Something big is coming.
So says Floyd Wray, a recognized expert in context records and language theory. He recently produced this most thoughtful enhanced scribed video. It’s worth a couple minutes of your time.
Also, his communication technique is something equally amazing. Enjoy!
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
On the BRINK?
September 2nd, 2010Too late for RevMobile?
September 2nd, 2010From the Ansca Mobile website, creators of the Lua script based authoring tool for Android, iPhone and iPad:
http://anscamobile.com/faq/ “Can I distribute my app on the iPhone App Store? Just purchase a one year subscription to the Corona Developer Program and you’ll be able to submit your very own app to the iPhone App Store. In fact, Corona developers are already distributing apps on the App Store. Check out some of the apps created by our customers at our Customers Page.” Many of you know my longtime business partner, Chris. He’s the original C coder of revBrowser and revSQLite and dabbles in Rev, but spends most of his time in the bowels of lower level languages and server api’s. He’s also spent time using Objective-C and Xcode– even building iPhone apps. Frankly, it’s hard to impress him– and I’ve worked with him since the mid 90′s. I asked him to take a look at revMobile and imagine my surprise when he came back seriously enthused about the app. I don’t remember his exact words, but he did mention he thought it had more potential than even Rev, and he had never seen something so easy to use to create iPhone apps. He was seriously pumped about the potential and future of the platform. And that was why I was so very sad, and MAD at Apple for what is now clearly no more than a change in licensing to only keep Flash off of iOS. Sadly, our dear revMobile was a casualty in what we all know was nothing more than a childish competition to see who’s was bigger. Certainly RunRev, nor Kevin were at fault. And the Apple apologists, like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, with his carefully crafted messages citing the protection of the platform’s integrity, first to market advantage, and lack of proper API support, are all silent– and missing. I’m sure they’re onto the next agenda item for Steve as he’s inviting them to top secret secret tours of the acoustic testing chambers in Cupertino, all the time his hand further up their posterior making their mouths move and fingers type. Bravo. Bitter? Yeah. A little. Still, is it really too late for revMobile? I spent a good part of last week reviewing the options out there and couldn’t find anything which works with the feature set I want, which includes a WYSIWYG IDE and editor, and is relatively simple to learn. Nope, doesn’t exist for the iPhone– not at least as far as I can tell. So, if all these other apps get a free pass on the license issue, then why shouldn’t RunRev try again? And not in 3 months, but now. I’ll gladly build an app for a client client of mine and submit it and see what happens. But, we need the tools. So, to CEO Kecin Miller, and others… What do you think?
http://anscamobile.com/faq/ “Can I distribute my app on the iPhone App Store? Just purchase a one year subscription to the Corona Developer Program and you’ll be able to submit your very own app to the iPhone App Store. In fact, Corona developers are already distributing apps on the App Store. Check out some of the apps created by our customers at our Customers Page.” Many of you know my longtime business partner, Chris. He’s the original C coder of revBrowser and revSQLite and dabbles in Rev, but spends most of his time in the bowels of lower level languages and server api’s. He’s also spent time using Objective-C and Xcode– even building iPhone apps. Frankly, it’s hard to impress him– and I’ve worked with him since the mid 90′s. I asked him to take a look at revMobile and imagine my surprise when he came back seriously enthused about the app. I don’t remember his exact words, but he did mention he thought it had more potential than even Rev, and he had never seen something so easy to use to create iPhone apps. He was seriously pumped about the potential and future of the platform. And that was why I was so very sad, and MAD at Apple for what is now clearly no more than a change in licensing to only keep Flash off of iOS. Sadly, our dear revMobile was a casualty in what we all know was nothing more than a childish competition to see who’s was bigger. Certainly RunRev, nor Kevin were at fault. And the Apple apologists, like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, with his carefully crafted messages citing the protection of the platform’s integrity, first to market advantage, and lack of proper API support, are all silent– and missing. I’m sure they’re onto the next agenda item for Steve as he’s inviting them to top secret secret tours of the acoustic testing chambers in Cupertino, all the time his hand further up their posterior making their mouths move and fingers type. Bravo. Bitter? Yeah. A little. Still, is it really too late for revMobile? I spent a good part of last week reviewing the options out there and couldn’t find anything which works with the feature set I want, which includes a WYSIWYG IDE and editor, and is relatively simple to learn. Nope, doesn’t exist for the iPhone– not at least as far as I can tell. So, if all these other apps get a free pass on the license issue, then why shouldn’t RunRev try again? And not in 3 months, but now. I’ll gladly build an app for a client client of mine and submit it and see what happens. But, we need the tools. So, to CEO Kecin Miller, and others… What do you think?
Our website is up! (mostly)
August 19th, 2010Dan and I have finally gotten around to finishing up the start of our website. You can see it at:
http://shaferwaltersgroup.com
Shot off: Vue and HyperShot
August 16th, 2010I've been following Bunkspeed's Hypershot for some time now. It's a very easy to use photoreal renderer, but a bit pricey for what you get. It turns out Bunkspeed ran into some licensing issues, and the HyperShot developers started their own new company, KeyShot. Meanwhile, Bunkspeed licensed another third party renderer and teamed up with NVidia to create their new product called "Shot."
HyperShot, KeyShot and Shot all tout super fast rendering speeds with photoreal results as their most significant feature. Here's a video which shows Shot in action:
Recently, I downloaded a trial copy of Shot to put it through it's paces. I don't have a fancy NVidia setup so I have to use the CPU only rendering mode. That said, it did seem to perform rather fast and I was able to crank out this basic quality level rendering in just 90 seconds. Here's a sample:
So, off I went to Vue to try and figure out how it would fare competing with Shot. Here's the render I created. It was rendered using Superior mode and completed in only 51 seconds.
There are differences for sure. The Mental Ray renderer of Shot seems to do a bit better on some of the light dispersion, but it also took twice as long and still has noise artifacts. Also, it really isn't an apples to apples comparison as Shot uses HDRI lighting while the Vue render uses my lighting rig from a previous post. I was able to use Shot's HDRI's inside of Vue, but they didn't work on this scene very well. This is because Shot has the concept of a "plate" which is sort of a seamless background / foreground and doesn't show the horizon line. The Vue render outside the rig using the same HDRI just didn't work. This is a feature I'm hoping Vue will one day have.
Also, I was able to do a number of smaller renders matching the Shot website with DOF and they took between 30 seconds and a minute on Final setting, which surprised me. They even had blurred reflections. Here they are:
So, what does this all mean? Well, it appears to me while Shot has a really cool 'rez-in' render feature, it's not really any faster than Vue. Of course one may say the quality of the Mental Ray renderer is superior, but I believe I can achieve some pretty good results in Vue, as evidenced above. I'll keep playing around and see where it takes me.
Lighting Setup for Modeling in Vue
August 16th, 2010I've been doing some modeling in Vue lately, and have been using this light weight lighting rig to be able to view my model from any direction without harsh shadows. It's also a poor man substitution for Keyshot and Hypershot renders as it creates very photoreal finished images.
See the video link below. The audio in this is terrible. I've got a bit of a cough and my mic is not working well. But, hopefully some of you will find something of value.
View on screencast.com »
The App 37 Signals Should Have Made
July 24th, 2010
The Secret to Managing Photo Albums on your iPad
July 21st, 2010GoodReader has all you need to manage multiple photo albums on your iPad. It can create folders and move images from your lame iPad Camera Roll to them. It works great with all sorts of online services, including my favorite Dropbox. And it has a great built in picture viewer with all the functionality of iPad’s own Photo App, including support for the VGA out adapter. Couldn’t be happier!
Kent’s pendant
July 6th, 2010My brother-in-law is an expert jeweler and he gave us all a great lesson on how to create this wonderful piece of jewelry check it out.
Vacation in North Carolina
July 3rd, 2010
Nieces Christina and Julia! Everyone is having a great time!
Scribing? What is it?
June 26th, 2010Over the years, I've been involved in a ton of brainstorming sessions. Some good, some bad, some GREAT! I don't know if there is a basic formula for success, but I've always believed getting folks involved was a key ingredient. Fast forward to something Dan recently shared with me, a scribed re-presentation by a talk given at RSA:
Wow! Of course this isn't a brainstorming session, but rather an animation of a whiteboard drawing in sync with a talk which was given earlier. The compelling nature of this sort of presentation cannot be denied. There are several reasons why I think this is the case:
- First of all, there's the whole viewer completion angle. The person watching the video has to 'connect the dots' regarding how the picture relates to what's on the screen. I believe this sort of approach creates a hypersensitivity for viewers enabling them to create a larger comprehension bandwidth than if watching video, a slideshow or someone talk. And for this reason, I believe this sort of presentation can only last at the most 7 to 10 minutes because after that point the brain just wears down and quits trying to make the connection.
- Also, a whimsical presentation like this one can liven up a presentation which had no life before. A friend of mine, Floyd Wray, who has done 20 years of research into "Cognition Records" points out rightly that over or under stating a situation can be funny, and engaging– which we see clearly in this video.
- And, watching this video, one gets the impression "It's not that hard to do!" Sort of like viewer completion only we feel it's something possible. So, unlike watching a full features 3D animation where you know $300 an hour experts used a billion processor cycles to create 10 frames of animation, here we have just one guy using a marker on a whiteboard. Of course upon further inspection, actually, it's not that easy. But the fact the scribing animation is done AFTER the talk allows for more time to think, setup, create trial pictures and then animate the whole thing. More on how I believe this can be done easily later.
What may be a harder job is the realtime scribing of a brainstorming session. For these it's more difficult as you pretty much have to think, and draw, on your feet, with little time for contemplation or mistakes. And it has to make sense– at least to the participants. Again, the concept of viewer completion helps significantly. While a casual observer may look at a scribed brainstorm session and not understand what is going on, you can be sure the folks who were present remember exactly the points the pictures made.
So, to that end, I thought I'd try scribing a brainstorm session with a client of mine who had hired a brand new Ad Agency and PR firm to begin the process of creating campaigns for a new product we've been working on for months. While I have never tried scribing before, I have moderated these type of sessions. Turns out it's pretty hard to provide direction, ideas, and scribe all at the same time. Lesson learned!
While 7 hours was a bit daunting, and very tiresome, I was able to create a number of whiteboard drawings, of which here are two of them. There's some distortion as I had to combine multiple iPhone camera shots together to get the whole picture, and I did have to whiteout the clients name, but it's a start. And there certainly is room for improvement. I have some ideas on how to do better. I'll talk about those on a later blog post.
