October 19 2009

minning.de and bad, old browsers

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It’s been brought to my atten­tion that this site doesn’t work too well in Inter­net Explorer 6 and 7. My offi­cial stance on the mat­ter? I could not care less.

I sim­ply refuse to waste any more time deal­ing with Microsoft’s issues. They broke it, they can fix it. minning.de looks fine in all mod­ern browsers and that’s good enough as far as I’m con­cerned.
So peo­ple tell me to give IE8 a try because it’s appar­ently much improved — no. I don’t care. I’ve had enough of Microsoft’s fail­ure to com­ply with 10-​​year-​​old stan­dards and I’m not inter­ested in whether they have finally caught up with the rest of the pack.

Same thing with Win­dows 7. After the hideous, bloated mess that is Vista, I am not giv­ing a Microsoft OS another chance. They clearly have other pri­or­i­ties than what I am look­ing for in an oper­at­ing sys­tem.
The main thing that both­ered me about Vista was that it looked like they let a bunch of ama­teur Win­dow­Blinds the­mers run wild with the inter­face. How am I sup­posed to per­form accu­rate color cor­rec­tions when I’m blinded by the flashy GUI? I quite inten­tion­ally didn’t set up my work­place to be a translu­cent, turquoise Fisher-​​Price envi­ron­ment and I’d pre­fer my com­puter desk­top to reflect that choice. Just stay out of my way, OS!

In the eter­nal words of Weird Al Yankovic: “Poke out my eyes, man!”

Appar­ently Microsoft has a vastly dif­fer­ent opin­ion there as they some­how inex­plic­a­bly man­aged to make the inter­face look even more gar­ish and tacky in Win­dows 7. Words fail me.

Now I’m def­i­nitely not a huge Apple fan — in fact the only time I turn on my Mac is to com­pile soft­ware. But I must hand it to them: At least their stuff looks pro­fes­sional and not like it’s aim­ing to woo preschoolers.

October 17 2009

Normality reaches 50.000 downloads

It’s been just a few months since I released Nor­mal­ity 3.0 for After Effects. Back then it was only known as a secret weapon in  the darker realms of the After Effects com­mu­nity.
Then Video Copi­lot came along and fea­tured Nor­mal­ity in their fan­tas­tic and in-​​depth tuto­r­ial, lead­ing to a mas­sive boost in the software’s pop­u­lar­ity and usage around the world.

Now, after sub­tract­ing the thou­sands of “ille­git­i­mate” down­loads dur­ing an attack on my site in Sep­tem­ber, I can proudly announce that Nor­mal­ity has offi­cially reached 50.000 downloads!

Nor­mal­ity Down­loads by OS

Google Chart

The chart shows  the dis­tri­b­u­tion between the Win­dows and OS X ver­sions, leav­ing the Mac all the way down at just 10%.

Nor­mal­ity Down­loads by Region

Google Chart

And, because I’m a fiend for sta­tis­tics, here’s the break­down by region. A cou­ple of sur­prises there in my opinion!

Any­way, this means there are (poten­tially) 50.000 users of my plug-​​in out there! I would def­i­nitely like to hear from you all about your expe­ri­ences with the soft­ware and the cool projects you are using it on.

October 13 2009

minning.de 6.5

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I know, I know… I should be work­ing on more impor­tant stuff, but when I updated the site’s design last June it was miss­ing some of the more inter­est­ing design ideas and refine­ments I had been plan­ning. I finally got around to cod­ing the site the way it was orig­i­nally intended with nice typo­graphic styles and — hope­fully — bet­ter readability.

“Good Design­ers Redesign, Great Design­ers Realign”

Instead of start­ing from scratch I built upon the exist­ing design’s code and look, tak­ing the good advice from A List Apart about realign­ing instead of redesign­ing; the foun­da­tion was quite solid, after all.

If you’ve vis­ited my site before, you should feel right at home:

  • The main nav­i­ga­tion remains the same with an extra bit of polish.
  • All links should still work.
  • I’ve imple­mented a proper caching mech­a­nism that should not only speed up page loads sig­nif­i­cantly, but will also pre­vent the site from stalling when­ever Video Copi­lot links here.
  • The cool AJAX page load­ing turned out to be a not so great idea over­all, so that’s gone.
  • Com­ments were a bit of an after­thought in the last iter­a­tion… this time they are fully inte­grated into the site’s concept.

Please bear with me while I iron out the last issues and enjoy the refined minning.de!

September 17 2009

Japanese information online

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For my many Japan­ese vis­i­tors I have asked a kind friend to trans­late the most inter­est­ing bits and facts on my soft­ware includ­ing Nor­mal­ity, Celu­light and my shaders.

日本語ページ

September 15 2009

Downloads suspended. Edit: We're back

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Due to what is either mas­sive abuse, neg­li­gence or an out­right denial of ser­vice attack, I have been forced to sus­pend access to all down­loads until fur­ther notice.

A user with the IP address 208.95.112.198 found it nec­es­sary or fun to down­load Nor­mal­ity 44.712 times in one night… that’s sim­ply unac­cept­able and unfor­tu­nately actions had to be taken to pre­vent con­tin­ued abuse of my lim­ited resources.

I apol­o­gize for the incon­ve­nience and hope to rein­state down­loads once the traf­fic has returned to a more rea­son­able level.

Edit: It looks like things have returned to nor­mal. Down­loads are back up ten­ta­tively, but I’ll keep an eye out for any sus­pi­cious activity…

September 3 2009

A word on comments

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OK… two days ago I enabled com­ments on minning.de because I am look­ing to improve com­mu­ni­ca­tion with my read­ers and the users of my software.

The num­ber of bla­tant Spam com­ments has been sur­pris­ingly mod­est so far. I am very happy about this fact: Akismet is doing an excel­lent job at catch­ing even the less obvi­ous cases and manda­tory mod­er­a­tor approval can eas­ily han­dle what lit­tle gets through.

So far I have got­ten help­ful and sup­port­ive com­ments which I very much appre­ci­ate. I’ve received a cou­ple of legit­i­mate ques­tions, some­thing I would also very much like to encour­age as it helps solve com­mon prob­lems and can lead to mean­ing­ful and inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions. It also helps cut down on my time spent doing tech support.

So far, so good!

With that said, I would still like to ask com­menters to prac­tice thought­ful com­ment­ing. One-​​liners akin to “AWESOME @_@”, “U R MY GOD” or “Cool bro!!” are mean­ing­less noise and will not be approved for posting.

I have set up a cou­ple of sim­ple rules that sound more like com­mon cour­tesy to me, but appar­ently some peo­ple need to be reminded from time to time.

Thanks and cheers!

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