February 6 2010

Quo vadis, Adobe?

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An inter­est­ing (but not ter­ri­bly sur­prs­ing) mes­sage was posted on Twit­ter a cou­ple of days ago:

“@chad_perkins Back from Adobe. Finally can tell you that the next ver­sion of After Effects is a WEAK upgrade (IMHO). But PS and AI will be GREAT upgrades!”

(via AE Por­tal)

The orig­i­nal state­ment has since been retracted because appar­ently the poster was under an NDA and spoke too soon… luck­ily I am bound by noth­ing of the sort, so I get to “retweet” (as it were) what­ever I want.
No offi­cial word on new fea­tures yet, but judg­ing by the rumors mak­ing the round it looks like After Effects CS5 is going to be the sec­ond lack­lus­ter upgrade in a row, 64-​​bit sup­port notwithstanding.

Maybe the com­pany that is no longer in the Flash busi­ness needs to spend a lit­tle less time com­ing up with cheesy feel-​​good mar­ket­ing slo­gans and instead focus on what they used to be good at:

Mak­ing tools that just let their users get their damn work done.

Hint: Home­brew installers that take more than an hour to com­plete and require one to shut down their web browsers, upgrades that lay waste to all exist­ing plug-​​ins and the oh-​​so pretty “Flash-​​y” but increas­ingly non-​​standard GUIs are not things that make artist’s lives any eas­ier. Nor do they “help peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate”, to put it in Adobe’s terms.

December 7 2009

Hey Australia...

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guess how I know you have a prob­lem with your telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions mar­ket? I’m being asked by the monop­o­list mar­ket leader Tel­stra to pay nearly 400$ in extor­tion “setup fees” to get my land line setup. A land line I don’t even want, because all I need is an inter­net con­nec­tion.

And the kicker? I’m lim­ited to 50GB a month. No, this is not a cell phone plan… this is a proper inter­net connection.

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.

June 4 2009

minning.de VI

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It’s been more than two years since the last major revi­sion to minning.de. To coin­cide with the upcom­ing release of a new ver­sion of Nor­mal­ity I thought it would be a good idea to finally push through with the new design that’s been cook­ing for almost ten months.

Word­press remains my CMS of choice and I am very happy with the lat­est ver­sion. I was con­sid­er­ing both Dru­pal and TYPO­light, but WP does every­thing I need and does it well.
My new design also makes heavy use of jQuery, which I am using to spruce up the site with some neat effects and also to sig­nif­i­cantly cut down on load­ing times through the use of AJAX; accord­ing to my tests, this iter­a­tion of minning.de is fastest I’ve ever devel­oped, even though it is by far the most com­plex per­sonal web­site I’ve worked on.

And thanks to web browser’s increased stan­dards com­pli­ance devel­op­ing this site was rel­a­tively pain­less and at times an actu­ally enjoy­able process. Fire­fox and Safari pretty much ren­der the way one expects them to.

At this point I’d also like to send out a really big F***YOU to Microsoft’s Inter­net Explorer.
From the get go I decided not to make any effort what­so­ever to sup­port IE6. Lit­tle did I know that IE7 would require per­sonal atten­tion as well.
It’s almost like Microsoft is inten­tion­ally try­ing to screw web devel­op­ers: They have accu­mu­lated nearly a hand­ful incom­pat­i­ble ver­sions that each require indi­vid­ual hacks and to top it off, you can’t install them at the same time to test your site – brilliant!

December 25 2006

How I switched and came back halfway

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So I finally gave in and switched to Mac. After about 15 years on Win­dows (and the occa­sional encounter with the Pen­guins), I got myself an iMac, mainly because it’s nice, portable and sup­pos­edly artist friendly. Also, I’m not happy with the direc­tion Microsoft is head­ing with Win­dows Vista. Don’t even get me started on all the Win­dows annoy­ances and “security”.

But I do ques­tion whether I made the right choice.

Now don’t get me wrong: I love this machine. It’s prob­a­bly the most solid com­puter I’ve ever used. As they say, “it just works”. The only prob­lem is: I don’t.
The utter lack of graph­ics soft­ware such as Pho­to­shop, After Effects (and var­i­ous plug-​​ins) and Maya in ver­sions that actu­ally run at half-​​decent speeds on this Intel machine is absolutely ridicu­lous. And that on a sys­tem that sup­pos­edly caters to artist’s needs? Pah!

Need­less to say, installing Boot Camp was the first thing I did after real­iz­ing the dearth of graph­ics soft­ware on OS X Intel, since switch­ing appli­ca­tions doesn’t make any sense for the sole ben­e­fit of run­ning them in the oh so pretty Mac OS.

My solu­tion for now: OS X has reduced itself to a fancy sys­tem for web-​​browsing and neat drop shad­ows. It’s gray Win­dows for every­thing else…

Just sad.

January 27 2006

The Plausible Impossible

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Well, as promised, my online shop opened today! Please visit the

The Plau­si­ble Impossible

for more infor­ma­tion on our upcom­ing AE plug-​​in suites Nor­mal­ity, Real­ity and Toxicity.

This is the first time I’ve opened a busi­ness, and they sure don’t go out of their way to make things easy for you: With all the forms to fill out, taxes to cal­cu­late and reg­u­la­tions to obey, you’d think they don’t want busi­nesses to open in Ger­many! More than once I’ve been at the point where I just thought “Ah, screw it!” and was about to throw it at all away. The first time actu­ally was the day wanted to reg­is­ter the busi­ness and went to the town-​​hall, only to spend hours wait­ing in dark hall­ways and being sent from door to door. At each door there was a hand­writ­ten note send­ing me to the next… “M is dealt with at B”… at door B: “M and B is dealt with at S”. It was quite ridicu­lous. Any­way, my appli­ca­tion went through and the web­site is online now, so it’s all good I sup­pose.
I just hope it pays out in one way or another, because the time spent plan­ning and man­ag­ing alone could have been spent on cre­at­ing a whole short film…

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