Manlio Rules

today i was using pixelmator, my image editing tool, and i ran across a frustrating problem. i had to figure out the size of a portion of the image that i needed to copy. I selected it with the marquee tool, and glanced over to the right, where i’m used to there being some sort of “info” window that lets me know the dimensions of my marquee. no dice. so i looked in the windows tab to see if maybe it was lying around and hidden. also no dice! it’s possible that the feature is hidden and i’m just not finding it, but is it possible that there’s no way to do this in pixelmator? argh.

edit: so the shortcut is to do a “copy”, then create a new file. the dimensions of the new file will be defaulted to the size of the marquee. that’s still more steps than i would like, but it’s managable.

Remember a few months back when i was looking for free image editing tools? well, i had signed up for a beta test with a product set called Aviary, which was advertising themselves as free online image editing suites. they had a large amount of different media tools, for everything from image editing to music generation to 3d modeling. It honestly looked a little bit pie in the sky, but i dropped my email for a beta invite just to see what happened.

This morning i got an invitation to use two of their products, Phoenix and Peacock. Phoenix is a straight ahead image editor, similar to photoshop, pixelmator, or acorn. I bought a license for pixelmator here at work and have been using that for the last month, but Phoenix could handle everything that I need easily. the UI is very intuitive for a longtime photoshop user, and i had found their tools incredibly responsive. In a few minutes of messing around, i created these two images:

Mostly using a blend of drawing and blurring tools. Simple stuff for sure, but i was very impressed with the overall ease of use.

Peacock is a Quartz Composer/Max-MSP style patcher that calls itself a “pattern generator”. There isn’t any real motion in the tools like there is with quartz or max, so basically you can make pretty trippy images. like this one:

I found Peacock a little harder to wrap my head around as far as what i was supposed to be doing, but luckily i’ve used quartz and max fairly extensively in my time, so once i figured out the model, it was pretty easy to get going quickly. my only complaint was that there was no easy way to “export” an image from peacock to my desktop, though once i saved the file i was able to go find the full sized image in my browser and download it that way. doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to just have an “export” canvas button. perhaps i’m missing something.

anyways, if you want to play around with either of these, i have 5 invitations, so let me know!

I was having a strange issue today with Eclipse (on OSX). i am building a game and using the Tweener library as an extension. so, as is required, I put

import caurina.transitions.Tweener;

at the top of my class. However, every 2 or 3 times that i would compile (i use the flash cs3 ide as a compiler), i would get an error stating that my Tweener extensions could not be found. And when i would go back to my class, i would find that the above import statement had disappeared. As you can imagine, this was annoying.

I worked “through” it for a few hours, but finally decided that it was too annoying to just deal with. After a little trial and error, i found that the Actionscript prefs in Eclipse for that project needed to be updated with my external Actionscript folder, even though eclipse is not the compiler for that project. easy fix, strange problem.

I saw that Adobe has released a new online photo service today, called Photoshop Express. Since i’ve been interested in finding a new way to edit my photos without having to buy photoshop, i thought maybe this was the perfect answer. I signed up for the beta and got an activation email quickly (which was notable because Adobe warned that they expected so much interest it may take up to an hour to receive the email).

Unfortunately, Photoshop Express is more of a flickr competitor than an Acorn or Pixelmator competitor. it allows you to upload your photos, edit them, and put them in a gallery where others can browse them. it also allows you to import your facebook, picasa, or photobucket images and do the same editing there.

the editing tools are interesting, as you would expect. all the standard level and retouching tools are there, and there’s an interesting method of applying effects in which you choose the effect you want, and photoshop Ex shows you 6 preview images which you can mouse over to see which ones would be the most appropriate.

I like this feature, it’s a good way of finding other options that I didnt’ have in mind when i started the editing process.

Overall i probably won’t use photoshop Express very much, i am fairly embedded in the flickr world, and nothing that photoshop ex seems to offer is above and beyond what flickr already gives me. but it’s a nice RIA and if you don’t have any of your stuff online, it’s definitely worth a look

I was reading the Adaptive Path blog tonight, and i ran across this program. California College of the Arts is offering an MBA in Design Strategy. The program is brand new and will start this fall with 30 students. It’s a mix of managerial economics, communications, and design studio classes. the studio classes seem to be more focused on innovation and product development than actual studio classes.

This is a fascinating program in my opinion. the low residency requirements, mix of economics and design courses, and focus on product development would make it a very appealing academic path for someone who wants to go into product design but also wants to have the business background. It seems like it’s a path to a senior product manager gig, or starting one’s own business. I would guess that marketing gigs would also be applicable after such a degree.

It becomes interesting to think about the future of business schools. this program doesn’t require the GMAT’s, but several schools have started to offer design related business hybrid programs, and i can only imagine the trend will continue, much like we’ve seen interactive media programs pop up all over in the last 10 years.

I wasn’t thinking about going back to school, but it would be interesting to find out a little more about this program.

but for now i think i’m going to take music lessons. and this summer, some variety of design class.

It’s well known that i’m not much of a calendar/address book guy. i never kept a planner when i was in school, except for a few years in HS when i had to write down assignments. I never keep any sort of date book, calendar, address book, anything. usually this isn’t a problem. I have most of my contacts in gmail since i’ve been a long time user, and i can usually keep my social calendar straight by just force of habit.

Lately, this hasn’t been going so well. Part of it is that I have too much stuff to do. Most of it is that i’m getting a little more scatter-brained, and the ole noggin just can’t remember stuff the way it used to. over the last 6 months there have been several instances where someone has emailed me about plans for that night, and i’ve realized that i planned something else because I just plain forgot about it. And of course i feel bad, but this has to stop.

So what’s a calendar phobe to do? I already had several shared google calendars, so i decided to try to use those. I like Google Calendar, but i really wanted something that could sync with my N95, and it’s not easily apparent on how to do that. (and by easily apparent, i mean, “there’s a huge honkin’ button somewhere that says: ‘SYNC TO PHONE’.”)

So i went to iCal. I was able to subscribe to my google calendars, and easily add new events from my desktop. sync’ing between different computers would be easy enough (and require a .mac account), but i only really use my work laptop, my personal laptop is being slowly transformed into a music studio, though i feel like i may be better off getting a low cost PC laptop and tricking it out for that purpose, with a large screen etc… but that’s a different discussion.

sync’ing my calendar with the N95 was really easy. iSync needs a plugin to handle the N95, but once you have it, it syncs perfectly.

Of course, as I was syncing calendar, i noticed that all my contacts were going from my phone to my computer. I liked this, it’s a nice little backup. but that got me thinking, maybe it’s time to actually put all my contacts in one place.

I’ve been using gmail for email since 2003, so a LOT of my email contacts are in there. i’ve got about 500 email contacts and another 250 people on my phone. Honestly i probably use about 100 of these total, there’s tons of people on my phone i can’t remember, and a good amount of my email contacts turned out to be craigslist housing search people.

In any event, once i had everything in Address book, i had to find a way to merge them, since some people show up multiple times (Alex Rainert is the worse offender). there’s a function called “check for duplicates”, which found 63 dupes and merged them. Of course, what it actually did was overrwrite one of the emails with the other one, add the phone number, and get the name messed up, which is shockingly NOT what I wanted. grrr…

then i decided to see what would happen if i re-synced with my phone. I was worried about having extra contacts without phone numbers in there, so i tried a test case. i removed all contacts from address book, saved them, and then tried syncing again, assuming that it would take the contacts from my phone and put them back on the computer. unfortunately, what it really did was wipe out all my phone contacts. awesome.

not to worry, at this point i just reloaded all my saved contacts, and did another sync. grrr… now i had 450 contacts, 200 without phone numbers. annoying. this is exactly what i was hoping to avoid. Luckily, a quick search revealed that in the preferences in iSync, there’s a buried option that lets you only sync those contacts who have phone numbers:

brilliant! so i did that and now my phone is back to where it started. 2 hours later.

As for my contacts, it appears that i’m going to have to go through and manually merge all of them to get what i really want. this isn’t a terrible idea, i can add full names and be more discerning about who to keep and who to delete. after last night i’m up to letter “j”. sigh.

the morale of the story: never organize yourself ever.

A week ago, i did a little analysis of Pixelmator, and its possibilities as an image editor. My friend frank directed me to this review that compares Pixelmator to a few other options, drawit and Acorn.

I did a quick run with drawit, and while i really liked the vector tools, i found it a little confusing to use. this isn’t to say that it’s necessarily a confusing program, i just wasn’t really feeling it. I played around for 10 minutes, did one of the tutorials, and deleted it from my computer. I suspect it’s a very useful tool if you’re doing lots of vector based work, but I use Flash for pretty much all my vector work, so it’s a little redundant.

The other program described in the review is call Acorn. I did a 10 minute run of it, and these are my impressions, in +/- form:

+The tools palette is very compact. basically it’s all in one panel, that sits to the side of your canvas:

It’s an interesting model, to have layers, tools, and tool options in the same place. i have to say, i kinda dig it.

+Another feature that Acorn provides is a “web export” tool. since most of my images end up getting exported for use in flash, i find myself mostly just saving as .png, but it is nice to have web compression options that show me how large the file is going to be at the end. that’s a thumbs up.

+the selection tools have a polygonal selection option!

+you can do basic shapes!

-I couldn’t get filters to work, for some reason. clicking on the menu just hung, without anything appearing. that’s not awesome, but i don’t use too many filters anyways.

-Brushes are somewhat limited. I couldn’t find a nice airbrush option

-little nit, but i would really love a zoom tool on the main tools palette

-I wish there were more image adjustments than just levels. color balance, for example, or curves would be nice.

Overall i think for what I do, Acorn would be a better day to day tool than pixelmator, though i have to be honest, i haven’t needed to use either one of them in over a week, so it’s possible that i just don’t need an image editor and i should be focusing on migrating to AS3 instead of doing shoddy product reviews…

but that’s not going to stop me from hooking up Ableton live 5.2 as a live looper sometime soon.

Today’s discussion: How do I handle spreadsheets without Microsoft Excel on my Machine?

the task: i need to make a huge list of words. every word needs text, difficulty, and category.

now, it would seem that the easiest solution would be to dump the words into Excel and make a little spreadsheet, the way i used to do when fantasy baseball season rolled around and i had enough time to do regression analysis on positional depth (this was circa 2001).

Sadly, Excel is no longer among the software that work installs on my machine. so i need a spreadsheet program, and ideally one that’s free, or cheap.

Option 1:Google Docs.

I really wanted to use Google Docs for this project. it seemed like the perfect ideal. I make an online spreadsheet, i copy some stuff, i export it to a .csv, i import into Textmate to finish. easy, right?

things started out easy enough. i signed up for google docs, made a new spreadsheet, and i was off to the races. I had a list of words in a text file that i wanted to use to start, so I copied them all and then tried to paste them into the document. and i couldn’t do it! I tried to use the edit menu, and it told me to use ctrl+v (apple+v). i tried that and it would occasionally work, and then more often just give me a blank prompt. it was infuriating.

I did a little poking around and i think the problem has to do with Firefox restricting key commands on their web applications. i messed around with creating a user.js file and changing some of the FF user preferences, but to no avail. finally I gave up.

Option 2: Open Office

I used to use OpenOffice a lot when i had a PC desktop that was my primary design machine. I never did a ton of stuff in it, but I could edit word docs, view spreadsheets, and a few other minor tasks that always seemed to be important but not worth the cost of MS Office.

Installing it on the Mac is very easy, though my X11 prompt (OpenOffice runs under X11) hung up for awhile and kept telling me that it a command time out. then it launched. this took about 2 minutes.

Once OpenOffice was up and running, I loved it. It looks and feels just like Excel, or at least the Excel that i remember using. there are some UI annoyances (menus take an extra instant to open, the mouse scroll wheel is a little random in its behavior). it’s also a heavy imprint (~500mb) on the old Hard Drive, and i don’t think i’m going to want to use it with flash screaming for more memory in the background, but it got the job done.

I’ve been trying to find a new subject for the blog, since i’ve grown slow and tired of giving life updates that mostly involve: “I’m fine”. It occurs to me that since i do consider myself a creative design professional (though the SXSW panels would disagree), i should talk about some of the design-esque stuff that i’m doing. Design, Code, and Me will focus on my daily design and flash coding experiences.

Our first subject is a software review. I work at a startup at the city, and the majority of my work is done with Flash. it finally became time for the company to get me a real license, and the CEO suggested that if i didn’t NEED photoshop, i take a look at a program called Pixelmator and see if it fits my needs.

So I did. And I have to say, i was pretty impressed. Most of what i do in Photoshop is resize, export, and play around with image retouching. Pixelmator seems to handle all of these things very well, though i do miss the “Save for Web and Devices” app in photoshop, i imagine i’m losing a bit of optimization with Pixelmator. Here are the pluses/minuses

+I can make my own filters in Quartz Composer
+I can do pretty much all the image editing and photo retouching i did in photoshop
+The app costs $59. compared to $1000 for photoshop, or $1700 for the web premium bundle.

-Doesn’t do paths/vectors for shapes (this is potentially my biggest problem with using it for everyday print design work)
-Doesn’t handle layer sets
-Doesn’t import photoshop layer styles
-Doesn’t import photoshop clipping masks
-Mac only
-the UI has some color issues. here is a SS of the “tools” panel:

I don’t know about you, but i have a LOT of trouble distinguishing the first 6 tools with the black on charcoal style. And to make matters worse, the pointer tool is in a different spot from where it resides in photoshop, so i keep selecting the rectangle marquee tool instead. CORRECTION: this is not true, the move tool is in the same place in both pixelmator and photoshop. i confused the photoshop and flash tools palettes. clearly i’m an idiot.

Overall, i think that for me, Pixelmator will be fine. Sad as it is, i almost never use the advanced features of photoshop, and until i get an educational license (which i SHOULD considering i teach at a college), i understand that $59 is much better than $1000 for a program i open maybe once a week.

So, if you’re looking for a low cost photoshop alternative, you’ve got a mac, and you don’t want to fight with the GIMP installation on Leopard (dreadful), i would check it out. Could be all that you need.