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Tuesday, March 16, 2004 |
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I've been using a demo version of Curio over the past couple of days to put together a pitch for Pattern Builder and a lesson in modelling styles. I found it quite a liberating tool to use. It gives you the freedom to draw scribbles, as you would on a piece of paper, when you're working out your ideas. Because they are just scribbles, you don't mind changing them or even abandoning them. Once you're happy with the rough ideas you can replace the scribbles with proper line drawings. The ability to work on a large canvas, as in The Big Picture, helps you to avoid the Death by PowerPoint syndrome. Curio took a while to get used to. To start with, the floating palette is a real pain; it doesn't matter where you put it, it always ends up on top of where you want to be. [Apple, these things are a pain in the arse in every application they appear in. Why can't we just have nice docking palettes that don't obstruct the work piece?] After a while I got the hang of the keyboard short cuts. They speeded things up a lot. After I constructed the Pattern Builder pitch in Curio I tried out the export options. There wasn't much there; Curio will export to a PDF file, but this results in your big, graphical idea being scattered across a dozen sheets of what ever the printer happens to be full of. You can turn page markers on in Curio so that you can judge where your idea sheet is going to be sliced up. I think this rather defeats the spirit of the tool, which aims to give you the creative freedom of a white board or flip chart. I asked Curio about this and they said that they would be separating the diagram sizing from the print sizing in a future release. The PDF paging left me with a problem: How do I get all this 'good stuff' onto a web page so that the world can see it? Fortunately, I found another way to export idea sheets. I fired up Freeway and created a new site. Then I selected all in a Curio page, copied it and pasted into a new Freeway page. With a bit of fiddling about I got a graphic of the Curio page in Freeway and uploaded it to my web space. [Sadly, Freeway couldn't manage the upload for some reason; I had to do it with Fetch.] Curio has a search interface built into it. I used it to find images of the American and Indian flags for a piece that I was going to write. Having a built-in 'creative' search is really cool. I can see where Curio's true market lies.
I'm a software engineer, not a creative type in the advertising sense, so I don't think I'd make full use of Curio's search and asset management facilities. I did like the freehand scribble facility but, apart from that, I could have done everything else that I need to do in OmniGraffle. Consequently, I don't think it's worth $99 to me, but if you are a real 'creative' type, it'll be well worth the price. |
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Yeah, yeah, all right, I'm going... 2:16:30 AM 
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I've been toying with the idea of turning Pattern Builder into a bona fide product. I would like some feedback from the Mac developer community (all three of us?) before I invest a whole load of my time and money into it. To this end, I have prepared a few html pages to give the curious a very quick idea of what Pattern Builder does for you. The emphasis is on pictures, not words. There's no need to worry about being bored to death by marketing guff. Anyone who is seriously interested can go along to Pattern Builder's main page for all the serious stuff. Please bear in mind that Pattern Builder is a home-brew project at the moment. Don't expect a polished web site. If you are a Mac developer, then please take a look at the quick overview, especially 'The Big Picture' and leave me a comment. All I want to know is: Does Pattern Builder look interesting enough to download? Please bear in mind that your 'No's are as important as your 'Yes's; without them, I won't know if any 'Yes's are one in five or one in one hundred.1:58:01 AM
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It's Zoë's fault, really. I was going to do something worthy this evening. I don't know what, but something worthy. Zoë's hair needed a brush and she said she'd sit still for it if we played Halo afterwards. She likes to be my lookout; at only five years old, she's not ready for a multi-user game, but she can shout if the bad guys turn up on the radar or my health's getting low. We did the hair brushing, then it was time for Halo. I got the kitchen timer and set it for twenty minutes. We set about escaping from the flood and the time just flew by. When the beeper went Zoe smacked it and we carried on. So it was her fault really. I've managed to get all the way to the end sequence, which I'm finding really hard. I never was much good with the Warthog. It slips around like it's on grease. I wonder if it's because my PowerBook is a bit underpowered, making the controls unresponsive, or if it's just my driving? I'm going to need many more runs at it before I make my final escape and watch the fireworks from space. I've only ever finished one action game before, and that was Blade Runner. I see a game, I think that looks worth buying, I play it, and then I lose interest in it. It happens time after time. Then, the next time I see an interesting game, the whole sorry cycle gets repeated. Still, I think it's worth buying all the crap games for that special gem you stumble across once in a while. My list of games worth buying:
Thinking about it, a lot of the unfinished ones were purchased during the holidays. Play was interrupted when I had to go back to work. For some, like Outcast, play has been terminated by Windows' version problems. Upgrade your OS and the things most likely to break are the games.
Civ II has a lot to answer for. I keep buying strategy games hoping they'll be that good; they never are. |
Last update: 3/4/04; 12:43:42 pm .
