iEye #21: E3 & 3G

Click to Play

And the winner is:

The winner of “My Dream App Personal Edition” is CodeArt (working logo pictured here, click for larger version). Code Art is a new type of picture editing tool. Programs like Photoshop, Pixelmator, and even iPhoto are bitmap editing tools, these draw things the same way our camera sees things, pixel by pixel, with each pixel having a certain color. Programs like Illustrator, VectorDesigner, and Inkscape are vector editing programs, these draw things the way our brain sees things (in a way), with shapes. Some programs, such as DrawIt with it’s filter trees, are slowly starting to move towards a new method, Programmatic drawing. Programmatic drawing already exists, the web page you are looking at right now was mostly drawn with code, although the header, buttons, and icons are mostly bitmap pictures. Code Art’s goal is to take this to the next level, with an easy to use, expandable, powerful programming language for art. It will utilize the power of CoreGraphics and CoreImage, allowing it to support both bitmap and vector editing, and maybe even both of them at once. It’s javascript-based language will make automation of repetitive drawing tasks easy, and will be expandable, so you can get plugins that make Code Art even better. It will also change the way you animate, easily allowing you to bring your still pictures to life. That’s basically self-promotion speak for: It’ll be pretty neat.

But wait, there’s more! I’ve actually been working on Code Art for 3 days now, after it had been tied with Power Twitter for about a week I decided there was a good chance that it would win, so I started work on it. I’m creating my own interpreter from scratch, probably a bad idea, but I can’t easily integrate any pre-made ones, so I’m sort of stuck. The above picture (which you can click to enlarge) shows what I have so far. Not much, I know, but you have to understand I have a whole code parsing, variable tracking/storing/using, exception throwing, object oriented, well organized interpreter in there. Sure, it’s not very powerful at all yet, but I’ve got a lot of the hardest parts done, or in the works. So, how long is it going to take? Well, it depends, a lot, on how motivated I am. I’ll try my hardest to finish it by the end of this summer, but it is a very big project, maybe bigger than TiMo, and I’ve never finished anything of this magnitude before, so It’s a bit of an uphill battle.

Just like with TiMo, I’ll give you updates on my progress every week or so, right here, on keatoncasts.grotonma.net … yes, that was a plug for a website that you’re already on, so sue me :p

MyDreamApp: Personal Edition

Remember MyDreamApp, where you could submit your application ideas and then there was a whole competition to see which ideas where the best, and would be made. Well, I’m making my own personal edition of that, where all the ideas are mine, and I’m the developer. You, dear reader, are the judge. Unfortunately, I don’t have a beautiful website like MDA, so the voting will take place in the box to the right of this text. You have until midnight on the last day of June to vote, after that I start ‘work’. You are also welcome to leave a comment with your thoughts (blogger speak for: PLEASE comment, I need your knowledge!). Here are the 12 choices, it took me awhile to come up with them, but I’m confident that I have some good stuff here. By the way: none of the names are final, they are all working titles, so don’t judge them on that basis.

TiMo: Yeah, it sort of got abandoned for a second time due to the “backend” that I wrote not being powerful enough, and once you’ve written a backend and based a whole app around it, it’s kind of too late to change. But, I am willing to re-do it one last time, this time with a much better backend that should support the whole thing.

 

StrobeShow: Rock out to your music by creating rhythms of light and color on the computer screen, using it like a strobe light at a rock concert. You could share your light shows with friends, even network multiple computers together so you have multiple light sources at once.

 

MakeItMine: Customize the icons/buttons used in your favorite apps (like going into the resource folder of apps). Simple editing built in. Theme support. A little like Candybar, but for specific apps, not the system as a whole.

 

CoverShow: A beautiful way to see your musical habits. Multiple, cover-flow inspired, ways to visualize your albums. Gets data from Last.fm and iTunes. Organize and play your songs however you want. Create a nice looking website to show all of your friends your music-listening habits, and your favorite songs. Network with your friends to see who has similar music tastes with you.

 

Desktop Tower Battle: 2 player tower defense game. Build buildings and creeps. Order creeps where to go. Place flag to be destroyed. Get money from destroying units/tower and use it to upgrade/build building/creeps. A little like the game Stratego, mixed with tower defense.

Creeps = Mobile weapons

Because the players have to keep some things secret from each-other, true ‘hotseat’ play, where they both use the same computer is not possible, there are a couple alternatives. First, complete network play, both players on different machines. This would be hard to do because of the many moving objects (creeps, bullets) that must all be the same on both computers. Another option is a ‘control panel hotseat’ system, where each player has a controller with a screen, such as a laptop or iPhone, where they control their armies of creeps. The main game showing all of the ‘action’ would run on a host computer. The problem with this is it relies on every player to have a compatible device, which might be kind of limiting, plus it might not be entirely fair if one player has a tiny little cell phone and the other has a laptop.

 

CodeArt: A coding based drawing and animation program. Instead of repetitive tools, use code to create fully automatable, animatable, scalable, modular graphics. A little like Quartz Composer, but more powerful, and scriptable, not just node-able. It could also use data, like RSS feeds and such, to create up to date, smart animations (again, just like Quartz).

 

iStudio: A video editor in between iMovie and Final cut. Specializing in subtitles, images, and keyframing position and size of multiple video tracks. It would be geared towards video podcasters, offering easy theming features, as well as quick compression and uploading features.

 

Bloggit: A desktop blogging client that’s actually GOOD *gasp* That’s pretty much all that needs to be said, all of the existing ones for mac suck. It would have complete mac-integration. Drag and drop media embedding. Easy templates to quickly embed YouTube videos and stuff like that, and, of course, a really good WYSIWYG editor.

 

REALajax: A tool to convert simple REALbasic Apps into Javascript. While Javascript does not support all of the features of REALbasic, I think it’s possible to turn a simple REALbasic app into an AJAX app automatically. It might be far fetched and hard to pull off, but with some motivation, and help, it could work. REALbasic’s easy design and coding tools make it an ideal platform not just to create desktop apps, but web apps as well, and it’s XML save format makes it easy to get the code to convert. It is also a possibility that I could make my own AJAX design and coding tool from scratch, if people are interested in that.

 

Jash: Flash for Javascript. Basically, a keyframe animation (and maybe interactive animation tool) that exports to Javascript and SVG.

 

PowerTwitter: A twitter client with a lot of useful features, like:

-Account Switching: Got multiple accounts? Choose which one to use on the fly.

-Offline Tweets: Tweet when you can’t get to twitter, they will be tweeted when twitter returns

-Flags: Like Location, Priority, Mood, and Category (Location Flag already exists, L:_____)

-Search: Take advantage of the full power of Summize in a nice interface

-Trends: Quickly See what your friends are talking about/talked about when you were gone

-TweetAhead: Integrate with tweetahead/use as a server

-Customizable Avatars: Change how your friends avatars look to you

-Customizable Sounds: Change how your friends ’sound’

-Filters: Filter tweets that you don’t want to see

-Better Growl Support: Includes Priority, separate actions per person (if wanted)

-Friend Manager: Smartly figures out who you should follow by who friends follow/@

-Stats: How much/when do you tweet

-Autotweet: Certain System actions

-Canned Responses: Including Auto-responders (@ or d)

-Bulk DM: Direct Message multiple people at a time

-TweetNumber alerts: Never miss a milestone in your tweet count

-TwitterHolic: See your twitterholic stats

-Easy Follow/Unfollow: If you forget how to ‘follow ____’

-Twitter Avatar/Style Changing: If twitter API allows

-Twintegrate: Auto tweet actions on Digg, Youtube, Wordpress, etc accounts

-Word Alerts: Alert user when certain words are mentioned (from any user, not just friends)

-Twitterfeed manager: Manage feeds that get tweeted

-Friend Location Viewer: See where your friends are

-Public Timeline: Browse the public timeline

-Highly Customizable Display Options

-Great Interface

 

WebCMS: A Content Management System (like Drupal or Wordpress) with no focus on blogging. It manages the pages and file structure online. When you want to edit/create a page you just type in or upload the HTML code for a page, which seems totally useless, but there are some advantages, like:

-Quick updating: if you make a mistake you don’t have to re-upload code, just hop into the editor and change it with just a couple clicks

-Version system: Make sure there are never embarrassing mistakes in your website, test out code thoroughly before publishing it, also, you don’t have to take your site down to upgrade because you can upload and test the new version of the site without affecting the old version, and then when you’re all ready, with the push of a button it changes instantly.

-User-customized pages: Send different pages to different people, based on the HTTP headers their computer sends. For example, you could automatically send an iPhone user to an iPhone specific page, or you could send a user to a version of the page translated into the language they speak. You could even give IE users and Safari users separate pages, for optimization, and making fun of the IE people. You can already do this with PHP, but the CMS would make it easier.

I could also add an online WYSIWYG editor like TinyMCE

 

Hey, thanks for reading to all the way down here! You’ve been great. By the way, if any other developers want to take my ideas, that’s fine with me, as long as we don’t both choose the same one, I want an iApp Monopoly :p

Also, don’t forget to vote!

The Ultimate 3D Modelor DEATHMATCH! Part One:

3D Modeling and Animation is the cool new hobby, and everybody is getting into it. It’s an new age art form, your mouse is your brush, your screen is your canvas, and your modeler is your paint. But, just like how there are oil paints and water color paints and acrylic paints, there are many different modelers, all with their pros and cons to them, and all with a specific goal in mind.

Part one is about weighing the pros and cons of modelers that I’ve been able to try out and get a feel for, so, Mac compatible modelers that will run on my mac and have a free trial. Here are 5 of them:

Modelor 1: Blender

Price: Free as in Freedom (and beer, or in my case, soda, although who gives away free soda? I digress)

Overview: Blender is the cheapest 3D modeler around, at a fair price of $0.00. Of course, that’s not to say it’s not worth anything more than $0, it’s a decent 3D modeler. It has it’s strengths and it’s weaknesses, and after a lot of getting use to it you can come out with some pretty good looking stuff. 

Pros: Free! Big, helpful user base, can answer all of your questions. Easy to navigate (once you get use to it) interface. REALLY cross platform, as in, every platform I’ve ever heard of, including a couple I haven’t, like IRIS. Built in game engine. Built in compositor. Built in (very basic) Non-Linear Video editor. Very good fluid simulator. Good physics system (hard body and soft body). Good modeling tools. Lots of key combinations. Python Scriptable. Very Expandable.

Cons: Very Steep learning curve (aka. hard to learn). Missing basic features like keyframing of all values (it can only keyframe an objects position, rotation, and scale, many other editors can change all values, so you can have objects do things like change color over time). Many features ‘hidden’ in the interface. The particle engine leaves much to be desired. The ‘addon’ features like the game engine and the NLE aren’t very powerful and are very poorly documented. The material/texturing system is hard to get the hang of and often involves a lot of random tweaking of poorly labeled controls. Lack of a landscape system/editor. Renders aren’t exactly stunning in speed or quality (although they’re not bad)

Who’s it for: Blender is good for modeling and for simple animations such as theme songs. If you’re willing to take the time to learn it, it makes a pretty good ‘first 3D modeler’ because of it’s good support and, of course, price. Mostly, it’s good for quick little 3D renders (like theme songs), and for just playing around in 3D and seeing what you can do. Basically: you really can’t complain too much about it, seeing as it’s free :p

Modelor 2: Cheetah 3D

Price: $149 (Upgrade for $69)

Overview: The first thing I should mention is that Cheetah 3D is Mac only, and there’s good reason for that. It has the nicest looking interface of any modeler I’ve tried, the only one to really look like a mac app. It uses all of the apple windowing styles, a unified toolbar, a mac-style property editor, and overall it uses the mac color scheme. All of it’s features are just a click or two away at any time, and you can figure out how to use it in no time. But, the interface is only half of a modeler, the other half is the power. Ok, Cheetah 3D is no Maya or Modo, but it still makes a pretty good render. The gallery has some great looking pictures, mostly single objects, not full scenes, but still, it’s pretty good.

Pros: Excellent interface. Very easy to use and learn. Has all of the basic features you’d expect in a 3D modeler. Makes decent renders. Good OpenGL modeling interface. Good animation tools. Mac OS X integration. Good import/export. Customizable UI. Javascript Scriptable. Very good price.

Cons: Render is kind of slow, not THAT impressive. Modeling can get kind of slow, especially when you have a lot of objects in a scene. Lacks a good landscape editor. Lacks a lot of more advanced features. Mac-only (It’s both a pro and a con).

Who’s it for: Cheetah 3D isn’t exactly ILM’s modeler of choice, it’s not as advanced or powerful as many of the other modelers out there. You’re not going to make Star Wars with Cheetah 3D. That said, it’s powerful enough to make some pretty good looking pictures and simple animations. It’s the perfect ‘my first modeler’ because of it’s ease of use, interface, well rounded feature set, and reasonable price.

Modeler 3: E-on Vue 6

Price: Numerous versions offered, can cost anywhere from $99 to $1035

Overview: Vue isn’t about individual models, like most modelers are, it’s about whole big 3D environments. It’s got a great terrain editor, and amazing tools to populate that terrain objects such as rocks, animals, or plants. And we aren’t just talking about static models of trees, Vue makes every plant different, although derived from the same ’species’ (model). You can literally paint forests and valleys filled with grass and trees onto your terrain model, and then texture it using your own system, or using one of the many pre-made textures. Unfortunately the interface isn’t very good, and it lacks good modeling or animation. 

Pros: Great terrain editor. Amazing ‘environment’ tools, to quickly and easily create large, natural looking scenes. Great plant system, makes every plant in an environment unique. Great sky tools, make realistic, volumetric clouds complete with god-rays and as many suns as you want. Really good looking water. Great material presets, good material editor to edit them or create your own. Really good looking renders. Multiple versions, starting as a pretty good price.

Cons: The interface is hard to get the hang of, not that well laid out, and really quite ugly. I find it hard to use. The more ‘conventional’ 3D modeler tools like modeling and animating kinda suck. It can be a bit slow.

Who’s it for: The way I see it, for most people Vue will be more of an addon tool than their main modeler. It makes beautiful environments quickly and easily, but lacks many of the most basic modeling and animating features. By itself, Vue is perfect for artists who only want to make a still picture of a scene, much the same way as painters do.

 

 

Modeler 4: Luxology Modo 302

Price: $895 for Personal License (to use on any computer you own, $395 Upgrade)

Overview: Modo can render things that you literally cannot tell from a photograph. It’s modeling, texturing, and rendering systems are nothing short of amazing. Now, they’ve added some pretty decent animation tools to it. What’s it missing. *See Cons*

Pros: AMAZING looking results. Very snappy render speed. Very easy, powerful modeling tools. Great 3D painting tools (so you can paint textures and materials onto an object). Just about every modeling feature known to man. Pretty good animation tools. Good import/export.

Cons: The interface isn’t all that great, and I found it really hard to figure out basic things like making materials. It lacks particle and physics systems. Not all that many free tutorials, often you have to buy training material. Very Expensive.

Who’s it for: Modo was clearly not designed with animation in mind, until recently it had no animation engine at all. Modo is perfect for people who want to model amazing looking things, like product mockups, people, even whole alternate worlds. If what you want is really good looking stills, I doubt you’ll find a better modeler anywhere.

Modeler 5: Maxon Cinema 4D

Price: $895 for the ‘Core Version’, up to $3495 with plugins ($235 upgrade, student discounts offered)

Overview: While most 3D modelers have a focus on modeling, with animation sort of thrown in there, Cinema 4D has it the other way around. It has great tools for complex scene layout, and easy animation, even on a large scale. And yeah, it can make it all look good. Of course, it has modeling tools too, and they aren’t bad either. It’s interface is well laid out, labeled, and documented, so it’s easy to tweak everything to be exactly what you want it to be.

Pros: Excellent keyframe animation tools. Excellent behavioral animation tools (automated ways of animating objects, like physics systems, premade paths, and other things like using an audio track to control values). Easy to use interface. Good material/texturing editor and manager. Nodal editors for movement, behaviors, texturing, etc. Good particle system Good object modifiers (things like clone tools that make setting up large environments easy). Good object/asset management. 

Cons: The modeling part of it isn’t all that great, can get confusing. I’ve seen better renders. Good tutorials can be hard to come by. Really expensive.

Who’s it for: Cinema 4D can do a lot of things, but at it’s heart, it’s designed for animation. It’s been used in a variety of professional 3D movies, and I can see why. The great animation systems allow you to add realistic looking, highly detailed animations, and while you probably don’t want to use it to make photorealistic, highly detailed renders, you certainly could use it. This might be my favorite of the ones I’ve tried, although that might just be because I focus on animation.