Recently Nathan posted a series of photo manipulations called Homeosis. Something about the contrast between ominousness and whimsey hit me in the creative nerve. It struck me that there was music implied in these compositions. They seemed to be a glimpse into, or evidence of, another history. This is a first rough sketch of this soundtrack. It’s a lot more plodding and heavy than I planned, but it starts to suggest the sound scape I’m going for. Click the link at the end of this post to open the slide show in another window. Click the slow button in the lower left and try viewing it while you listen to the music (the slide show will loop around a couple of times).
Author Archive for Gunnar Proppé Page 2 of 9
scribbles - simple drawing for Mac
This is the way of Indie Mac development. Create a tool that either does something (one thing) new or does something old in a new, easier way. Make it beautiful and fun to use. Take advantage of the APIs Apple provides, like Core Animation. Make a slick web site with a forum, blog, and user-contributed content, put a screen cast showing how cool the app is, provide a demo and charge a reasonable price for the full version. Finally, create a silly, punny company name. Like atebits. Heh.
via tuaw
Konterkonzept EP by Julius Lagerfeld from the Interdisco netlabel. This is music with an evil grin. The Joker’s henchmen would dance to this. Yes, it’s electronica, but moreso, it is electric.
According to Lagerfeld, “it was created by exclusively using hardware synthesizers to set a counterpoint to the prevailing approaches of laptop and software.” He seems to be onto something. This stuff just crackles with energy from the first few seconds and carries through to the end.
While the requisite minimal techno repetition is there, it exists simply to lull you while subtle surprises slink in and out of auditory view. Lagerfeld knows how to take his time and explore an idea, and then move into territories that at first are unexpected, then seem inevitable. This is true of the structure as well as the sound design.
Note: for some reason archive.org’s stream of this EP is playing back at a slower speed. Preview this one from the mp3 downloads instead.
Apple has made some aesthetic changes to buttons in Leopard. Specifically, toolbar buttons tend to be less glossy and use 2D black and white symbols instead of full color images. The reasoning given at WWDC 2007 was that they felt the user’s focus should be on the app’s content rather than being distracted by eye candy around the edges. Whether developers agree with this or not, a good Mac app should fit seamlessly with the rest of the user experience (unless you’re a member of the delicious generation).
The older icon style hasn’t been nixed yet, as seen in this screenshot of console’s toolbar, but it clearly the emphasis is on the flat, 2D, black and white symbols (see also the new standard folder icons).
Apple has been making an effort to make it easier for developers to integrate the Mac’s new look and feel. For instance Leopard introduces image templates. Developers now have access to a whole bunch of standard images for their apps’ buttons. These are available from the Media tab in Interface Builder 3.0’s Library. It’s a snap to find the appropriate image for standard icons and drag it to your button. No more digging through Safari’s app bundle and scavenging button icons, wondering if you’ll get a nastygram from Apple some day for stealing their graphics.
Here’s the new Library in Interface Builder, showing some of the icons in the Media tab.
But, there are bound to be times when you need to make a custom icon for a button. The recommended way to do this for these kinds of button icons is by creating it with a vector app like Illustrator or InkScape and saving it as a PDF. This way they will be ready for resolution independence (bitmaps can also be used but make sure to create them much larger than you think you’ll need).
Here I’ve added an icon for a stop button as a pdf file to my Xcode project. Interface Builder automatically picks up this addition and shows it in the Media tab of the Library floater in the project’s library (the Xcode project is named TemplateImageButtons.xcodeproj). A note about the pdf you create: the document’s dimensions determine the border around the image in the button.
Here’s a simple transport using the custom stop icon and the system-supplied NSRightFacingTriangleTemplate for the play button. Easy! We’re done. Wait. Something’s not quite right. Notice how the play button has a subtle grey tint to it, while the stop button is infinite black, like the monolith in 2001. When I first saw this I thought maybe the system supplied template images had some kind of tint built into them. But it turns out NSImage can be told that any image is a template and as long as it meets certain criteria, it’ll automatically add tinting as needed. The secret is making sure the image’s filename ends with Template. Renaming the stop icon pdf from TransportStopIcon.pdf to TransportStopIconTemplate.pdf is all it takes. The easiest way to do that is to contextual-click on the pdf file reference in the Xcode project and choose Rename. Interface Builder will get informed of the change, and Xcode will issue the proper SCM commands as well. This is newly minted stuff in IB, so some things are a tad clunky. For instance, you’ll need to drag your renamed icon onto the button again to get the change to stick. Also, I’ve noticed that IB sometimes shows missing image icons when I close the document and open it again.
Much better! Beyond simple tinting, the system will also create an embossed version of your template images for other button types, and create that blue glow around it for the active state of a button (for example, the View/Hide Mini-month button in iCal).
One caveat to this image template system is it expects the image to be black with a clear mask. I ran into this when trying to use a red circle graphic as an image template for a record button. It was converted to a medium grey image by NSImage. I’m looking into whether you can tell a template image to draw as a color but I think in this case I’ll have to create the various button state versions of the circle graphic manually.
I noticed a trend at WWDC this year of Apple adding more things like this to make developers’ lives easier. Although there were some poorly handled transitions (*cough* dropping Carbon 64-bit *cough*), this is one area I’m very glad to see Apple focus on.
More information:
http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/Cocoa/AppKit.html
NSImage Class Reference
Some time last year I followed this link from Cool Hunting to Alex Young’s Milieu blog about netlabels. Little did I know the world of new music it would open. A netlabel is is similar to a record label, except that it distributes its music primarily via the internet, often for free. I was suspicious at first about this concept. Wouldn’t it simply be a recipe for really bad music? Surprisingly, as I found out from the releases highlighted on Milieu, the answer is not always. In fact I’ve discovered some jaw-droppingly good music coming from netlabels — mostly electronica, but occasionally other genres are represented.
Continue reading ‘Netlabels’
