This is one of those times when I really wish I had more visitors. I really wish I could do a bigger service to this guy - and I hold hope that one day I will. Justin and his CartoonSmart tutorials are the biggest thing that made me the designer I am. I can’t ever thank him enough for all the things he has taught me. If you are interested in learning about Flash, then CartoonSmart.com is the website for you. Go check it out. I’m also putting the button on the sidebar.

One of my favorite features in Leopard escaped me when I was writing my first post-Leopard blog, but this post is here to set it right. Apple’s default email reader, Mail.app, has received significant upgrades. Apple seems fairly proud of their new “stationary”, which allows Mail.app users to send messages with HTML formatting (borders, framed pictures, etc). Personally I just see that as absurd — I am not looking forward to a generation where email takes 5 minutes to open because it’s so bogged down with images and useless formatting.

That said, Mail.app does have several great improvements. It now allows you to write yourself notes, and store them with IMAP, meaning you can transfer them to your iPhone or laptop, or some other device, fairly easily. Next is to-do lists, which work in much the same way. Both these features are very simple, but they add a lot to the program. No more iCal running in the background. iCal is great, but I can only afford room for one program.

The last great thing about Mail.app is quite timely for me. I’ve only recently started keeping up with world news, the economy, and things of that nature, as much as I should. Mail.app is going to make this even easier for me with its new built-in RSS reader. Safari simply doesn’t cut it as an RSS reader, because, let’s face it, Safari just isn’t built for that sort of thing. Mail.app is. Again, this is a very simple implementation of RSS, and I’m sure hardcore RSS freaks won’t be too thrilled. But for people like me, who can’t justify dedicating one app to RSS and RSS only, Mail.app’s new RSS capabilities are a very welcome addition.

I should also touch on QuickLook, because it is insanely cool. I don’t claim to understand how it works, but from my perspective this is a technological marvel. I can click a PDF document, touch my spacebar, and BOOM! In a matter of less than a second I have the full PDF in front of me. I have tested this on massive, graphically intensive PDFs that would have taken Tiger take 10-20 seconds to fully load up. Everything is instantaneous.

One last thing I’ll mention is the new voice, Alex. He is intended for the visually impaired, and reads words that are on screen. This has existed before, but the voices available were very robotic. Alex is a breakthrough, he sounds incredibly human-like (for a robot). I’m sure that Alex will have a huge impact.

Summarily, at least figuratively speaking, I’m currently screaming like a schoolgirl over Leopard.

And I’m still amused at this:

That’s right, folks, Leopard is here! I had it yesterday! Matter of fact, I was the first person in Utah to walk out of the Apple Store with box in hand! Everything about it is incredible…from the very packaging, to the beautiful new (but familiar) User Interface. It makes my computer SCREAM, presumably from the jump to 64-bit and an even tighter coding standard.

Excusing a few third-party applications that haven’t updated their apps to the “Leopard-look”, everything is very beautifully integrated. The shadows are subtler than before, and yet they do their job of showing you which window is active even better. The Finder bar’s transparency isn’t distracting, as I was slightly worried it might. The Dock is just simply amazing.

Spaces is even more incredible than I thought from the demos. It so so perfectly smooth. Even when my computer is under load, I am able to switch Spaces quickly and elegantly, with no to very little lag. One of my favorite things about Spaces is that it allows me to organize my screens in a way that there are only 2 or 3 open windows in any given Space. That means I get to see my desktop wallpaper a lot more frequently now, which is always a welcome sight. Before, it was rarely seen.

Time Machine is also incredible. The interface is so sleek and beautiful. It makes backing up your computer easy and automatic. The only gripe I have with Time Machine is that it has caused my hard drives to near-constantly emit that incessant clicking noise that means they’re moving files around. That said, I believe the main cause for this is that I have been installing apps and moving files to their new homes all night yesterday, so files were changing more drastically hour-to-hour than during normal use. The problem shouldn’t occur very much when I’m done settling in.

Safari 3 is so much better now. It’s faster, it’s more stable, it fixes all the bugs and gripes I had with Safari 3 Beta. It’s a beautiful, efficient browser, and among your choices: Firefox, Camino, Opera, Safari, at least for me, Safari is by far the best.

But I saved my absolute favorite thing about Leopard for last. I haven’t seen much buzz about this anywhere, which quite surprises me as I find it to be a very useful feature. You see, when your Mac recognizes a Windows server on your network, it shows you in the Finder sidebar. And if you get info on that, you will find that the default icon for a Windows computer on the network is a beige monitor showing the infamous Blue Screen of Death.

So can we expect Vista Service Pack 1 to show Macs on the network as Spinning Beachballs of Doom? But hey, I’d take a psychedelic spinning cursor over an ugly blue screen any day. That’s just me.

Video of the launch, unboxing, and install will come. Peace out.

Back in the 1970s, IBM was the biggest computer manufacturer and essentially the monolith that Microsoft is now. In the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs was a software designer and the business side to Apple. They were doing quite well into the early 1980s with their Apple II, which was quickly revolutionizing the world into one of personal computers. With Apple doing well and growing quickly, it was time to expand with partnerships and new staff.

Steve Jobs brough in two new characters that would ruin Apple for decades to come. First was a partnership with small software developer Bill Gates and his company, Microsoft. The other was a new CEO: John Sculley, then CEO of Pepsi Cola.

Bill Gates would soon leave Apple to develop his own company, now privy to top-secret Apple-eyes-only information, such as the GUI that was being developed, which would revolutionize the world yet again, and the newfangled “mouse” that went with it. Bill Gates used this information to catapult Microsoft into the Windows era. But more on that later.

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs was locked in a power struggle with now-CEO John Sculley. Jobs had developed software which would run on the Apple II and turn it into a business machine. Sculley insisted that this so-called “business machine” would canabilize sales of the Apple II. Jobs noted that the business and personal markets were entirely seperate, and that leaving the business market open was not a good idea. He said to Sculley, “do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?” However, reason does not always prevail, and Sculley won the struggle. Jobs left Apple.

Over the next decade or so, Sculley would transform Apple from what should and could easily have been the world’s supplier of computers and developer of the mainstream Operating System into a small niche company which made its sales only to graphic designers, and less and less of even that as Sculley’s reign continued.

Of course, Microsoft had no such idiot in power to hinder them. They had Bill Gates, who, when it comes to marketing at least, is pure genious. Microsoft grew while Apple shrank, and when they ran out of ideas, they just stole Apple’s already existing ideas. With Apple getting smaller and smaller, people began to think Microsoft actually had come up with many of these ideas, and we approach the early 2000s era where Microsoft is practically undisputed.

In 1996, however, Jobs had quietly returned to Apple, and was beginning to lay the foundations of an entirely new era, one which we have yet to see. In 2001, the iPod revolutionized the world and brough its attention back to Apple. Over the last 5 years, Apple has improved upon their products in ways that give Microsoft nausea.

Recently we have seen changes begin to take place that will lead to a day when Apple finally gets the audience it deserved from day 1. EA has announced simultaneous release for all major titles on Mac and PC. Bungie has announced an end to their exclusive partnership with Microsoft. Apple has an estimated 46% of the high-end personal notebook market share. These are just a few of the things that are happening that will ultimately lead to Apple’s return to world technology authority.

Until that day, I will continue to fight for the cause! Long live Apple, and death to Microsoft!!!

UPDATE: This is a _really_ boring podcast. Don’t listen to it. Seriously. Sorry, to those who already did. So sorry.

Going through this 43 Web Design Mistakes posted on Daily Blog Tips (at least 5 of which aren’t related to design in the least), I find I disagree with a rather large number of them. Overall, it’s a decent list, but I wanted to review the list in a podcast.

Good news, too, I finally figured out how to export an MP3 (although it’s a rather complex process). Apple, get your act together and support MP3 out of GarageBand directly!!!

That said, the Podcast is about 36 minutes long. I have no idea how I let it get so long, but there you have it. As a result the file size is rather large, so it might be a rather unfortunate wait for some of you on slower connections. Most browsers can stream MP3s, however, so you shouldn’t have to wait long.

LISTEN TO PODCAST - 35min48sec
MP3 (28.7MB) | M4A (16.9MB)

By the way, this is quite off-topic, but you should go pick up the new Foo Fighters album in iTunes. Now.

Not sure if I ever let you guys in on a little project I was working on last year called Blood Bath. Just shy of 400 man-hours went into it, and the end result was…well, not very good.

But anyway, there were 3 of us working on it, and we were forced to do things that we weren’t necessarily the best at. We’re doing a sequel (well, sort of…) and this time we’re doing it right by getting experts for every task. You can check out the details here: luminousnerd.com/bb/

BloodBath II will be a standalone movie, so you certainly won’t need to have seen the first to get it. In fact, the first is pretty unclear, and hard to get…this one will have a much better screenplay. Also, BloodBath II will be feature-length! That’s a long cartoon, especially independent. It’s going to be a lot of work and it’s going to take a long time, but the more people we have helping out the better it will be! Here’s a synopsis (taken from the home page at luminousnerd.com/bb/)

BloodBath II takes place in the aftermath of BloodBath I (see it here), in which two alien species invade Earth simultaneously. The Liquisects and the Humans make a pact when they see the might of the terrifying Savaa. The United Government, or UG, is a coalition of humans from every military and liquisects, and is the only hope against the Savaa. Unfortunately, there is also an extremist group of humans infiltrating the UG unexpectedly. This group, the Organization for Mother Earth (OME), believes that the Savaa are messengers of God and have come to cleanse the Earth.

Lief Torv, a famous reporter with information on the detailes of a new technology being developed at a Savaa Hive in Australia, is taken hostage by the OME. It is up to the UG, lead by Admiril Chance Vor, to get to that information as quickly as possible and infiltrate the Australian Savaa Hive in order to preserve any hope of what had very temporarily been peace on Earth. To make matters worse, the Savaa have sent Drones deep into Earth’s mantle which emit EMP waves, disabling much of the human technology and forcing them to redevelop technology using led, which blocks the EMP pulses.

Again, here’s the details: luminousnerd.com/bb/ If anyone reading this has an interest in the project, and has a skill that would benefit the project (professional level, please) then I’d love to hear from you!

Last night was the 3rd annual Telos Awards…and certainly the best yet. It’s a competition my high school puts on - awards for good movies, although this year they offered a few awards in visual art as well as audio composition and unmade screenplays. I was invited as a finalist, though they refused to tell me exactly which entry was a finalist. As such, I could only assume that it was the one I’d put effort into (the rest were simply entered on a whim) — Blood Bath. That’s the project myself and two friends have been working hard on for a total of 475 hours (that’s 81 hours of work per minute of animation) and had absolutely no question we would win Telos for.

That project, however, was not the winner; indeed, it wasn’t even nominated. It’s tough to say why not, because I personally think the final product was very nice (not to say we couldn’t have done better) and infinitely superior to a couple of the other entries which were picked as finalists. Alas, that is not my place — the judges did what they did, and we’ll have another shot next year.

At that point none of my projects had been announced in any categories, and the two categories that remained were the ones that Telos is all about - films - the big shuh-bam, the main prize. Best Film and Best Comedic Film. As all of my entries were either 2D animations or 2D artwork, I began to suspect that I had received the invitation erroneously. There was a time of suspense, one might say, while “Cheno” (Mike Chenoweth, Professor of Film) explained the prizes and some other things.

Then something rather unexpected happened - the Best Comedic Film category, like the others, had three nominations. Each and every one of the nominations was some short cartoon I’d produced and entered with low expectations. I won the second most important of the categories, by default. No one else entered! I really can’t believe this. The prize for that award was some $500 software called Vegas+DVD (Windows software, but I can easily sell it and buy Final Cut Studio 2, which will be coming out in a few months). Not to mention the cool trophy (pictured twice). I would feel much more deserving of this trophy had my cartoon won, but the prize for that category was software valued at $150, and that would have had to be split between three of us. This winning entry (Wally the Water Droplet) was all my own, so monetarily speaking it’s the best outcome of Telos this year.

Truth be told though, my mind was elsewhere during the entire assembly. Sure, I was excited for it, it was after all supposed to be the fruition of 475 hours of work…and I was trying hard to be as excited about it as I might have been had it taken place a week ago. Be it good or bad, that just wasn’t going to happen, as my mind was determined to think about a certain girl.

Her name’s Rhebecca and she’s way out of my league; in fact, she’s about as far out of my league as you can get. My league is that of overweight nerds who aren’t funny and don’t have much to offer (the lowest league). Her league is that of professional model/actresses who are amazingly beautiful and always “taken” (perhaps the highest league). Personally I don’t care much for the league system, but of course that’s easy for me to say

When I asked her out earlier this week, I did so more to find out how she would say no than anything else. But then there’s always (at least for me) that glimmer of chance that maybe she’d say yes. So my first question was, “hey Rhebecca, are you going out with anyone right now?” and the answer didn’t surprise me at first. With a smile, of course, “I am”. A few seconds later, or minutes as it seemed to me, came “not.” She wasn’t taken! Well, that still didn’t mean much without the follow up. “I was wondering if you’d consider going out with me some time…”

We all know what should have happened, assuming the rules of the league system. Either she would smile and laugh a little, and say “no thanks”, or perhaps outright grimace at the thought and maybe even slap me. Our school’s a fairly nice community, so I sure didn’t expect the latter. We’re not that far away from Earth, though, so I was prepared for ridicule. “Sure, I’d love to, where do you want to go?”

WHAT?! No. No way. I wasn’t prepared for this one. “Uhh..well, I didn’t really have a specific place in mind, but…” YOU DORK! You just screwed it all up! She said yes, you moron, and you don’t know where you’re going? Now she’ll grimace, now she’ll say “no thanks”. But it didn’t come…instead, one of the cutest laughs I can remember hearing, and “Okay, well just let me know where and we’ll go!” And then she hugged me! She hugged a fat nerd! It was awesome! And then she walked off.

I called her that evening to tell her what the date was, and make sure it was something she wanted to do. Then the next day, we saw each other, but she said nothing. I guess that’s my initiative, but every time I say anything to her it takes courage. I thought it was just my own fault until just before Telos. She’s active in the student body, and was there giving out raffle tickets to everyone as they came in. I was with my friends (the ones who I worked on Blood Bath with) Skaven and Bigtree. As we entered, she said hi to Bigtree, and took no notice of me. That stung.

I have no idea what it meant — most likely, she just didn’t see me — but it made my mind even more active than it had been for the last two days. What does that mean? Does she still want to go on the date? Is this normal before a first date? Is this just how it works, and I don’t know because the only thing I know about traditional dating is what I see on TV? It was all I could think about for the whole of the Telos Awards (and continuing through now). After Telos I decided to be proactive. I didn’t want to have a date with an amazing girl that I didn’t even feel comfortable talking with.

I approached her, and it took as much (or more) of me as it had when I first asked her out…this time I had more of the classic stutter than before. “Rhebecca, I was wondering if maybe I could call you some time over the weekend, you know, to, you know, just talk. Unless, I mean, not if you don’t want to, but…”

“Yeah, that’d be great!”

“Oh okay, cool, well, are you sure it’s cool, because I don’t want to bore you or…”

“No, that sounds fine!”

“Okay, great, cool, well, I’ll talk to you later then…”

“Okay, bye Jt!”

I have to put the exclamation point on everything she says, because she’s so happy, and so nice, and everything she says sounds exciting.

Still I wonder what “that sounds fine” means. Still I am curious whether it’s a pity date or something like that. Still I wish to know if she just said yes to all of this because she’s a really nice person and doesn’t want to say no. But still I possess that crazy bit of hope that she actually does like something about me, and that what I think of her now is true and she’s a very good person, and maybe…maybe…this could be something.

I’m not sure if my readers have been in such a situation before, or know what this is like. Either way you probably didn’t want to read all that, but I’ve been wanting to write it out. I’m sorry you had to sit through it. Wouldn’t it be ironic if she reads my blog?

I’m sure you all noticed the change over on the left of the site (the sidebar).  I did change a few things around.  I’m not sure if you noticed, but a while back my PexagonTech affiliate banner went down.  They accused me of trying to get “backdoor sales”, but I explained to them that I had attempted no such feat.  They made me start a new probation account.  It’s taken me this long to lose the laziness and get moving on that.

But while I was messing around with the sidebar, I realized that I don’t list the categories anywhere on the whole site, except a sort of list on the About page (which doesn’t even link).  Mostly, I just set up redirecting pages…a roundabout way of doing things.  So I cleaned up a bit of the code while I was at it, and we end up with this.  If anyone has any suggestions please use the Contact page and get in touch with me, or just comment on this post.

I have purchased a Mac Pro, which I will of course be reviewing, although I can tell you right now it will be a good review.

I also purchased a mouse pad from Func, which I hope will be a very good mouse pad. My Ice Mat is gone with my old computer, but Mac Mighty Mouse doesn’t go with it very well anyway. Hopefully they like this one. I’m sure they’ll like the picture on the mouse pad (custom designed by yours truly):

It seems I mistakenly overwrote the image. Sorry about that.

Blogs have been lacking lately. I have got to find something new to blog on. For now, all I can do is mention that with Combat Films and Research I could very possibly begin blogging on video games as they relate to war and actual combat. CFR is relaunching their blog The TOC and I’ve spend the past few days working mostly on that for them. In addition I’m working on a project for a company which wishes I not name them on this site. It’s to be the employment section of their website and will be a lot larger than most employment opportunity pages. We’re including testimonials, large descriptions of the environment, etc. I’ve pretty much finished the aesthetical side of it and am now working together with the staff to produce quality content. I can’t post a URL here, but email me if you would like to check that one out.

The computer’s gone and I’ve a lot further to go for my Mac than I’d expected. If anyone has $900 to loan me, let me know.

Sorry that’s all I’ve got right now. Peace, folks.