snickering), you’re up for a little visual programming, you’re in for a real treat. This tool is to become my new time-waster, I know. Even better, I can easily create visualizations for iTunes, thanks to the iVisualize plug-in. Why program C++ from scratch when you can grab bits and bobs off the shelf and piece them together into something cool? The visual interface of Composer is a bit like XSI’s FX Tree (or Render Tree, or other visual data-flow UIs). It’s basically a compositor and link to motion and image effects, except that it does it all in “real time”, using OpenGL and Apple’s Quartz Extreme. The closest thing is probably Cycling 74’s Jitter, but included free with the operating system, and very tightly integrated… Wow, there goes my life for the next month or so! (-;
- Not to mention guitar, Spanish (just over a year later and nearly finished my 3000-word vocabulary book!) and all the other usual time-sinking suspects.
Those are mine…so what’s your excuse?