After Effects = Awesomely Sucky.

I am now an official After Effects addict. (this is a problem, conflicting with my Battlefield: Bad Company 2 addiction!)

After Effects is extremely cool and has awesome features, but it’s clearly no more than your average Adobe product- buggy as hell.  Text will start flying in random places, but after a render it’s back to normal.  What?

Oh, and apparently OpenGL features aren’t supported with my GPU, yet looking at the OpenGL info section in Preferences everything is supported.  Eh?

Can’t wait for CS5 (even though Adobe seems pretty consistent at not fixing problems)

Mica WindowBlinds Skin for Windows 7 is up!

This was a massive update to Mica, adding lots of new things and tweaking many others to make it kick as much butt as possible.

Download it from WinCustomize »

Cairo is Open Source

Just in case you haven’t read this already, Cairo Shell has gone open-source via GitHub.  All you fellow developers out there, head on over and write some code!

Chuck!

…is back!  The first three episodes have been great.  Click me to watch them on Hulu.

All Phones Suck

So, I was looking at different smartphones tonight and every single platform seems to suck in a big way (by platform, I’m talking about WinMo, BlackBerry, Android and iPhone).  I’m not even looking at the phones with weird firmware that doesn’t have a large developer base.

Windows Mobile I don’t think I even need to go into.  I can’t even say it with a straight face!

BlackBerry has a terrible browser and has a plastic keyboard.  The Storm is a joke of a BlackBerry and I won’t go into that either.  A crappy browser is a huge thing for me since the number one thing I would do on a phone is browse the web over the air.

Android shows a lot of promise, but still feels quite immature.  The usability is horrendous and the UI is not fluid at all (for example, when you’re scrolling and hit the top of a list, it just *stops* rather than bouncing a la iPhone).  As for usability, most options are hidden unless you go to the device’s physical buttons (or software buttons off the screen surface).  Another biggie is that there appears to be no way to scroll to the top of a list or page without giving your fingers a workout.

The iPhone OS doesn’t have any of the issues I’ve listed above, but still has a ton.  The first thing is that the device is closed (unless you like breaking warranties) which is a pain for people like me who crack something open the day they get it.  Another irritating thing is the lack of proper multitasking support.  Yes, you can get that by jailbreaking, but the skimpy amount of free RAM on the device doesn’t allow for much.  The OS also seems to bog down after a while and needs a reboot in order to get stuff done.  Oh, and it’s only available on AT&T which is useless here.

Since I already have an iPod touch, I don’t see any reason to go with the iPhone.  I’ve been eyeballing Android, but after giving it a little test-drive in an emulator I think I’m going to wait to see what comes in the next few updates.

Screw You, technology.

Just found out that no backups of the PCs have been happening for ages due to insufficient space on the Linux server.  What, am I supposed to find out when I need to restore the backups?

*buys a larger drive for the server*

Alek’s Controllable Christmas Lights for Celiac Disease

What’s better than looking at Christmas Lights and blowups during the holiday season?

Controlling them.

I’ve spent so many hours just playing with this person’s front yard it’s ridiculous.  Who knew this could be so addicting?

Controllable Christmas Lights »

NoiX for Windows 7

Yeah, I’m back into skinning again. (If you’re not familiar with my stuff, head on over to my skins gallery at WinCustomize by clicking the little green guy over on the right or by clicking me.)

The last time I even touched skins was over a year ago, before Windows 7 was first previewed at PDC08.  Due to its awesomeness, it’s the only version of Windows I have used since.  Unfortunately, this means that all of Stardock’s stuff was broken for me until just recently.  With WindowBlinds 7 and today’s awesome new build of SkinStudio 7, I can now update my stuff and get rolling on creating new skins also.

Since there are very few skins to guide off from in figuring out how exactly to skin some elements of Windows 7, it’s been somewhat of a pain to get stuff working correctly (Luckily, I’m dedicated ;) ).

The first skin that I’m giving the Win7 treatment is NoiX, even though it’s not my most recent skin.  Why?  Because I like it better.

Here’s a sneak peek of the progress so far.  You can see that I’ve re-done the All Programs button to not be fake (looks and works much nicer in Vista and 7 now), skinned the search bar, shutdown button, new taskbar elements, and fixed things that 7 broke.  I’ve tweaked some other areas of the skin as well that you’ll have to find in the final release :)

Weekly Tip #5 - What’s that song?

This has happened to everyone- you hear a song, absolutely love it, but have no idea what it is or who it’s by. There are many mobile apps that will do that, but what if you’re using your computer and hear, say, a song on a YouTube video that you like.  Rather than cranking up your speakers and holding your phone near them, I have a better way.

First, download Tunatic from http://www.wildbits.com/tunatic/ (compatible with Windows and Mac OS X). This handy app can identify songs and then offer quick links to iTunes, where to get it as a ringtone, or lyrics for that song.

Tunatic will use your default audio input device to identify the song, which is probably your microphone (which doesn’t get us any better results than a mobile device).  We need to fix that, so here are instructions for the Mac OS and Windows since this is a cross-platform application.

Windows XP: Open the Start menu, choose Accessories, then Entertainment, and open Volume Control. Open up the Options menu and choose Properties.  Select the Recording radio button, and place a checkmark next to “Stereo Mix” in the list below. Unfortunately, if this doesn’t appear your hardware isn’t capable of doing this. Now press OK and you should see the Recording Control window.  Place a checkmark next to “Select” in the Stereo Mix section.  Make sure the Stereo Mix volume is turned up. Now, open Tunatic, play the song you want to know about, and press the magnifying glass button in Tunatic.

(XP screenshots courtesy http://www.fxaudioeditor.com/xp_recording_problems.htm)

Windows Vista/7: Right-click the Volume icon in the system tray area of the taskbar and choose “Recording devices.” Right-click in the white area of the list that appears and select “Show disabled devices.” Find “Stereo Mix,” right-click it, enable it, and remove the checkmark next to “Show disabled devices.” Unfortunately, if this doesn’t appear your hardware isn’t capable of doing this.

Now, choose Stereo Mix and click the “Set Default” button. Select Stereo Mix again, click the Properties button, choose the Levels tab, and make sure the volume is up.

Then press OK and OK again. Now, open Tunatic, play the song you want to know about, and press the magnifying glass button in Tunatic.

Mac OS X: To do this on OS X, you must install Soundflower from http://www.cycling74.com/downloads/soundflower. Make sure to install the correct version for your version of OS X. Then, open Soundflowerbed from the Soundflower folder that was installed into the Applications folder on your hard drive. It will open as a menu bar item. Choose its menu bar icon, and select your output device in the menu (probably Built-In Output if you use your Mac’s speakers or speakers connected via an audio jack).

Then, open the Sounds system preference pane (see last week’s tip for shortcuts to doing this) and select Soundflower (2ch) for your Output and Input.

Now, open Tunatic, play the song you want to know about, and press the magnifying glass button in Tunatic.

That’s it, enjoy!