Monday I woke up feeling like hell and have basically felt like hell for the entire week. I don't know what I got...some bug...

achey stomach - check
headache - check
achey throat /neck - check
sore eyes - check
cough - check
sneezing - check
runny eyes - check
sore throat - nope
inability to sleep - check
mild laryngitis - check
runny nose - nope
fatigue - check
muscle aches - nope

So essentially the symptoms I usually get in the winter when I have a cold--sore throat, runny nose and muscle aches--are missing from this summer bug, but I have everything else. I've been staying in bed trying out software on my new MacBookPro. I bit the bullet and ordered an upgrade to Photoshop CS3 while I can...before they don't allow upgrades from version 7 anymore (like they did with Illustrator...the latest version I have is 9, and the cutoff for upgrades is 10...I have to buy a whole new damn CS3 version! Damn!!!!)

I felt really awful Tuesday night as we listened to the Democratic Convention on the radio in the bedroom. I haven't even felt like getting up and going to the living room and watching TV...OD'd on that during the Olympics. Yesterday I felt fairly good in the morning and got a lot done and thought we could go for a bike ride, but by the time Stan got home I was lying flat in bed again. So I used that time to download a demo of iWorks. iWorks has taken the place of Appleworks since about 2005 when they stopped supporting AW and have taken off all mention of it from their site, other than stating they don't support it.

Gone are the Paint and Draw modules that came w/AW. No big loss...they were like MacPaint and MacDraw from 1985 (which I used a lot during my free time at Kinko's)...I mean, it would be silly for me to use those apps now except to affect 80s computer art. Gone also is the Database module. Now *that* will be sorely missed. I used that every day as a checkbook transaction tracker and I kept track of all my sales and expenditures for tax records. iWork has no equivalent database program.

AW's Presentation module (which I never used) is now iWork's Keynote which looks a lot slicker, and from what I read, blows MS's PowerPoint out of the water. I don't know if I'd use it, but maybe I could figure out how to make SWFs of art or jewelry or something. I don't make presentations (images of polyester suited people with briefcases, pointers, and pie charts), but maybe something automatic and artistic for the web might be nice since I never really could figure out Flash much and never upgraded past version 4 (too technical).

AW's word processing module is now iWork's Pages, and AW's spreadsheet is now iWork's Numbers. I made use of AW's spreadsheet in a most unusual way. Visit any of my jewelry pages, either my main page or the pages on the left navigation bar (not the individual item pages). The listings of jewelry items with the thumbnails was all done with with AW's spreadsheet. It was so easy to organize jewelry listings that way, shuffle and sort items, alphabetize long lists, delete sold items and add new items. It would have been hell to do that in BBEdit (my HTML program of choice...yes, I raw code, can you believe it?), so I just constructed a sort of "container" page with Server Side Includes and have the included content in the spreadsheet. When it came time add the new content, I'd just make my changes on the spreadsheet and export it out as ASCII text. Unfortunately, I found out quickly that wasn't too clean as it put in tabs between columns. So after the export I had to open it up in BBEdit and clear out the tabs. I know, kind of cludgey, but it was the only way I knew to deal with it, and it was certainly much more efficient and error-free than if I would've created the whole list of items into one BBEdit HTML file. That would have been a nightmare trying to sort out. I know there's database (Filemaker?) programs out there that can probably do that automatically, but I have absolutely no idea how to run anything like that on my server, and no one to show me how either. I thought this was rather ingenious that I figured out as much using AppleWorks's Spreadsheet.

With System OS X 10.5 and our new Intel-based Macs, Appleworks is showing signs of breaking. Nothing major, but when I try to export an ASCII file as .txt, it won't add the .txt or it adds two periods, or something weird. Not as smooth a workflow as I'd like. That's why I wanted to check out iWorks. But iWorks' Numbers, despite many improvements, doesn't export TXT files. It doesn't even export RTF (Rich Text). Just PDF, CSV and XLS. PDF is worthless...it's graphical, not text. And either CSV or XLS put in a whole bunch of commas and quoted everything that cannot be removed with one quick search and replace in BBEdit. It does import my old AppleWorks spreadsheets nicely, however. Exporting is another matter. But I'll get to that later. Then I figured out that iWork's Pages *can* export plain text. I cobbled together a spreadsheet-like table setup in Pages that worked fairly well and exported clean text (except for tabs...face it, if you have tabular data, tabs are a fact of life in exported table text). But it wasn't...right. I kept having to adjust the height of the rows when I added and deleted data. It didn't look as neat and clean as a real spreadsheet.

Then I was playing around this morning with Numbers and found out I could have multiple spreadsheets in one document! I have a couple dozen spreadsheets for my jewelry content...that would be convenient to have them all in one file. Then I also figured out that I could select a spreadsheet and copy/paste it into BBEdit. It copies it clean (with tabs, of course...no getting around that) with none of that gunky comma quote CSV/XLS garbage. How sweet is that? I can already use pre-existing BBEdit text files...just delete the existing content and cut/paste from Numbers the new content...that way I don't have to create a new text file and accidentally misname it, search/replace tabs and voila! That even sounds BETTER than the individual spreadsheets with AppleWorks and the exporting. Fewer steps, fewer files.

Now as far as the checkbook register and income and expenditures tax info lists that we use AW's Database for...I downloaded a simple transaction tracker template that works in Numbers. Nothing fancy, but it WORKS, and I guess that's the point of the aptly named software, huh? $99 for a family pack so we can both use it on our laptops...not bad. Sure beats the price of a Photoshop Upgrade.

Labels: Graphics and Software, This Boring Life

Well, I got my ibook back today. Seemed fine in the store. What they were supposed to fixed got fixed. Of course weirdness never shows up right away. Now there's another user account, "apple". I can't seem to delete it because it's an admin account. Also, somehow my HP printer driver disappeared, and my Alien Skin filters wouldn't work. I'll have to look into reinstalling the printer stuff tomorrow. I Installed the Alien Skins and they seem fine now, but in the process I realized I had no record of my Human Software plugins serial numbers (that has nothing to do with the apple repair problem, that was just my own negligence). Then I couldn't find the disks they came on. This sent me into a panic, which explains why I am up at 11:30 at night.

Oh yeah, and Stan is sick, which means guess who's next in line?

I really wish I had a secretary and a maid. Hell, I wish I had STAFF. Put a geek on the payroll as well.

My static speakers was not a speaker problem, but a mic problem. And it wasn't even a hardware issue, it was software weirdness, some firmware causing a feedback loop. Well, I'll be. A big old WTF. Didn't see that coming.

Labels: Graphics and Software, This Boring Life, WTF

Apple's redesign of their website is a little...depressing. I really liked the glass buttons from their last major redesign that came out with OS X 6-7 years ago or so. It was their trademark of OS X just as the rainbow Apple was their trademark of previous incarnations. I had a friend tell me that the rainbow Apple looked like the gay flag. OK, so maybe that's why they changed it back at the turn of the millennium (not that there's anything wrong with the gay flag), but why the change away from the glass buttons now? I don't like this new interface--it's like minimal sci-fi. Stark, bleak, dark grey sci-fi. No unique technique went into the design at all. Looks like any 13-year old boy with no artistic sense could do it. I hope Steve's recent schmoozing with Billy Boy hasn't swayed him over to the dark side too much.

Labels: Graphics and Software

The most recent *new* Photoshop Plugin I purchased was Flaming Pear's Hue and Cry. Flaming Pear is most famous for Super Blade Pro, the beveller/texturizer/materializer filter that creates other-worldly precious-yet-tarnished effects on any selection in Photoshop. Flaming Pear also has a few dozen other plugins both free and commercial at very reasonable prices. One thing I absolutely LOVE about Flaming Pear's Plugins that have an interface with controls (as opposed to ones that just apply one standard effect) is the dice. Click the dice and you get a randomized effect. I think there should be a law that mandates randomizing dice on all graphic software or plugins. I can hear the anal retentive perfectionists now, you know the kind, the boys from artschool who never got dirty in painting class but preferred the sterile environment of graphic design. Their work was technically good, but lacking in passion: "You should know how to use the software without resorting to the dice to create an effect for you". Bite me. Just because I like the dice doesn't mean I don't know how to use the software. And it's very easy with Flaming Pear because all their plugins are very intuitive. Dice makes experimentation fun, and sometimes surprises you with an effect you probably never would've come across on your own. The anal retentives were absent the day they studied Dada.

I downloaded a demo version of Hue and Cry, a "color noise generator" several years ago when it first came out, but it didn't knock my socks off at the time. I was still relying heavily on KPT 3's Texture Explorer for random color and patterns, as well as KPT 5's Noize. When I also got Alien Skin Textures, that gave me a bundle full of textures and patterns to play around with, generate and mutate. But I thought I'd give it another try. I downloaded another demo and fell in love with some of the color combinations it would generate. It was a sentimental attachment to something long lost that made me feel happy. But upon deeper experimentation I realized this Plugin has the ability to create effects very evocative of abstract modern artists. Upon clicking the dice a few times, I'd see vignettes of art history float by. I created the miniature samples exhibited on this page in the styles of the following artists in order from top to bottom:

Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keefe, Gustav Klimt, Georges Braque, Hans Hoffman, Wassily Kandinsky.

Hue and Cry works by applying colored effects in various modes to whatever shape you select: circle, square, diamonds, octagons, tvs, fluerons and points. You can also control for overlap, warping, complexity (which doesn't move from "0" when I hit the dice, BTW...must be a bug), softness and zoom. You can also select the saturation of the color, the hue, the "striping", and something called "doublure." And not only does Hue and Cry have one randomize dice button, it has three! The big dice mutates the most, the two medium-sized dice less so, and the three little dice button mutates in small increments. The only thing I wish is that there was a way to apply a separate dice to each feature so you can *only* randomize the color, for example, or lock certain features so you can randomize everything except the smoothing as another example. But for $20 (with free upgrades on future releases), I'm not complaining!

Labels: Graphics and Software

When I first got on board with Mac OS X (10.1) in 2001 and purchased Photoshop 7 which ran natively in OS X and in OS 9, as well as in Classic Mode under OS X (or "Phantom 9" as Stan calls it), the Plugin situation didn't really bother me. I had a gazillion plugins from six years years of acquiring them, and I was planning on running them all in OS 9 or in Classic. Forever. After all, I didn't really *have* any plugins that ran under OS X other than the ones that are part of Photoshop, and as long as Photoshop could run in OS 9/Classic, why bother?

Flaming Pear was one of the first Plugin developerss that created OS X versions of all their filters. Then I bought the very groovy Alien Skin Xenofex which also ran under both OSs. And over the past few years, I eventually acquired a couple more Alien Skin packages, and acquired all the OS X versions of the Flaming Pears that I use, and eventually the OS X versions from Panopticum (Digitalizer, Alpha Strip and Engraver). I was also acclimating more to using Photoshop under OS X, and I liked it. It just seemed smoother, and the interface looked nicer. In fact, I was getting by pretty well using OS X. But with half my filters still stuck in Classic, I'd have to restart Photoshop under Classic each time I wanted to access some of those effects. Maybe I was just too much of a cheapskate to upgrade to the OS X versions of filters I already paid for with the Classic versions (The Flaming Pear filters were free to crossgrade) but I don't know, I think it's pretty understandable. Earlier this year, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade anyway, costs be damned. Classic was starting to annoy me.

Because Xaos' Terrazzo, one of my all-time favorite filters, hasn't been upgraded since 1998 and has no OS X version, I decided to give the newly released Human Software's PhotoTessel a try. Like Terrazzo, it has all the 17 symmetry patterns that are so much fun to create incredible designs with. I ordered it along with PhotoRepeat and PhotoWeave (which I used to create the Plaids on this site). I LOVE PhotoWeave, I mean, hey, it makes Plaid, and the only other plaid software I've encountered was extremely expensive. The problem with Human Software is that the documentation is weak, not just in quantity but in substance as well. I've read and re-read the PDF manuals that come with it, but it still baffles me. I think these programs will have to grow on me. Maybe I'll have infrequent epiphanies of how to use them, much like it was in my first years of learning Bryce. I can tell these filters are extremely powerful and deep, but much is left unexplained in the documentation. Also, I tend to get a lot of spinning beachballs, especially in PhotoTessel, while any mouseclick seems to take forever to process. Also, PhotoTessel's handling of the symmetries is different than Terrazzo's. There is distortion involved, whereas there is none with Terrazzo. However PhotoTessel does allow one to rotate and distort not only the source tile, but also the way the tile is applied to the image, which can create many interesting effects.

I also upgraded my Andromeda software, Screens and Cutline. The upgrades are only $20 each (but of course with Flaming Pear that's the price of a whole new plugin with free upgrades for life). So naturally, the idea of paying $99 to upgrade my Kai's Power Tools filters rubbed me wrong. After all, I had KPT 5, KPT 6 and KPT Effects (7). I already had them, why should I pay almost $100 to get them again, except for a different OS? But if I wanted to use some of my favorite filters like Shapeshifter, FraxPlorer, Noize and Lens Flare in OS X, I had no choice. But still, there's something wrong with idea of one who already bought the licenses for the filters under OS 9 paying the same price as someone buying them for the first time. No upgrade pricing. Maybe if they'd thrown in a carbonized version of the KPT 3 Suite, maybe then it'd be justifiable. I mean these are POWERFUL pluigins, and a $99 first time price actually seems very LOW for 24 filters of this calibre. Make it $149 first time pricing (that's just a little over $6/filter) and $49 for the upgrade, then it would make more sense. But that's my only rant. The KPT Collection doesn't include *all* the filters from 5, 6 and 7. Missing from 5 are Smoothie, Orb-It and FraxFlame (FraxFlame II from 7 is included), and missing from 6 are Scene Builder and Sky Effects. I honestly don't remember needing to use Smoothie, Scene Builder was rather quirky and crashed, and Orb-It is easily replaced with Scatter (which I now have experimented with extensively like I never did before and LOVE). I do miss the original FraxFlame...somehow it seemed faster to render than the version II of it, and I did like Sky Effects a lot. But Alien Skin's Little Puffy Clouds can easily replace that one.

There were still some Plugins eternally stuck in the 20th century version of the Mac Operating System, and I will never, ever be able to use those in OS X. There's the incomparable Terrazzo. PhotoTessel, despite being able to do much more than the extremely simple Terrazzo, doesn't cut it. It's too complex, and Terrazzo is beautifully simple. Then there's the handy little freebie "Grid Creator", a Mac-only plugin that makes grids and lines that no other filter has ever done (why?). There was Ink_XHatch, a filter that simulates various drawing techniques. And most importantly, there's the KPT 3 series, some of which were completely peerless and irreplaceable. Despite my love for Flaming Pear's Hue and Cry as a noise/color/texture generator, there's something about KPT 3's Texture Explorer that just wows me. And what about Spheroid Designer? Not even KPT Shapeshifter or Gel can compare when making spheres. And although Scatter is easier and smoother to use than Spheroid Designer's Genesis Editor, the latter creates spheres layed out in patterns impossible in the former. But one of the hardest to do without? A very simple KPT 3 filter called Twirl, which also has a circular Kaleidoscope effect. I've never been able to find any other filter that kaleidoscopes like that. How could I still get these effects when I also swore off switching back between the two Photoshops--quitting and restarting the program each time is such a chore. What's a Macintosh digital artist to do?

I'd still have to employ the Classic versions somehow, some way. I know that eventually all things Classic will be completely obsolete, when and if I get an Intel-based Mac I will not have Classic available to me except on any old computer I still may have. Until then, I could still harness the power of these legacy filters, but I only wanted to do it the easiest way possible without restarts. Then it came to me: ImageReady, the sister program to Photoshop. Would it work? Yes it did! In the Finder, I chose Get Info for the ImageReady Application, and clicked "Open in the Classic Environment". Now, I can work in Photoshop natively in OSX, but if I need the help of an old filter, I simply switch to ImageReady, which will run in Classic. No quitting and restarting and quitting and restarting. Just toggling. Sure it's not perfect, but considering the alternatives, It's a dream come true.

Labels: Graphics and Software