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Teknowledgee
Feb. 8th, 2009 12:00 pmBeen playing with new tools and I thought I'd give them a mini-review.
So... I decided it was time for some spring cleaning at work and in cleaning off my desk, I found a device that I was given about a year ago and had never got around to plugging in.
Stylewise, It's an 11. Brushed aluminum, glossy black acrylic and blue LEDs. smaller than a mouse, very heavy. Feels nice, looks nice. Thumbs up.
Usefulness: With a basic install, it works with SecondLife and... Wow. It's really FUN! It'd probably kick butt with FPSs too. I'll probably use this as my primary control for moving around in SL. For Maya, the installation was slightly more involved and required adding some mel scripts to my startup (which I am generally loathe to do). The learning curve on it is a bit steeper too. A little practice, and I think it's slightly easier to use than the key chord camera controls. It might be really useful in combination with my wacom pen when doing sculpting though this will require I learn to use it left handed. When I've got a bit more time, I'll give this another try. Does zoom, pan and change brush size in Photoshop.
Now the bad news. That's pretty-much all it's good for. Despite having the same shape and styling as a jog control, I can't use it as a jog control. It has very limited programability. So while it could be GREAT in a number of applications, I can't use it with them. I can't fathom why they wouldn't have a programmable mode to at least treat the various controls as modifiers to mouse movement. Most apps have chorded keyboard options to do various pans, rotations, etc. So twisting the puck could take over mouse control and press whatever chord. That'd make the thing useful for dozens of apps.
All in all: Glad I didn't buy this. $100 for another chunk of metal on my desk. Usable for 2-3 apps. If it were programmable or I could at least use it as a jog control, I'd call it a keeper, but as it is... Nah. Not worth the price and only the attractiveness of the design makes it worth the desk space.
Artrage is fun, but it's pretty limited in what it can do. Don't get me wrong, for the price, it's great and the UI is really fun and friendly, but to really be useful, it needs a few more brush tip shapes and slightly smoother brush control. It's a great toy and good for slacking and was enough to get me interested in trying a 'real media' painting application. Open Canvas sounds great but it doesn't run on the Mac and they have no plans to ever make it run on the Mac. That leaves Corel Painter.
I wish I could find something positive to say about Corel Painter. I'm sure it's a great application if you can get past the learning curve but... Man. Blow me back to 1988, Batman. That UI is SO dated, cluttered, and unfriendly. I feel like I'm using OS-8.6. Many of the brushes are painfully slow. You draw a line of watercolor and you wait 10 seconds for it to 'soak in'. I gave it 3 different tries and gave up in frustration each time. Perhaps if you've been using this application since the Mac only has 256 colors, it's great, but for anyone coming in today, I'd tell them to get a Windows box and a pair of noseplugs and use OpenCanvas, or just enjoy the simplicity and beauty of ArtRage. For myself, I realized just how much I like ArtRage and... If I really want to do something that uses a variety of brushes... I have real paint and real brushes which have an incredibly simple and beautiful UI.
I haven't really explored all of what spotlight is. Until yesterday, it was just this annoying search box that would pop up when I hit the wrong button. However. I've been doing a lot of cataloging of video for this editing project I'm working on. I started off by building myself a spreadsheet recording the names of files, the time points, notes, etc that I wanted. Problem with this is that if you rename the clips, you need to update your DB. Also, it requires you to look at two separate things. So... I thought there was another way to do this. I could have swore that Quicktime let you do that kind of marking of files (The Mac DVD player lets you do this. It's very handy for marking references for drawing and when putting together clips) but no such luck with Quicktime. Or at least, I couldn't find it. So... Looking at 'More info' on the file, I see there is a 'Spotlight Comments' entry box. Keen! I can type my comments there... And it basically works... EXCEPT if you hit return, not only does it NOT go to the next line, it highlights the line you're one and if you start typing... Goodbye previous text and there's no undo! FANTASTIC! GREAT JOB APPLE! *sigh* I can't believe that a company which prides itself on UI would make such a total boner on a piece of the UI.
On the other hand... This is the solution I've decided to go with for now. I wonder if that's partly out of nostalgia. Years ago, frustrated with the 8.3 filenames of DOS, I wrote a program that would attach additional blocks onto a file, be it text, executable, or whatever. Then wrote my own DIR command so that I could list files and see the extended info block on the files. If I renamed, moved, or copied the files, the tags stayed with them. It was pretty spiff... Except.. That was before the advent of virus scanners. What I'd wrote attached to files the same way a virus did. It was a controlled and benevolent virus but.. The first time I ran a virus scanner, it freaked out. Ohwell. It had been fun while it lasted.
Getting back on course... Spotlight comments... I give it a 1 out of 5. Comments are great. No linebreaks, not so great. Violent punishment for trying to use linebreaks.. Very uncool.
I guess that's about it for now. Back to work.
So... I decided it was time for some spring cleaning at work and in cleaning off my desk, I found a device that I was given about a year ago and had never got around to plugging in.
The 3DConnexion (3D mouse)
Stylewise, It's an 11. Brushed aluminum, glossy black acrylic and blue LEDs. smaller than a mouse, very heavy. Feels nice, looks nice. Thumbs up.
Usefulness: With a basic install, it works with SecondLife and... Wow. It's really FUN! It'd probably kick butt with FPSs too. I'll probably use this as my primary control for moving around in SL. For Maya, the installation was slightly more involved and required adding some mel scripts to my startup (which I am generally loathe to do). The learning curve on it is a bit steeper too. A little practice, and I think it's slightly easier to use than the key chord camera controls. It might be really useful in combination with my wacom pen when doing sculpting though this will require I learn to use it left handed. When I've got a bit more time, I'll give this another try. Does zoom, pan and change brush size in Photoshop.
Now the bad news. That's pretty-much all it's good for. Despite having the same shape and styling as a jog control, I can't use it as a jog control. It has very limited programability. So while it could be GREAT in a number of applications, I can't use it with them. I can't fathom why they wouldn't have a programmable mode to at least treat the various controls as modifiers to mouse movement. Most apps have chorded keyboard options to do various pans, rotations, etc. So twisting the puck could take over mouse control and press whatever chord. That'd make the thing useful for dozens of apps.
All in all: Glad I didn't buy this. $100 for another chunk of metal on my desk. Usable for 2-3 apps. If it were programmable or I could at least use it as a jog control, I'd call it a keeper, but as it is... Nah. Not worth the price and only the attractiveness of the design makes it worth the desk space.
Corel Painter
Artrage is fun, but it's pretty limited in what it can do. Don't get me wrong, for the price, it's great and the UI is really fun and friendly, but to really be useful, it needs a few more brush tip shapes and slightly smoother brush control. It's a great toy and good for slacking and was enough to get me interested in trying a 'real media' painting application. Open Canvas sounds great but it doesn't run on the Mac and they have no plans to ever make it run on the Mac. That leaves Corel Painter.
I wish I could find something positive to say about Corel Painter. I'm sure it's a great application if you can get past the learning curve but... Man. Blow me back to 1988, Batman. That UI is SO dated, cluttered, and unfriendly. I feel like I'm using OS-8.6. Many of the brushes are painfully slow. You draw a line of watercolor and you wait 10 seconds for it to 'soak in'. I gave it 3 different tries and gave up in frustration each time. Perhaps if you've been using this application since the Mac only has 256 colors, it's great, but for anyone coming in today, I'd tell them to get a Windows box and a pair of noseplugs and use OpenCanvas, or just enjoy the simplicity and beauty of ArtRage. For myself, I realized just how much I like ArtRage and... If I really want to do something that uses a variety of brushes... I have real paint and real brushes which have an incredibly simple and beautiful UI.
Spotlight (Part of the Mac OS)
I haven't really explored all of what spotlight is. Until yesterday, it was just this annoying search box that would pop up when I hit the wrong button. However. I've been doing a lot of cataloging of video for this editing project I'm working on. I started off by building myself a spreadsheet recording the names of files, the time points, notes, etc that I wanted. Problem with this is that if you rename the clips, you need to update your DB. Also, it requires you to look at two separate things. So... I thought there was another way to do this. I could have swore that Quicktime let you do that kind of marking of files (The Mac DVD player lets you do this. It's very handy for marking references for drawing and when putting together clips) but no such luck with Quicktime. Or at least, I couldn't find it. So... Looking at 'More info' on the file, I see there is a 'Spotlight Comments' entry box. Keen! I can type my comments there... And it basically works... EXCEPT if you hit return, not only does it NOT go to the next line, it highlights the line you're one and if you start typing... Goodbye previous text and there's no undo! FANTASTIC! GREAT JOB APPLE! *sigh* I can't believe that a company which prides itself on UI would make such a total boner on a piece of the UI.
On the other hand... This is the solution I've decided to go with for now. I wonder if that's partly out of nostalgia. Years ago, frustrated with the 8.3 filenames of DOS, I wrote a program that would attach additional blocks onto a file, be it text, executable, or whatever. Then wrote my own DIR command so that I could list files and see the extended info block on the files. If I renamed, moved, or copied the files, the tags stayed with them. It was pretty spiff... Except.. That was before the advent of virus scanners. What I'd wrote attached to files the same way a virus did. It was a controlled and benevolent virus but.. The first time I ran a virus scanner, it freaked out. Ohwell. It had been fun while it lasted.
Getting back on course... Spotlight comments... I give it a 1 out of 5. Comments are great. No linebreaks, not so great. Violent punishment for trying to use linebreaks.. Very uncool.
I guess that's about it for now. Back to work.
