WWDC VIDEO THOUGHTS AND NOTES

• I want a Mac Pro. Though I’m not too keen on buying upgrades for Photoshop and Illustrator just to run them natively on Intel. No, GIMP isn’t even close to being an option for me.
• Finally, we (well, Ton) can start work on a 64 bit Mac version of Blender.
• Although nothing was said about it in the talk, there’s an ominous, and positive RSS Feeds icon in the new Mail. Unfortunately they still have the horribly ugly, hard-to-differentiate and inconsistent blue bubble buttons, ugh. Oh well, I use Mail Fixer anyway.
• They made Mail even more bizarrely inconsistent. Note the non-standard arrow-button-less scrollbars on the note view (in the video here) and on the stationery pane. I don’t mind the new style at all, but choose something and stick to it, for crying out loud! Note: Yes I’m aware that Blender is worse, having two types of scrollbars, both weirder than Mail’s here. I’ve got other things to work on now, so pay me and I’ll fix them ;)
• There are some interesting looking icons in the dock on the Xcode preview page. One’s Xcode, one’s Dashcode, one seems to be a new Interface Builder, but I’m not sure what the one with the green A is.
• The new Dashboard ‘Web Clips‘ feature looks mind-bogglingly great. Such a simple concept, but very original, and well implemented. But what on earth is up with that ridiculous black icon on Safari? How did Apple’s usually excellent UI designers let this crime against visual hierarchy and gestalt theory take place? The back/forward and stop/refresh buttons are generally far more important to users, than Web Clips, and making that button stand out like a lacerated bleeding thumb, in colour, contrast, and style is a terrible decision. Leave the advertising of new features for the web site, not the UI!
• Although it’s utterly inconsistent with the rest of the OS, I really like the look of Time Machine. I think it actually works quite well presenting a clearly different view of the system, to distinguish against normal use, and besides, who doesn’t want a wormhole in their computer? :) People online have been wondering about disk space usage, but on the preview page it says “Time Machine only backs up what changes, all the while maintaining a comprehensive layout of your system”. I’m not sure if that means it stores changed files, or does diffing of files. Even so, at Orange when we used Subversion version control system to store all our art assets (mostly binary), the Subversion repository with all the revisions actually took up a fair bit less space than a full checkout, due to compression. So if they do something similar, Time Machine may be quite acceptable in that regard.
• The new Leopard server OS now comes with wiki software built in, which is cool. The icon is just lovely. I’m also curious to see what Apple have done to the Wiki interface itself, since MediaWiki and friends are still highly technical, somewhat clumsy, and have a lot of room for improvement. Who’s going to make me a nice Wiki that uses contentEditable, eh?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous Debris. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

1. Yaduh / 2006.08.09 @ 00:32
   
   

   Cool, we all need a Mac now. lol
   Blender is shipped with?

   You should name your next animation project: “Apple project”

   @+ friend

2. Matt / 2006.08.09 @ 00:49
   
   

   Uh, sorry, I don’t really understand what you’re saying…

3. Bill / 2006.08.10 @ 04:42
   
   

   I guess the web clips button is black because the dashboard icon is too. It reminds users of the dashboard, as it should.

   When you squint your eyes it really stands out though, thats true.

4. benoitc / 2006.08.11 @ 00:44
   
   

   Why not Gimp vs Photoshop? What is currently missing to Gimp in your dday work ?

5. Matt / 2006.08.11 @ 02:42
   
   

   benoitc: A lot, and I don’t really have time to go into it in detail here. Maybe that would make another nice blog post, with some specific critiques on Gimp…

   A lot of the trouble I have with it (but definitely not all) comes from it not running natively on Mac OS X. I know a Mac GTK port is underway, but I haven’t seen anything too tangible from them recently and who knows how long it’ll be before Gimp runs acceptably with it. Even then I fear it’ll still be like GTK with a dodgy Mac skin, rather than something that feels native and integrates with OS services.

   In terms of features, I’d need things like:
   - adjustment layers and non-destructive layer effects like drop shadows and strokes (or hey, why not innovate a bit instead of copying PS and come up with some other nice non-destructive editing method? nodes?)
   - healing brush
   - typography tools that are remotely decent and directly manipulatable (kerning, tracking, leading, baseline shift, aa methods) + text boxes/paragraph tools like alignment, indents and hyphenation
   - Not as huge a deal for me these days, but decent colour space / >8 bpc dynamic range / duotones / profiles / pantone
   - recordable actions and batch processing
   - a unified free transform tool (scale+rotate+move+skew, etc) that provides decent visual feedback (what’s up with the rotate tool overlaying on top of the existing layer).
   - vector masks
   - a good visual way to optimise compression, like PS’s Save for Web

   But my major concern is with the UI, it’s just not well optimised for smooth working, and interrupts the creative process with FAR too many useless popups that always seem to appear right on top of whatever I’m trying to look at and work on. Many things are badly thought out and seem like they’ve been pieced together by many developers, without a thought out workflow and design. An example is the ‘warning: you are about to save a layer mask’ dialog that comes right after you’ve wasted your time going through the 5 previous popups, and doesn’t even give you an option to save the rgb layer anyway, so if that’s what you want, you have to repeat the whole darn process. The buttons and panels are very large and take up a lot more screen space than Photoshop, and feel quite clunky (this could be a non-native issue, not sure…). It also seems to lack many of the fast shortcuts in PS I take for granted, like Cmd clicking on a layer to select its contents, \ to activate layer masks, etc.

   Actually I’ll stop, and write a proper post about this later. Perhaps it may help the project, but I’m not sure how receptive they are to critiques or how they’re actually progressing these days…

6. benoitc / 2006.08.11 @ 18:48
   
   

   Matt: thanks for the comments. I’m agree with most of them too. And in fact I think my workflow is currently better with photoshop than it is with Gimp. My main proble is with layer management and text. Gimp is better to use on linux but have the problem of popup and windows focus.
   Notes :
   - You can change key bindings of Gimp. But I suspect some shortcut are missing.
   - Aboutr Save for web. This currently a project accepted in Google Summer Code (http://code.google.com/soc/gimp/appinfo.html?csaid=F7779C948689C4A) . I don’t know what will be the result. It is based on this feature request : http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98017

7. Matt / 2006.08.12 @ 01:41
   
   

   benoitc: Ah, that is indeed good news for gimp about the save for web!

8. basse / 2006.09.15 @ 03:34
   
   

   did you know, that Krita has adjustement and filter layers. Krita also have lot of colorspaces. ofcourse Krita currently runs on Linux.. as whole KDE. but when KDE4 is coming out, it means all KDE/QT apps will be much easier to be built natively on other platforms, because QT4 licence changes.
   I don’t know about others, but I wait eagerly when I get Krita working on these shitty WinXP machiens at work.

   oh, and gimp has healing brush nowadays btw :)

   .b