05.09.2008

Drama Breeds Drama

Yeah, okay, seriously - this weekend I'll work on updating to the new look. I've been putting it off for months and I'll most probably just wipe the slate clean and slowly re-add updated posts with goodies.

I'm not sure what to say about the whole Facade drama on MTF. Although I think it'd of probably been best to not hype things up until they were more settled. I thought I'd take the time to talk about a few things. First off, I'm not really "sided" with anyone concerning Architect-vs-Other Theme Apps. I stopped visiting MTF because it was balls and was growing frustrated with the community and moderation. I don't mean the moderators, I know most of them and they're all awesome guys. I just feel things aren't strict enough, through no fault of their own.

Anyway, Johnny basically hit me up one day and showed me what they were working on and it got me interested. I recently helped them with their website preview. It's not as excellent as I'd of wanted but I didn't get much time to refine it. I liked how the bars, rope and frames turned out however.

So, long story short - too late! - I'm working on a theme. No hype or silly previews or anything. The Facade preview site will feature a preview but that's about it. Hopefully folks will like it. One of the decisions to try Facade and Architect was because of the idea of themes for money. I wanted to explore this. A lot of themers spend a lot of time crafting themes and, to be frank, they don't get a heap for it. The idea of paying for themes is a bit alien. I'm sure there will be a lot of folks who complain and stomp their feet but then you could turn around and say "You don't think a month of work from me is worth the cost of a coffee?" One idea I thought would work well would be for the theme-app developers to charge for the app and then hire themers to create themes. This would keep themes free to the end user, besides the initial cost of the app, and give more top quality themes to market the app with.

I've no clue how much Qui will be. This is more an experiment in seeing if people are willing rather than trying to gouge them. No more than $3 was my first thought. Opinions via comments are welcome on the matter.

Hopefully things work out and it'll breath new life in to Mac theming.

Oh and yes, if things go well, there will be a Niqu 2.

04.09.2008

Cry Some More

Okay, stop fucking whining on about Chrome. If I hear one more fucking person say "I DON'T GET WAT DA FUSS IS, DERES NO ADBLOCK, SHIT SUX OGMGZ" I'm going to take a cricket bat to someone's balls. It's been out like three fucking days. Did Firefox (ahem Phoenix) have AdBlock after three days? No. So spewing worthless shit about how the internet is unusable with ads - that's bullshit by the way - adds nothing to any discussion. It'll get a God damn ad blocking addon, now shut the hell up.

Alternatively I'm also sick of the "OMGZ IM FED UP OF HEARIN BOUT CHROME OMGZ" folks. Google releasing a browser is big news regardless if you think it's good. If you don't care, you don't care about the web trying pull away from the shit stain that is Internet Explorer.

It's really hard scrolling past articles/Twitter entries/comments. My heart bleeds for you.

25.08.2008

FYI.

Actual Title: FYI, I'm a Spy^H^H^HReally Cool Dude.

Things to do: a) Actually do things! b) Secret things! c) Jazz!

Yeah, I know, I should keep this more updated but nothing is really super exciting at the moment. I have been working on goodies though. Wink, wink. Oh and this is reason enough to use Firefox if you're on Youtube a lot. (Seriously, I think 95% of Youtube members are the most fucking retarded ass-cocks in the world.)

Take it easy folks. Where's my peanut? I feel a game of Space Invaders coming on.

05.08.2008

Big Boss, Big Ego

Quoting this from Gruber:

I posit that the usability and elegance of any product, software or hardware, tends to reach and seldom surpasses the level that satisfies the taste of whoever is in charge of the product. This applies universally, not just to free and open source software. For example, it explains why Microsoft produces such crummy software even though the company employees thousands of talented programmers and even designers -- Microsoft's decision makers have no taste. But the problem is endemic to open source. The people in charge of most free and open source software products tend to have poor taste in user interfaces; people with good taste in user interface design are seldom in charge of open source software projects.

This is totally on the mark. You can have the best artists in the world, but if the guy in charge wants polka-dots everywhere, your service is shit out of luck.

27.07.2008

No Worries

I've been trying to wait for something eventful or worthy to blog about, but since people yell at me if 'Suds sits on the porch and enjoys a brandy instead of yelling very loudly about things, I thought I'd make a quick one.

The super-duper new website is still in the works. Basically everything hard is done ("Float does what?" "Why is that DIV there?") and I just need to stop avoiding the boring shit of re-formatting the current entries and redoing all the damned previews. That's annoying, especially for things like the dock skin previews where I have to faff around changing them and shit. I also want to make a few tweaks to the preview templates before I start that, so that's holding it up a little too. I've still got my list of goodies and bits that I'm going to be working on. No worries.

Looks like I need to update MT's Spam protection, was a few pages worth. Also need to update/fix the other blogs on this MT installation (like my lemonpie's), 'cause they're throwing out errors when folks comment, huh.

Updated - Actually, I thought it might be cool to show how it's going to look, so you can click here to take a gander at test blog. I included this entry as well as some testing ones for comparison.

If anyone with a higher CSS power level than me can recommend changes, or can say if I've done something bloody stupid, I'd love to hear from you. Also if anyone knows how I can make the left and right column's text lines line up even after paragraph breaks, I'd be real grateful.

10.07.2008

Shit Bomb, Yo

Probably everyone who's a UI-freak has already seen Gruber's Flickr about an atrocious iPhone app design. I wasn't going to make a post about it before, at least I thought, it was obvious why it was poorly thought out and implemented. Of course then the creator decided to reply to the majority with basically 'I've been doing this for twenty years, and I'm not bankrupt, ergo I'm right and you're all wrong'.

Sorry Steve, it doesn't work that way. So I thought I'd go through and list what is actually wrong and offer a solution.

1. The background colour. It's very web 2.0 of you, but it doesn't match any of the iPhone UI colours. White, black or the stripes are usually the best route unless you have at least some idea of colour balance.

2. The top tabs and "Car #1" button. They're connected to nothing, are they supposed to be related? They give no indication if they're going to alter the view or are just selectable.

3. The "Type" buttons. Now you're using different things for (apparently) the same style option. One you gave tabs, the other you're using separate buttons.

4. The dial is not a fast-input method. And it's taking up a shit load of screen estate. Not to mention it's function is to fill the screen horizontally, to give users enough room to actually, you know, use it. Lumping it in a corner feels odd.

5. The "Destinations", "Purpose", "Frequent Trips" etc on the left are all aligned wrong. You align these to the right, so they're all the same distance from their object.

6. The plus and edit buttons are detached from the list of frequent trips. And the list has no indication if it's going to work like the regular list view and be scrollable. Also, why is one green? What does that mean?

7. The $ Spent, Save Data (Data? Jesus) and Clear are just lumped in to the middle of the UI. There's a reason most people put the final choices such as Save, Cancel, etc at the bottom of UIs, because they're meant to be the last thing you do. And the $ Spent isn't even aligned with the other two.

8. The Latest list doesn't even match what the others look like. The fields are all aligned differently. The arrow button isn't even attached or clear what it'll do.

Steve's whole defense summed up was that he knew his customers and that they wanted a fast UI. I'm sorry, but 'fast' isn't an excuse for eye-forking bad design. In fact, the whole point of UI designers are for them to create ways to use an application quickly and trouble free whilst pleasing to the eye. See any IconFactory's Twitterific for the iPhone for an idea on this.

My recommendation would be of Paul Walker's take on how it should be designed.

Additional: Check out some absolutely amazing artwork. I liked to the Undead section because they're stunningly grotesque.

02.07.2008

Endtimes

I'm sick of MacThemes bullshit. I remember when people had the balls to actually say when they disliked something and offer critique on things they thought could be improved. I remember when people didn't pander to shitty 5-minute releases. One of the biggest problems with a community which is based on people spending (a lot of) time on freeware things for other people's enjoyment is: They get better. And then they start doing it for money. When you start doing something as actually work you start to lose the enthusiasm for doing the same thing in your free time.

And so good releases tend to dry up for periods. This lowers the overall quality bar and new members have nothing to compare them to. That's not to say there aren't good releases anymore. Jonas always releases high quality works.

I don't care if this sounds elitist, but it damn well should be. You should want a community you've been around for years to want the fucking best of every single member. I don't want JoeSchmoe's fifteen minute icon, I want someone to slave over every pixel and make sure it's damn impressive. I don't want rehashed iPhone releases, I want some innovation.

Call me when people start really caring about the community instead of bubble-wrapping butt-hurt newbies.

Addendum: This is all in start contrast to an earlier entry. It really does seem like the pendulum swings between Eat-Up-Shit and Assholes-Everywhere. If only it hung in the middle or just off-center to the right.

26.06.2008

The Silent Killer

I'm behind on doing shit, yeah I know. Sorry. Tiny entry today mostly because I'm fucking sick of what I'm going to dub "Website Expansion Syndrome". Stop making websites so fucking wide. There's no reason in the fucking world why you need to eat 1000px of width whilst reclining on my display. Excuse me for wanting to be able to read something in Safari and have a few other windows open uncovered!

Apple is one particular offender with this. I've recalled some of their pages being upwards of 1200px wide. Just because they want a hugely large image smacked on it.

Fucking stop it.

17.06.2008

We Can Rebuild Him

Just a note that I'm going to be fucking around with the site this week, so if Soap Suds disappears or you start getting a lot of 404s don't worry. It'll all work. In the end. Hopefully. Well, maybe.

Fingers crossed.

16.06.2008

Flimsyfox

A lot of people are going on about the gradient in Firefox, in some cases saying odd things like Firefox is brighter in the middle. This isn't how it seems they've drawn the window.

You see, the gradient is STILL a linear one, except it's not stretched as far as the actual window height it seems. Once you split it in to parts (see above, right), you can distinctly see that there's the main window background, then the gradient and then flat darker part. It's really obviously wrong, because it looks like crap. I don't get what the big hold up is over it either. Just make the gradient stretch all the way from top to bottom.

And because it's there, I'm going to whine about how horrid those back/forward buttons are. First off, the curve of the inset behind the buttons doesn't even match the circle of the back button, making it look uneven. Next, why are the buttons separated? Segmented buttons are not detached, because they're... Well, they're a segmented button, y'dig? Personally I've got no idea what they were thinking. Here's something I threw together in a few minutes that I think would of looked much nicer.

It makes me laugh though, really. Firefox is so meh on OS X. Literally the only reasons I hear from people that use it on a Mac are "It has X plugin that I need". You have to hand it to them, adding open plugin functionality was a clever fucking way of making users "need" that app, when all they really need is a specific plugin.

On a related note, I'm trying out Safari 3. I've been a Camino user on and off for probably 6-12 months. Mostly form my time on my G5, because Safari could be a hog after a few hundred tabs. The only thing I miss is having the tab bar move tabs along as I moved along, so I always saw my selected tab in the tab bar, and ones adjacent to it.

11.06.2008

Devouring Dust

So, WWDC has been and gone with the fabled keynote. Overall I found it was tedious for the most part. The highlights were basically the iPhone price drop -- which, surprise surprise, no-one rumoured -- and... Oh. That was basically it. MobileMe is just .Mac, renamed with redone web apps. It's cool for the people that like it's features, the new online iDisk seems a big improvement. But it's still pricey in my eyes for what it delivers. A friend of mine, when the iPod was becoming more popular and more of a focus at Apple had a routine that he would complain how Apple paid so much attention to it. Special events, keynotes mostly dedicated to it. Imagine his frustration when this happens all over again with the iPhone.

Anyway. The iPhone price drop is good news and Snow Leopard seems to be as predicted really, except it contains a lot more new developer technology that people anticipated. Things like "Grand Central" and OpenCL are going to improve performance on any recent Macs and even more so in the future as consumer machines move from two physical processor cores to eight logical cores when the quad-core chips with SMT start shipping. Most applications don't make best use of four or more cores at the moment, and even then they're usually professional applications. As we move forward, more multi-threaded support seems crucial.

Next subject, I'm working on the overhaul of Soapsuds. After thinking about it a bit, I'm going to move it to the main domain, out of the subfolder and aim Soapsuds more towards a mix of its current blogging with more regular goodies releases. I'll also be rearranging the site structure to make it easier for me to organize files. The old files that haven't been available in a while (such as Capture) will be moved and I'll be sure the 404 has a list and links to older unsupported downloads.

Hoozawinga! Twopence more and up goes the donkey!

07.06.2008

Bullshit Totally

I'm so pissed off right now. Since moving, I've used a BT Total Broadband package. I needed something with a decent speed and no usage cap (I've bounced between 30GB and 75GB a month usage). It looked like a decent deal.

First annoyance is that I couldn't use my own wireless router. I fucking paid £150 for a good router, why do I have to use your £20 one? And true enough, within a few months it was dead and wouldn't start up. A week waiting for a replacement later, I got the next one. Ever since I barely get 400kb/sec during non-peak times. During peak time, I get around 140kb. Oh and it likes to drop connections like no-one's fucking business. And routinely slows to "Weak" strength. In fact, in XP I've never seen it higher than two out of five bars in strength. About three times a week it will just plain stop new connections - meaning that downloads will continue if I started them but it won't let me open new pages in Camino, or let me reconnect if I drop IRC, AIM and the like.

I should not have to baby sit your shitty hardware, BT. And your shitty excuse for a line is driving me nuts. So, the obvious option is to leave right? Sure, I have a contract, but I'll pay the fee and move on. Except I actually went to check out the price of that.

BT Total Broadband charge the full amount due over the remainder of the minimum term of the contract.

WHAT. THE. FUCK. I pay £25 a month, and the minimum contract length was fucking eighteen months. That means if I cancel early I'd have to pay a fucking charge of two hundred and fifty pounds ($500). That's fucking outrageous. Not only that, BT may charge an additional £40 to migrate my line to someone else.

That ends up as nearly £300. To get off this shitty line.

I'm going to be looking up some numbers for trading standards for sure this week, I'm not biting £300 of costs simply because my ISP is unable to supply a working router and connection I was advertised.

05.06.2008

Here Pussy Pussy

A quick entry because shitters are annoying me whining about the OS X 10.6 rumours.

First, concerning the name: It's a code-name. This doesn't mean it will be used for marketing. Fucking hell, it doesn't even mean they'll tell people it's called that. Jaguar's point releases had stupid names like Jaguar Blue, Jaguar Red, Jaguar Plaid -- and they were just internal names.

Also, it's a fucking name. Tiger sounded lame. Stop being a whiny whore.

Next, the price. No-one knows it. Stop saying "Baaaaw, I'm not going to pay $129 for a bug fixing release!" because you sound fucking stupid. It could be $5. It could be $29. No-one knows until it's on the store. Dropping Carbon and PowerPC macs? Good. People should be using Cocoa anyway, at the very least for the UI because of Carbon's quirks. Remember folks this won't be out until sometime next year. Most PPC macs were phased out in '06. It would not be outside the realms of possibility that 10.6 comes out in 2010 (Fuck yes, sci-fi dates people!) meaning four years of support.

Apple is not one to keep legacy support for long. This is how they work. Not many CEOs stand on stage and call people "laggards" for not upgrading within a few years.

Why are they doing all this? Here's my guesses. First Snow Leopard is not going to be a whizz-bang release. It's going to be mid way between a full OS update (Panther/Tiger/Leopard scale) and something akin to Puma (10.1). The first version of OS X (Cheetah) was very slow. Puma was a free upgrade for everyone as a thank you for sticking with it. Snow Leopard won't be free, but I could see a price of around $39-$69. Possibly something like: $69 for full, and $39 if you're using Leopard already. I would not be totally shocked if Leopard users could buy and download the update over the web -- Even a 6GB download isn't shocking anymore.

I'm sure there'll be more than just 'general security and stability', remember OS updates are usually the prime time for Apple to bugger around with the built in apps such as Safari, Mail, iChat et al.

My only wish for it is: Please fucking kill plastic capsules Apple.

30.05.2008

We're Off to See The Wizard

Quicky note entry today. I should have a rather long first-impressions and first-experiences post(s) concerning my trial of Age of Conan soon. Also I'm still working on some goodies, I've got a list that I want to do and hopefully can get them all done relatively close together and make a nice fancy release. And God damn I will get something concerning the "proper" site front sorted. If only it's a static page or some shit.

Not dead or lazy, I'm on the case!

29.05.2008

Thanks Hollywood

Fuck you greedy shitfucks in Hollywood.

In my head Alien Resurrection, AVP and AVP2 do not happen. No, Weyland-Yutani do not get their technology from fucking Yautja. No, xenomorphs do not reach Earth ever, because if they do it's game over. No ifs, no buts. Seven-hundred-odd years in to the future it would be game over. 21st century Man wouldn't stand a chance - bar nuking the contentant. Maybe that'd work. And the bullshit of having 'Bishop' be Weyland. I'm sorry, did you miss Alien 3? The whole Bishop was designed to look like his designer thing? The one that visits Ripley and gets fucking hit on the head?

SORRY DID YOU SLEEP THROUGH THAT?

But no, it's not enough, they went and shit all over Doctor Jones too. A God-damn refrigerator, Jesus.

22.05.2008

Love, Life and Leon

I actually managed to get some sleep, fuck yeah. First, happy anniversary to my peanut butter! She's better than pasta, coke and a Brasgalla icon all put together. An' that's saying something.

Bits and pieces in today's entry. WinClone looks like it'll be very handy. For those that don't know, it lets you clone your BootCamp (well, any disk really) to a disk image and then lets you restore it. All this is doable through Terminal and Disk Utility but WinClone makes it easy, fast and it's free. It's icon is pretty hideous though, so I'll probably end up doing one soon.

I also want to talk about Lutetium; frankly I'm just not happy with what I've done so far. I gave one of the #TUMT regulars the saves for him to cut up and throw around for the other regulars, but I don't think I'll be working on them again. There's a few reasons and I thought it'd quell (at least a little) some of the fist-shaking if I went through them.

Number one: Lutetium Eon was started before I moved to pure-vector work. As a result the majority of the older work were bitmap at 256px to 16px. Ergo, I couldn't neaten them up to the standard I want nowadays. I did make a start on redoing the 32px sizes and some folks liked those. But they're just not how I wanted LEON to end up.

Number two: The style. Originally LEON was to be a rather Minium° like set. Focusing on matching the folders to Apple's current designs. It went through lots of changes. The first, frankly, took fucking ages for me to do. I just don't have the time to spend three to eight hours on every single icon. The second was more simplistic but looked 'old fashioned' compared. Lastly, the front-on Leopard view. It's not really exciting.

The hard-drives seem quite popular. I'm really disappointed with the 32px state I ended up with though. At the very least I want to redo the hard-drives to a higher quality. Maybe include a generic folder and PSD, let people work with it. Should be a decent compromise. I know it doesn't set a good standard (what with Myre and a number of other icon sets not being finished), but this really isn't a case of just Can't-be-bothered-itus. Lutetium has a very specific kind of aim in my head, and I just don't want to release it until it... Well... Matches. Unfortunately my brain is rather good at changes it's mind on what to focus on.

I do have another very simplistic set I've worked on, called Latt. I will finish this, no teasers or any of that junk, because Raz will literally gut me like a fish if I don't. I'll try to have some goodies for you folks this weekend.

Have a good day guys.

21.05.2008

Lovesnickers the Saucy.

Been not too eventful past few weeks. Work and jazz, I got my snazzy new 2.8GHz 24" iMac yesterday. So I thought for once, fuck it, let's have a cheerful entry. Well mostly cheerful.

First impressions were... Well. Whoa. My old G5 iMac was not - to me - a slow dog. Sure, after 300 shapes and junk in Fireworks things did slow down. Sure, Camino took like 10-seconds to launch and usually ended up taking 15 seconds for a new window after I'd done some browsing. But it was fine. This thing screams ahead. Screams. Every app opens literally instantly. Starting up is super fast. I've yet to even get both cores to 50% usage. It's insane. I haven't reinstalled Illustrator or Fireworks yet, but I'm looking forward to giving them a spin on some of my larger saves and seeing how well it does.

The other big things besides just having a speedier CPU was the fact it's an intel Mac. Yes, I'm so fucking late to the party the drunk loud-mouth tart has already been under the coat pile for a few hours, the even drunker rambo has already run a car through the wall and no-one knows where all the cheese-it snacks went to.

So I opened Boot Camp, partitioned the drive - which in retrospect I should of given it more like 40-45GB, I've already used half of the 32GB - it was all really easy. I restarted with the disc in and everything went smooth. The installer restarted again and bam "Disk Error"... Hm. Well after twenty minutes of just thinking my discs were busted, I found out you're supposed to quick-format the "BOOTCAMP" partition, or else it'll still be HFS+. So I did that, everything worked fine.

Apple amazes me sometimes with their little touches. I popped the Leopard disc in, and wham. The Boot Camp installer leapt up and started doing it's business. After another restart it was done. Everything seemed to work great. Drivers for my 8800GS made the window drawing really smooth, even the volume keys on the Apple keyboard worked. Exactly like in OS X. You push one and it does the "POP!" noise and the volume overlay. I was pretty stunned at that.

Clearly, lots of effort has gone in to Boot Camp from Apple to make Windows that bit more familiar.

Later that day though, disaster struck. I let Parallels use that Boot Camp drive for it's virtual machine... All seemed fine, until I restarted and tried to install some games. "Disk full". What the fuck? I'd only used, at most, 10GB of the space. Yet it told me none was free. Turns out Parallels seemed to have buggered it all up. Don't ask me how. I don't know. In the end I had to reinstall Windows, formating the Boot Camp drive again and then re-set everything up... After that everything has been pretty okay though.

One odd problem I have though is that the sound is fucking loud. Even on the minimum setting, it's too loud for me to use headphones without thinking my head will explode. Going to try fixing that later.

Why would I go through that hassle of Boot Camp? Games. Of course it's games. I've not really played a 'modern' Windows game since '01 or something. The fact I play new games and play them well was a huge selling point. I'm so very lucky Apple upgraded the iMac just at the right time. I haven't tried many games yet. The Portal demo runs great. Could probably do with a bit more RAM, as it stutters during loading. Bioshock runs... Well, I was stunned basically. Only played 10-15 minutes of it but my jaw was open most of the time. The amount of work, attention to detail... Atmosphere... It's amazing. Can't wait to play through it.

Anyway, in short: It's all good, apart from a few Windows related hiccups. Really pleased with the purchase. Lastly, tomorrow is me and my girlfriend's first year anniversary! A whole year of her putting up with me and my toes, aren't you just amazed?

28.04.2008

Oh Shit, Mystic Powers

Friday I begged the Gods of The Internets that Apple's iMac update would come the following tuesday (so I wouldn't have to sit on moneys resisting buying the out-dated ones). Next day, rumours had it they were coming Monday/Tuesday. Sadly the reports were just that they would have slightly faster processors and larger hard-drives. I looked to the skies and pleaded to the same Lords of Jiggawatts that Apple would update the graphics card too.

Today: iMac update. Better processors, more RAM and better graphics card for the 24". And not just better, actually pretty damn decent for mid-range gaming apparently.

I'm going to be sacrificing a chicken pie to them later in thanks.

I don't game hugely since my... Er... Addiction, mostly from being busy. But the thought that I'd get 90FPS in WoW, on high compared to 15-20FPS with everything low or off is.. Well.. It makes the inner kid all warm.

Gaming hooooo!

25.03.2008

One Small Step for Mac...

One giant leap for themekind.

There's been some wonderful OS X theme related news in this thread. A big jump towards someone finally making Leopard customizable. I had a bit of fun last night playing around to make the buttons look like Max Rudberg's Milk theme. Unfortunately for the moment it looks like Niqu-like themes are possible because we have no way of changing button glyphs or text colours.

In other news, non-Mac users are actually using the fact Safari 3.1 for Windows is using OS X's font rendered and not ClearType.

I don't often get on my high horse -- because my lemon pie is usually petting him and giving him sugar lumps -- but dear lord. This is why people can put up with shit user interfaces (Hello Aero). It's why I don't actually read Ars' discussions, because it's full of developer types.

Now, I love me the smart sort. Christoph is an amazing developer. The Transmission developer was cool to work with. The problem I have with most Windows or Linux developers (I apologize in advance for these broad statements) is that they have no taste. A lot seem to have this jealous view of user interface designers that they just aren't needed. Usability is just coded, not designed, apparently.

Look, ever wonder why Linux is widely unknown? Why no average Joe cares? Because it looks like Windows Light. It feels like an abused wife. Okay, you've left your previous partner but now... Why are you making this next one so like him? Is there some deep emotional trauma going on? He didn't really mean to blue-screen of death you baby.

God damn I'm skipping all over the place with my analogues today. I've only had one coffee, I'll blame that.

You don't have to copy Windows. You don't have to copy OS X. Do something different. Something new, something fresh. Stop being assholes to 'proper' designers -- not psuedo "well I kind of know Photoshop" guys. Big distros? Stop fucking cheaping out buying stock icons. It just makes you look bland.

Lastly, recognize that user interfaces are like fashion. No look is ever perfect and no look remains cool or fresh past the couple of year mark. No, I'm not saying every UI should dazzle and swoon users. Just be good looking, usable, made from competent graphics and out of the way when you need to work.

Vista is the guy in the sparkling costume trying to impress. OS X is the guy in the sharp grey suit now. Don't let Linux be the badly dressed guy in the corner that no-one asks to dance.

13.03.2008

I'm Not Zombie Obsessed.

I bought myself a tablet this week. I missed drawing and decided to take it back up -- in pixel form! It's swell, especially compared to the shitty one I got many years back. Which broke. And didn't work on OS X. Need to re-learn how to draw shit before assaulting the world with mangled things.

We had a power cut, oddly, as well tonight. I was half asleep and convinced that the zombies had finally begun their attack. My long studies of Zombie Survival Guide would pay off! Unfortunately, chopping and bludgeoning weren't needed (I didn't even need to solve a fireplace puzzle).

Still busy with works, I know, I know. I need to work on Leon and some freebies.

This has been a public service announcement from your local Zombie Patrol.

22.02.2008

Floating Lemons

Quick entry. It's been a really tiring week and I'm glad it'll be over soon. Hopefully next week I'll find time to finish the new VS front and GUI pages and use them. Happy nineth month to my tangy lemon pie!

Polished black plastic, glass and glowing under-light indicators. Comes in four colours.
Download Float (3D) Dock iContainer (Resources)

19.02.2008

Idle Coffee Makes Work for Coffee Coffee

It's that time again! Busy week this week, I've got to look after my niece and two nephews for most of the week, which is damn tiring, and also work on a couple of pieces of work. I had a peek around and one thing I need to get sorted is Capture. I still find it amazing that something me and Chris did a few years back is still getting recommended by bloggers and websites in new articles. So I'm going to try and catch Chris and talk to him about updating it and everything - it'd be a shame to waste that work.

Need to find time to work on VS Goodies/About code. It was nice to see how easy it was to turn in to an MT4 template. I'm secretly hoping to get the new VS done by the end of the month. Would be really nice to finally have a proper site again for folks to see.

I don't think I've ever drunk as much coffee before.

14.02.2008

Metallic Valentines

Two main things today. The first thing is; it's Valentine's Day! That means you're supposed to be all lovey and shit, swoon your girl and then waggle your eyebrows (that last one might just be me though).

A different style, it took me a few days on and off to get this done. Was fun to do, hope you enjoy it. Either way, I hope you have a nice day with that special somebody.
Download Drift Away Together: 1280x800, 1680x1050, 2560x1600

Next up I want to talk about Lutetium (collective groan). I've been working on eon for quite some time now, I actually started the folder icon back in november. Obviously I haven't made speedy work for lots of reasons. It didn't help that I changed how I do most of my icons and sizes nowadays, or that I wanted "proper" icons for each folder, meaning many hours.

So I sat down and thought about what to do, because I really do want to get this set done, out, and enjoyed. End result; redoing the folder icon. There are two reasons for this; the first is I want to separate Lutetium more from Minium. One of the first things Cary said to me when I showed him back in November was "Unless you out-Minium Minium, it's going to look very inspired by it." I didn't want the angle or similarities to loom over my head and make me paranoid about the whole set being too me-too-ish.

The second is the folder additions. Frankly they took a lot of time for each one. And when there's a heap to do, it makes it slow going. Now, some artists can do that; Take Lanham's Agua for example, I love that set, but a lot of the folder additions are quite simple. I'm quite certain if he'd been going for photo realism with the set, it would of taken a lot longer.

And so this is what the new folder looks like. You can see the angle is much more like classic Aqua folders and has more references -- with the seam -- to the old Lutetium theme. It still needs a few touch ups, but hopefully I'll have a few more previews to show you this weekend.

And here's the current what-if styles of the folders. I think I'll be going with the second or third for the first release (to actually get them out), and perhaps work on the first style. Rather like the previous additions, but simpler.

Hopefully you like it and it'll turn out to be more usable and help get eon out before '09. (Wink wink nudge nudge)

11.02.2008

Choke a Bitch (or: How Today Sucks)

I fucking fail today.

- I decide, hey! Save monies by printing off magic cards to try them out. That's smarts.

- Printer is one of those shitty "Print from camera" dealies, so it doesn't have full USB port. So I can't hook it up to iMac (no cable).

- So I think, hey, I can transfer the card images to my camera, then print from camera!

- Camera doesn't support mounting as disk image, so can't transfer to it...

- So I think, hey, I'll buy a USB A-B cable from eBay!

- I buy it, notice the paypal address is still my old one... Cable gets shipped to old address.

And people really do wonder why the whole Apple "It just works" thing sells shit. I think Artie is going to have to choke a bitch before the day is out.

Edit: Huzzah the seller didn't send it until after my email, so it got sent to my new address!

08.02.2008

I'd Tap That

In a pretty bad mood, assholes down the road don't know how to shut the fuck up. My sleeping is pretty messed up too. Argh. Anyway, happier subjects, like lemon pies and geekery.

My current geeky but not-actually-spent-money-on is Magic the Gathering. With having quit WoW and given some of my old collected junk to one of my nephews, I don't have anything geeky to do. Which means excess geek juice, and you know what that means.

So after examining the colours I decided to go with black, although I might try out blue or red in the future. In those sorts of games, I don't play fair. I'm a cruel bastard. My first draft deck, excluding starter deck and stuff, is a discard deck. Megrim is going to cause damage every time you have to discard, and oh boy I've got lots of cards that do that. The main strategy would be to get my rats in play, have them die and bring them back, protecting my more valuable creatures. Mindslicer plus Abyssal Nocturnus would be a pretty harsh combo if you had seven cards in your hand (AN gets +2/+2 until end of turn when you discard a card.. Mindslicer makes both players discard they're whole hand. +14/+14, yum yum).

Although that isn't my ideal deck, there's a few I swapped out because they cost £15/$30 each, and I needed two of each. The deck above would still cost £60-80 though, which kind of made my wallet cry. Sticking with starter and a few boosters f'now I reckon!

08.02.2008

Ancient Lich Seeks New Thrills

A contentless post, to keep myself blogging! I installed and tried out Chyrp, it's a wonderfully light and simple blog/CMS system. I'm seriously thinking about moving VS over to it and working on reopening her. Basically making VS in to an expanded Soap Suds. I've been meaning to do something with the "main" site for a while.

Not much else, I've been doing some hopefully helpful stuff in order to get some more client work, trying out Twitterific 3.0.1 (feel free to follow me) and deciding what's for breakfast.

26.01.2008

"I Need a Blog! Oh Wait..."

Oh hell no, I didn't forget about 'Suds. Really. Seriously. Aw shit, I did. I've spent the last week throwing around ideas for a blog, from something I thought I could DIY to something extravagant. All the while, old Suddy here has been around, and isn't actually ugly. It needs brightening though, so Sans is now the default style.

Lots has happened since I actually kept this place properly updated. I got myself a wonderful girlfriend (of eight months no less!) and my house move were the two biggest. Quitting World of Warcraft is probably a third if you've known my backstory. It means I actually get time to make goodies and all sorts of niceness. Of course themes aren't really in the question, what with Leopard horribly mauling the Shapeshifter scene. Give me a wondrous new version of Shapeshifter and I'd happily update Niqu and Myre.

First new topic I'd like to go over is Lutetium eon, now that the cat's out of the bag. It's planned to be a full icon set -- which you don't see many of, outside of IconFactory nowadays -- with all the trimmings. I liked the name, especially because it's obviously tongue in cheek. It's basically the folder icons that are left, mainly, and I want each one to be a high level of quality... So it might take a while longer. One problem that has cost me some time is the fact during Leon's development I changed how I do each size. Beforehand each size was a scaled down bitmap, which I then hand edited for clarity. Now I redo each size using the vector paths from a higher size, meaning I can make every size crisper and it's a lot less work if I need to edit something across them all.

Next, I've actually began playing with 3D in order to try and make more complex icons with more accurate perspectives. It also lets me play with materials that are really hard to think up in your head, glass refraction is a notable one. I'm still definitely a newbie to it, but it's fun to learn.

Lastly, I'm going to be using 'Suds as a place to actually, y'know, publish released stuff. So if you like my jazz, be sure to subscribe to the feed.