One of the first handmade fanart I ever got…
not counting pin-riddled voodoo dolls of course…
Another thing of importance, I think, is that these criteria should be evaluated dynamically (or cached whenever possible, but it’s not a good idea for a file-system browser to take a half-hour parsing the HD each time it starts): navigation should never be interrupted to scan the content of a folder or read metadata. Relevant data should be integrated progressively as they are read and file representation morphed accordingly to fit their new status (e.g. for a program like fsv, block should grow or shrink, change color and move around when their contingence and relevance becomes clearer to the system).
It would be essential that such a system integrates a powerful search tool to help navigating or filtering. This should be easy to do but I have not seen much of this in any projects lately. With HD routinely containing thousands if not millions of files, it is just vital to have ways to query a certain file by its name or type.
All these features, conjugated with one of these 3D file-browser project could give a seriously kick-ass software and help get past their sole purpose as futuristic eye-candy.
And now for the complaining about how little time I got and how I’d love to implement such a thing one day soon… yea whatever…
Movable Type 3 Developer Edition is out.
Stirred quite a controversy and lots of anger, huh…
To conclude, it might be more realistic and in tune with the market to offer a personal use license for under $30 that covers up to a dozen blogs/authors, while charging “real” commercial prices for corporate use. As for me, I think I will stick with this version for a while and might consider switching to WordPress in the future: its architecture is definitely nicer, and the fact it is open-source and written in PHP makes it infinitely more appealing to my inner-geek (plus the moral bonus of being able to contribute by coding)…
Yet Another Party Announcement
If these upcoming party announcements are becoming a bit monotonous for you, that’s because they are, believe me… So this is the last one, I promise, and precisely to tell you where Party Notices will be posted from now on.
Let me introduce our brand new NativeTokyo page (that is, until we get nativetokyo.com launched). For now, it contains details for two parties in May:
Candy in Shibuya on Friday, May 21st Free Day Party in Yoyogi Park on Sunday, May 23rdyou there!
Here it is at last. I just finished a first version of the flash flyer for our May 23rd Party in Yoyogi koen.
This flash anim is definitely not a work of art. There are many things I am not quite happy with, and I kind of botched the sound editing. But this will have to do, as I’m a tad busy trying to ingurgitate a few hundred nasty pages of applied mathematics and quantum mechanics in time for next month’s finals. All this, naturally, on top of my regular full time job and musical activities.
The skinny:
More details soon enough, along with a map. Send me a note if you wanna receive an update.
Went to the Spiral Independent Creators Festival last Monday and finally took the time to upload a bunch of pictures on my gallery page.
On display were the creative works of about 30 artists, making the first of two groups to be voted upon by the public. I must say I was not really blown by any, though more than a few were worth the trip.
Works ranked from purely artistic to practical design ideas with a bunch of goofy gadgets in the middle.
Apart from a few graphic pieces that could not be given any justice with my crappy digicam, some things that caught my attention were:
The Playstation DJ Set-Up (only there as a sponsored product, not really an “independent creator”, but anyway). Although I was expecting the usual slick-but-useless PS2 gadget game, I was floored by the demo the guy gave me.
In a nutshell, the DJ Box presents you with a split screen, on each side of which you can load, play, cue and mess with, any audio track previously saved on the hard drive (an additional HD component is the only special requirement, according to the guy). When tracks are selected and played on each virtual turntable, beats are graphically symbolized by small lines moving vertically, kinda like a conveyor belt. You can either pitch and cue manually or use the autosync, which did a perfect job (at least on the prepackaged, extremely basic samples used in the demo: I’d be extremely curious to see how the beat detector behaves with more serious tracks). So far, quite the minimum you’d expect from any attempt at recreating a DJ setup on a console/computer…
But beyond this, I must say any standard feature I could think of had been covered. Not only did scratch and manual pitch work fairly nicely with the control pad (the two analog paddles controlling each one a turntable), but it also had effects (filters, delay etc) and even a sampler (did not get to play with it though). I thought I had found the flaw when I inquired about the possibility to monitor your mix, since there’s obviously only one audio output on a PS2, but the guy told me you just needed a USB adapter (speaker or headphones, I guess) to get a split monitor on top of the master out.
So all in all, it looked quite impressive, nearly too impressive actually, as I must say the interface did not look anything as easy as it could have (why replace nice easy presets “flanger”, “reverb”, “echo” effects by a single highly configurable but much less intuitive “delay” effect)… I guess that’s part of the game (you don’t want it to look like a wanabee toy, this has to be the real thing). Unfortunately, I was unable to see how it fared with real tracks and real DJing action, but I bet it won’t be long before there’s a bunch of Japanese Otakus out there able to rival Q-Bert with their console.
Another cool idea, was this glass panel made to look like frosted glass (the kind where the glass seems broken in small pieces) that turned out to be filled with small bubbles. A pipe at the bottom leaked bubbles in the interstice made by two sheets of glass and the result was quite mesmerizing (especially when you realize the trick and start catching the small bubble snaps occurring randomly inside the window).
Other than that, many minor but nifty ideas, such as these clothes entirely made out of tarpaulin or a project to re-brand Tokyo’s Subway with jungle animals logos for each line…
Some guy was even showcasing the archives of what was essentially a moblog (keitai pics sent by email and archived online): presented very nicely, but quite far from groundbreaking…