Veerle recently ran a “What is Graphic Design” contest, and got some beautiful entries. She just announced the winners, and they’re a lot of fun. #15 is my favorite, I think. I love the way the message isn’t complete without the words and images both; I’m not sure why it ranked the lowest of the winners.
Makes me wish I was a graphic designer or had any sort of talent in that area.
I’ve shared my exploration into the world of tablet-friendly software, and there I recommended Sapiens, an application launcher that uses a mouse gesture to pop up a circular menu that provides you with quick-click access to the programs that you most often need in that context (Sapiens watches your habits and learns what programs you need/want the most over time). It’s a clever piece of software that’s beautifully designed.
But I’ve got a little secret for you: Sapiens actually totally sucks when you use it with a tablet. I don’t know about you, but when I’m drawing I tend to use a lot of circular motions. Sometimes I use motions that aren’t actually circles, but that are close enough for Sapiens. After about the third time I see Sapiens’ expanding dotted lines, I’m usually swearing like a sailor.
Sapiens does provide a list of excluded applications, so I could, for instance, disable it in my various drawing apps where I use circles the most. However, this totally defeats the point of using it for me since I’m mostly needed it when I’m using my tablet, and I’m mostly using my tablet when engaged in an artistic endeavor.
Fortunately, there is a simple solution: xGestures. xGestures has the happy benefit of requiring you to hold down a button while you make the gesture (right mouse button by default, which translates into the bottom button on a Wacom pen), so unlike Sapiens it rarely activates accidentally unless you make a habit of holding down the right mouse button while you move your mouse around.
To rid Sapiens of its annoying mouse gesture, circle your mouse for the last time, click the preferences icon and set things up in the “Activation” tab as shown (just follow the orange arrows):
You can set the hotkey to anything you like (just make is obscure so that it won’t be likely to conflict with another application). Then in xGestures, set up the gesture. I used a circle (after all, why not?). If you do use a circle and are using a tablet, I recommend drawing circles with xGestures a few times before you actually define the gesture. I found that my typical circle can register in a number of different ways, but by drawing it a few times I found the one that I use the most often, and then stuck with that.
And now that Sapiens is actually on-demand instead of constantly interfering, life is much, much better.
I’ve been having a hankering to write some short fiction and throw it up here on Beckism.com, but for some reason every time I start a story its pacing and plot jump into a novel-length plot.
That damn senior thesis ruined me for short fiction. I never really appreciated before how difficult it can be to write something cohesive in a thousand words or so. Guess I’ll just have to finally finish Season 1 of Dirt Man. (It’s only been what, three years in the making?)
Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a great game for the Nintendo DS that’s appropriate for any age. The art is engaging, the puzzles range from laughably easy to head scratchers, and the music and occasional voice acting are both extremely classy. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys logic puzzles.
I’d forgotten how many hours of my childhood were poured into puzzling out logic problems until I picked up Professor Layton and the Curious Village and had nostalgia slap me in the face. It was a very pleasant surprise.
Recently my boss started asking for more graphics editing and it was the perfect excuse to buy a Wacom graphics tablet, which is something I’ve wanted since college but haven’t thought I’d have a use for. I’m not really the artistic type. The drawing below (which I drew yesterday after work and probably speaks loads about the state of my unconscious) pretty much epitomizes my abilities:
I opted for the 6×11 Wacom special edition, which is a sleek black color instead of their standard gun-metal gray and is huge (and a widescreen ratio!) without completely depriving me of desk space. The actual tablet is gorgeous, and over the past week and a half I’ve fallen completely in love with it. I had thought that tablets were only useful for drawing (hence my years-long hesitance over buying one; see above), but it also stands in as a great alternative to mousing (or, in my case, trackballing — which, incidentally, sounds a lot dirtier than it actually is). And, to be honest, although I’m no da Vinci, I find drawing the occasional diabolic clown a lot of fun.
But the real reason my introduction to tablets has been so great is because it’s opened up a whole new realm of software that I never before had a reason to explore.
Scribbles was the first thing I downloaded, of course. The program has some issues (no eyedropper, inability to move single layers around, etc.) but it’s still one of the most brilliant interface designs I’ve ever seen, and it makes drawing a quick after-work diabolic clown far easier than it should be.
ArtRage, on the other hand, was a program that I’d never heard of until I went looking for cheap, easy-to-use drawing programs, but it’s fantastically cool. I haven’t really found a use for it yet, but who doesn’t want to be able to use paints and canvas on their computer? Just swooping the paint brush around makes me feel so classy.
Then there’s Sapiens. I took a look at Sapiens when it was originally released and had absolutely no use for it. While I love the concept of circular contextual menus, I’m a hardcore LaunchBar fan who likes to keep his hands on the keyboard. When I’m using the tablet, though, LaunchBar becomes pointless because it’s a long trip back to the keyboard (and I have to put the pen down). When I realized that, Sapiens was the obvious choice for a mouse launcher.
And of course xGestures, which I’ve used for years, functions great with the tablet. (The key: large, steady strokes.)
The last thing that I’ve been finding myself using the tablet for has been taking notes (primarily useful during phone calls when I only have one hand available). Unfortunately, I have not yet found my perfect solution for this. SketchBox is a cool piece of software, but the stuff you sketch isn’t searchable. inkBook promises searching, but is less than stellar in actual use (just try using the erase tool and watch it casually destroy stuff you never touched; not fun). Circus Ponies Notebook 3 looks promising (and, considering past Notebook versions, will certainly be far more polished and feature-rich than inkBook), but it isn’t even available in beta yet.
I’ve tried using Apple’s Ink technology for note-taking, and while it’s mind-blowingly amazing that it can recognize my handwriting (which is legible to a select few people in this world), the technology’s implementation is a little too clumsy for quick text entry.
So the hunt continues, which, to be honest, is how I like it. I am admittedly a bit addicted to software demos. And I am, at least for the moment, hard-core addicted to tablets.
Changes, a beautiful application that allows you to easily compare directories and files, was released today. I got into the Changes beta late in the game, and I don’t know how I got anything done without it. It makes comparing text files ridiculously easy and, dare I say it, fun. The developer is extremely responsive, too, and has a great first name to boot.
Changes has a 15-day free trial, and is available for $39.95. Additionally, you can get $10 off the asking price if you act soon by using TUAW’s coupon. I strongly recommend that anyone who works with plain text files download Changes and give it a try. It’s a must-have utility.
I’ll make this short and sweet:
Although MarsEdit 2.1 added tagging, it didn’t include an easy way to migrate in your old tags (it only remembers tags that you’ve added to a post using MarsEdit). There are two workarounds for this:
1) Edit a MarsEdit plist (not too painful, but still not fun)
2) Open up your old posts and select the tags
Seriously, all you have to do to get MarsEdit to remember a tag is to select it. If you have a fairly short list of posts (or quick fingers), this is simple. Make sure that the tag field is turned on for your blog and that it’s the last field before the content in the post window. Then:
Rinse and repeat. Repetitive, but if you don’t want to touch a plist it’s probably an acceptable substitute, and once you get the pattern down you can very quickly drill down through a number of posts (one hand for arrows/enter, one hand for shift-tab and command-W). If you’re not impatient, it looks like Daniel Jalkut will be implementing some sort of friendly tag management interface down the road.
Because I’m a drummer and possibly crazy, I put on some music and did it in rhythm. This is more fun than it sounds; kind of like a poor man’s Guitar Hero. Without a guitar. Or any heroics.