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Thursday, 6 June 2002 |
Worth reading.
12:28:33 PM 
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For multimedia producers, Director is their first choice simply because nobody seems to know about the existence of iShell. Yet Director has many pitfalls, including the one that to build crossplatform multimedia you need a Macintosh and a Windows machine and two copies of Director, not just one. And all that costs a lot of money.
Here are some quotes from the iShell website.
iShell, a remarkably powerful, but easy-to-use multimedia authoring tool. In the marketplace, iShell competes with Macromedia Director and Authorware, but promises much faster development times and more stable end results. All of this in an inherently cross-platform environment—there is no need to buy two versions of iShell.
Who uses iShell? All sorts of people, from programmers to artists, but non-programmers especially like iShell’s visual, intuitive interface. Our fastest areas of growth among new professional users are: graphic artists, designers, digital photographers, video editors and sound masters. But, we also have many users migrating to Tribeworks and iShell from Hypercard, Supercard, Director, Authorware, mTropolis and Apple Media Tool (AMT).
iShell is free.
12:13:34 PM
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From the Font Reserve/DiamondSoft email newsletter:
Font Reserve 3.1, slated for the second quarter of 2002, will expand your font management capabilities by providing support for the new OpenType format, Apple’s new dFonts, double-byte fonts, and Windows TrueType fonts in Mac OS X.
Illustrator 10 and InDesign 2.0 users will soon benefit from Font Reserve’s auto-activation plug-ins. The plug-ins use DiamondSoft’s Font Sense technology to automatically activate fonts with pinpoint precision as you open documents. These plug-ins will operate in the Mac OS X publishing environment.
At long last! Full font support coming eventually. OpenType is a terrific font format for many very good reasons. I want to use OpenType fonts with every graphics and design application, but you need your font manager application to support them first, and Font Reserve is the best font manager around.
Read more about OpenType at http://www.adobe.com/type/opentype.
12:01:08 PM
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What is it with the people of Perth and photographic printing paper?
When I was teaching photography in universities here, ordering prints from commercial labs in the past, and now that I am doing it again, I have constantly come up against a bizzare obsession to do with photo paper.
I just got a call from the guy making the prints for my show opening Friday, and he still does not seem to have got it into his head as to exactly what I want. It is as if I am breaking all the known laws of Man and God, and he just wants to really be sure before he assists me in condemning myself to Hell.
Photographic printing paper comes in a series of dimensions that are arbitrarily determined. In Australia, they sell it in inches, a unit of measure that is supposed to be illegal. Inches vanished from common use so long ago that I cannot even visualise what an inch is. The paper these prints are to made on is apparently 20 x 32 inches.
I want my prints made so that the image is not cropped at all, under any circumstances. The image is sancrosanct. I design the image in-camera, and do not screw around with it later when it is being printed. If it is cropped, then the image’s graphics, content and meaning falls apart. You would think that if I asked a lab to print the whole of the image, then they would do that.
But here it has always been a problem. Labs hate not cropping the image. They have an obsesssion about using up every last little bit of the photo paper by covering it with photograph. If that means arbitrarily hacking into and slashing at a carefully-designed photograph, then they will happily do that. If it means the picture falls apart and looks like shit, then they gladly take that path. It makes them happy. It makes me furious.
These printers would rather waste millimeters of an image for the sake of centimeters of paper, even if it seriously weakens the image or damages altogether it by losing essential data.
When I was teaching it was exactly the same. Students had real battles with themselves to force themselves not to crop the image just for the sake of filling up the whole sheet of paper. There were feelings of intense guilt for having “wasted” a centimeter of paper. They would rather make badly cropped prints than not use the whole sheet. My God!
When you use the term full-frame elsewhere in the world then it means the full frame of the image, of the photographic film. Apparently that meaning has been turned on its head in Perth and it means the full sheet of photographic paper, regardless of any conflict between the proportions of the negative or transparency and that of the paper. That was the sticking point in today’s conversation with the printer.
11:34:02 AM
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The freeware Mozilla 1.0 web browser has been released by developer organization Mozilla.org.
Definitely worth grabbing and using. I am about to download it today. I usually resort to an earlier version when I get sick of Internet Explorer exploding, or of Opera’s still incomplete JavaScript support. If Mozilla proves to work well in conjunction with UserLand Radio, then I will make it my number one web browser.
11:08:31 AM
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Go get it, people!
10:51:57 AM
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From MacCentral: Mac OS X 10.1.5 has been released, available via the Mac OS X Update Panel. The long-awaited Mac OS X 10.2 upgrade is expected to be released in the northern summer.
10:48:29 AM
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The Apple eMac—their all-in-one G4 computer for educators and students—is now available for everyone to buy. Its US price is $1099, so the Australian one will be over double that. That is still a good price for a machine with a 17-inch monitor and the ability to run Mac OS X well.
I badly need a machine that can do the latter, as this manky old upgraded Mac clone runs Apple’s wonderful new Unix-based operating system slowly and badly. It should not even run X at all, in fact.
Although I would have preferred to be able to buy a PowerBook G4 or dual-processor G4 for real power and limitless capabilities, I need something better right now, so the eMac looks to be it. When your work is all done on computers, you find you need more than one, or even two, anyway.
This eMac for consumers is only slightly different to the eMac for education, which I may be able to buy as a part-time teacher. Here are the consumer model specifications:
- 17-inch flat CRT display (16-inch diagonal) with up to 1280-by-960 pixels in 24-bit color;
- 700 MHz PowerPC G4 processor;
- 128MB SDRAM;
- CD-RW optical drive;
- 40GB ATA Hard Drive;
- built-in 10/100BASE-T Ethernet;
- a 56K V.90 modem;
- support for optional AirPort wireless networking;
- integrated 16-watt digital amplifier and stereo speakers for great stereo sound;
- an audio-in port, headphone jack and microphone;
- NVIDIA GeForce2 MX AGP 2X graphics with 32MB of Double Data Rate (DDR) video memory;
- Apple’s optical Pro mouse and full-size Apple Pro Keyboard;
- Mac OS X version 10.1.4, Mac OS 9.2.2; and
- a software bundle that includes Quicken Deluxe 2002, AppleWorks, QuickTime, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mac OS X Mail, WorldBook Mac OS X Edition, PCalc, OttoMatic, Deimos Rising and Acrobat Reader.
10:36:30 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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