Remember, Messenger has a revenue stream embedded in it: complex (possibly animated) user icons, emoticon packs and "winks" and "nudges". I don't use them, you probably don't either, but I have a freelance job making them for American Greetings (and a few of their subsidiary brands).
I don't know the details of the money, but I know that AG makes an amount of money off of these things that's kinda surprised them, and it would not shock me at all if Microsoft gets a little something off of every one of these things someone buys. (Probably does: Wikipedia notes that winks, etc, can be digitally signed, and the official client won't play ones that aren't signed by MS. How much do you pay to have them signed, hmm?)
(Ironically, I'll probably never see my work live - I use Adium for my IM, and it's not going to happen until some time after Gaim implements it.)
See, I was trying to make a joke. My IM usage patterns are such that I almost never initiate a conversation, much less pass a link around - so a worm that successfully managed to masquerade as me would just kinda, you know. Sit there.
People like nudges enough that there's a revenue stream involved in them. I only ever learnt about them when I got hired to do 'em freelance for American Greetings. It seems they're making a pretty good amount of money off the damn things. (and off of custom emoticons)
Me, I'll never see my work in an IM client, as I use Adium on a Mac. If Adium ever adds the capability to understand nudges, I'll probably turn it off the instant I upgrade. (Is there a "no goddamn nudges" switch in the MSN client, I wonder?)
The only thing I find Adium lacking in is audio/video capabilities, and file transfer reliability issues...
Not in New Orleans. Phone service is still out in a lot of the city, as is power. My mother could have moved back into her old apartment - it was structurally sound, the water only went halfway up the first floor and she was on the second - but there's no power, no gas, no water, no sewage, no phone there.
Long, long lines impair readability - I find it a lot harder to read something that's stretched all the way across the screen. I have to work harder to figure out where the start of the next line is when I flick back across tens of inches. This is part of why newspapers are laid out with columns - easier, faster reading.
I actually design most of my web stuff to float prettily on wide layouts, but to keep the text at a width designed for comfortable reading. Measured relative to the font size, so when you do apple+/- to resize the text, it doesn't get crammed into a suddenly-too-thin column...
Will there be a Macintosh version of Expression Graphic Designer?
No. Expression Graphic Designer will not available on the Macintosh platform.
Is Expression Graphic Designer a new version of Creature House Expression?
Expression Graphic Designer is a product based on the Creature House Expression products.
Expression was a very cool graphics package - it did natural media effects, like Painter, but it did them with infinitely editable and resizeable vector representations. The piece I did with the demo (using the default brushes that come with the program) a few years back, when too broke to buy a full copy, was a lot of fun. When I had cash available to buy the thing, Microsoft had eaten Creature House and taken Expression off the market.
Like a lot of artists, I use Macs. I was afraid that whatever Expression turned into would be Windows-only, but my reaction to this actual release is still a hearty "fuck you, Microsoft".
Oh yes - I'd also like to point out to the original poster that an SVG or PDF representation of my art is a lot larger than a web-resolution bitmap. Print-res is a different story. But I'd rather not put print-res images online!
I've tried Expression, Canvas, Flash, and Freehand. I stick with Illustrator. I enjoyed playing with Expression's natural-media tools, but as a Mac owner, I'll probably never see another version now that MS ate it, and I don't want to find myself depending on an orphaned app...
What about the chemistry between the Doctor and Jack? They're a match made in slash heaven! The Doctor's a time-travelling alien of ambiguous sexuality, and Jack's a saucy time-hopping pansexual rogue!
Okay, I still wish the tree-girl from the second episode had stayed on. "Breath from my lungs". Rowr.
I just don't really see any signs that the Doctor's interested in Rose. Physically. But him and Jack... there's something left unsaid!
Offhand, I don't think any of my friends have a dedicated DVD player. We have PS2s and our computers have DVD drives, but the only people who might have a box whose main purpose is "play DVDs" are the ones whove sunk a lot into their AV setups... and even then. They all have PS2s. And might not have bothered.
I don't think I even know anyone who's bothered to get one of those remote controls for their PS2. We all just poke haphazardly at the controllers until what we want happens.
So, yeah. If I was in the market for a New Console, and was intending to only have one hooked up, Nintendo would have a strike against it for the no DVD thing.
Until I found myself with a housemate who likes to watch stuff off the air regularly, it still got used: videogames was the main reason I bought the thing, but it was also used for video-tapes and DVDs.
I class myself as someone who almost never watches TV, yet I have a nice-sized one that sees use.
I was going to suggest "literature" or "art" or something like that: something not technical, something that will expose you to ways of thinking where there is not One True Way to solve a problem, something soft and squishy.
Because life's pretty boring when everything in it's an engineering problem, including other people. Get yourself some abstract knowlege that's useless, but fun.
this phenomenon could become even more regional in the days to come
I dunno. Most of my multiplayer roleplay is textual these days, on a small place with probably only a few dozen players. It's somewhat East Coast biased, but I'm one of the major players, and I live in California; players are scattered across the northern continental US and the world.
One of the major strengths of the net, in terms of community, has always been its role in making it easier for really arcane interests to be shared. This place I'm into is, indeed, rather isolationist in its own way, as it's also very elitist at heart. And some interesting real-world ties have begun to happen because of this thing, too.
Now if I could just decide if you're saying my LJ is sometimes +5 Insightful, or if you're saying I'm occasonally found around people who're regularly so. Or both. Maybe both.
The front page of LJ used to say something like "Tell the world about your life! Create a Livejournal!". Now it's more marketspeaky stuff about blogging.
Most LJ users I know put a lot of thought into what they write. Sometimes it's about their life. Sometimes it's about other things. Sometimes these are intertwined.
I have a friend who has five or so different LJs, for different purposes. Me? I've thought of separating things out, but in the end, I prefer to keep my sketchbook scans and finished art intertwined with the rest of my life. The focus is on my life and thoughts, not "my thoughts on politics", "my thoughts on CSS", "my art", "my sex life", or whatever.
I don't see any technology advantage to LJ in this. I don't know what their finances are like; they need a lot of bandwidth for their tons of active users and the many user icons. And they recently started an integrated photo-hosting thing, too.
Is LJ turning a profit or breaking even? Is 6A? I don't know. I believe LJ is supported mostly by paid users, not by venture capital - it's never positioned itself as an Internet bubble thing.
On the other hand, LJ has really nice comment-spam blocking (partially due to their size; they can detect an address flooding lots of journals with similar crap in ways an individual blog can't), while 6A's been fighting a losing battle against comment-spam on both TypePad and individual MT installations - my LJ has anonymous comments turned on, and I've gotten about three spam comments in its entire life.
As to all the people dismissing LJ as whiny 12-year-old girls... you can find self-absorbed blogging teenagers on Blogger, TypePad, and personal Movable Type/Wordpress/etc installations. LJ has no monopoly. It's just that there's no 'random personally hosted blog' link the way there's a 'random LJ' link, and the 'blogroll' column taking up screen real estate on the front of your blog isn't as easy to peruse as someone's LJ friends list.
Wait and see, I guess. I already had my internet rumor freakout of the month yesterday when I read about Adobe's plans for the next release of Illustrator.
the "HTTP" component is available (like wget) to any app that calls it
The version of KHTML that Safari relies on is part of OSX now. There are a couple of "alternative browsers" that rely on this for their rendering, but more interesting are other apps:
xJournal, the LiveJournal client I use, provides a live web preview for very little code.
Adium, a multi-protocol IM client, uses this for its message windows.
Most every coder's editor offers live web previews. I think SubEthaEdit was the first. It's addictive to tweak your HTML/CSS in realtime.
There are probably other tools that use this. This is what I can think of offhand.
If you know an artist, ask them to do art for you. Offer whatever skills/toys you want in exchange.
Why? Learning to create compelling images is hard. It takes about five years of fairly intensive practice and study - figure drawing, observation, caricature of the world around you.
Anyone can learn to draw, just as anyone can learn to program, but whatever the discipline, they have to put in the time to practice. Being able to make effective small-scale graphics like icons is harder than it looks at first; theres little space to get the point across in. (Blow up screengrabs sometime; take a look.)
If its appropriate for your program, consider some kind of skinning mechanism - that can net a number of looks for the thing from users, for little visual effort on your part. Especially if youre willing to run a little archive on your site.
Wikis have other uses for online games, as well! A story-oriented MUCK I participate in uses a wiki as a repository for information; we were initially intending to run a Lexicon set in the game-world, but ended up making a constantly-evolving reference for the players instead.
(Sorry, no links - there's some elements of this muck that are terribly easy fodder for trolls, and we practice mild security through obscurity.)
And no, Stuffit Expander can't compress stuff. Use the DropStuff program that's sitting right next to it.
I always found Windows's tendency to put the menu bar in program windows an obnoxious abberation. It was at the top on the early Macs, it was at the top on the Amiga.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, Messenger has a revenue stream embedded in it: complex (possibly animated) user icons, emoticon packs and "winks" and "nudges". I don't use them, you probably don't either, but I have a freelance job making them for American Greetings (and a few of their subsidiary brands).
I don't know the details of the money, but I know that AG makes an amount of money off of these things that's kinda surprised them, and it would not shock me at all if Microsoft gets a little something off of every one of these things someone buys. (Probably does: Wikipedia notes that winks, etc, can be digitally signed, and the official client won't play ones that aren't signed by MS. How much do you pay to have them signed, hmm?)
(Ironically, I'll probably never see my work live - I use Adium for my IM, and it's not going to happen until some time after Gaim implements it.)
No, it's Saturday morning and I'm in bed with both of my boyfriends.
The only drive I'd want are the ducks, though I suspect one of my lovers might covet all that sushi.
See, I was trying to make a joke. My IM usage patterns are such that I almost never initiate a conversation, much less pass a link around - so a worm that successfully managed to masquerade as me would just kinda, you know. Sit there.
So it'll really not be interested in actually talking with anyone, and never start a conversation? Not much of a virus, then.
People like nudges enough that there's a revenue stream involved in them. I only ever learnt about them when I got hired to do 'em freelance for American Greetings. It seems they're making a pretty good amount of money off the damn things. (and off of custom emoticons)
Me, I'll never see my work in an IM client, as I use Adium on a Mac. If Adium ever adds the capability to understand nudges, I'll probably turn it off the instant I upgrade. (Is there a "no goddamn nudges" switch in the MSN client, I wonder?)
The only thing I find Adium lacking in is audio/video capabilities, and file transfer reliability issues...
Not in New Orleans. Phone service is still out in a lot of the city, as is power. My mother could have moved back into her old apartment - it was structurally sound, the water only went halfway up the first floor and she was on the second - but there's no power, no gas, no water, no sewage, no phone there.
No, it's difficult to evolve without reproduction. I know a fair number of geeks who have lots of emphatically non-reproductive sex...
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I installed Privoxy on my boyfriend's computer. And I interrupt his browsing now and then for (half-)naked cuddles.
I'd say that some women are much greater than Firefox.
Long, long lines impair readability - I find it a lot harder to read something that's stretched all the way across the screen. I have to work harder to figure out where the start of the next line is when I flick back across tens of inches. This is part of why newspapers are laid out with columns - easier, faster reading.
I actually design most of my web stuff to float prettily on wide layouts, but to keep the text at a width designed for comfortable reading. Measured relative to the font size, so when you do apple+/- to resize the text, it doesn't get crammed into a suddenly-too-thin column...
Expression was a very cool graphics package - it did natural media effects, like Painter, but it did them with infinitely editable and resizeable vector representations. The piece I did with the demo (using the default brushes that come with the program) a few years back, when too broke to buy a full copy, was a lot of fun. When I had cash available to buy the thing, Microsoft had eaten Creature House and taken Expression off the market.
Like a lot of artists, I use Macs. I was afraid that whatever Expression turned into would be Windows-only, but my reaction to this actual release is still a hearty "fuck you, Microsoft".
Oh yes - I'd also like to point out to the original poster that an SVG or PDF representation of my art is a lot larger than a web-resolution bitmap. Print-res is a different story. But I'd rather not put print-res images online!
I've tried Expression, Canvas, Flash, and Freehand. I stick with Illustrator. I enjoyed playing with Expression's natural-media tools, but as a Mac owner, I'll probably never see another version now that MS ate it, and I don't want to find myself depending on an orphaned app...
What about the chemistry between the Doctor and Jack? They're a match made in slash heaven! The Doctor's a time-travelling alien of ambiguous sexuality, and Jack's a saucy time-hopping pansexual rogue!
Okay, I still wish the tree-girl from the second episode had stayed on. "Breath from my lungs". Rowr.
I just don't really see any signs that the Doctor's interested in Rose. Physically. But him and Jack... there's something left unsaid!
"Everyone"?
Offhand, I don't think any of my friends have a dedicated DVD player. We have PS2s and our computers have DVD drives, but the only people who might have a box whose main purpose is "play DVDs" are the ones whove sunk a lot into their AV setups... and even then. They all have PS2s. And might not have bothered.
I don't think I even know anyone who's bothered to get one of those remote controls for their PS2. We all just poke haphazardly at the controllers until what we want happens.
So, yeah. If I was in the market for a New Console, and was intending to only have one hooked up, Nintendo would have a strike against it for the no DVD thing.
I have a decently-sized television.
Until I found myself with a housemate who likes to watch stuff off the air regularly, it still got used: videogames was the main reason I bought the thing, but it was also used for video-tapes and DVDs.
I class myself as someone who almost never watches TV, yet I have a nice-sized one that sees use.
Or maybe it's you being quite self aware, and using the fact that how you present yourself can influence how you act to your own ends?
Masks can be really profoundly affecting things if you let them. And a particular outfit can be as much a mask as something that goes over your face.
If you observe that manipulating symbols can make you change your thinking, you're an idiot not to consider doing this deliberately.
I was going to suggest "literature" or "art" or something like that: something not technical, something that will expose you to ways of thinking where there is not One True Way to solve a problem, something soft and squishy.
Because life's pretty boring when everything in it's an engineering problem, including other people. Get yourself some abstract knowlege that's useless, but fun.
I dunno. Most of my multiplayer roleplay is textual these days, on a small place with probably only a few dozen players. It's somewhat East Coast biased, but I'm one of the major players, and I live in California; players are scattered across the northern continental US and the world.
One of the major strengths of the net, in terms of community, has always been its role in making it easier for really arcane interests to be shared. This place I'm into is, indeed, rather isolationist in its own way, as it's also very elitist at heart. And some interesting real-world ties have begun to happen because of this thing, too.
Now if I could just decide if you're saying my LJ is sometimes +5 Insightful, or if you're saying I'm occasonally found around people who're regularly so. Or both. Maybe both.
And stalk away!
Most LJ users I know put a lot of thought into what they write. Sometimes it's about their life. Sometimes it's about other things. Sometimes these are intertwined.
I have a friend who has five or so different LJs, for different purposes. Me? I've thought of separating things out, but in the end, I prefer to keep my sketchbook scans and finished art intertwined with the rest of my life. The focus is on my life and thoughts, not "my thoughts on politics", "my thoughts on CSS", "my art", "my sex life", or whatever.
Is LJ turning a profit or breaking even? Is 6A? I don't know. I believe LJ is supported mostly by paid users, not by venture capital - it's never positioned itself as an Internet bubble thing.
On the other hand, LJ has really nice comment-spam blocking (partially due to their size; they can detect an address flooding lots of journals with similar crap in ways an individual blog can't), while 6A's been fighting a losing battle against comment-spam on both TypePad and individual MT installations - my LJ has anonymous comments turned on, and I've gotten about three spam comments in its entire life.
As to all the people dismissing LJ as whiny 12-year-old girls... you can find self-absorbed blogging teenagers on Blogger, TypePad, and personal Movable Type/Wordpress/etc installations. LJ has no monopoly. It's just that there's no 'random personally hosted blog' link the way there's a 'random LJ' link, and the 'blogroll' column taking up screen real estate on the front of your blog isn't as easy to peruse as someone's LJ friends list.
Wait and see, I guess. I already had my internet rumor freakout of the month yesterday when I read about Adobe's plans for the next release of Illustrator.
The version of KHTML that Safari relies on is part of OSX now. There are a couple of "alternative browsers" that rely on this for their rendering, but more interesting are other apps:
- xJournal, the LiveJournal client I use, provides a live web preview for very little code.
- Adium, a multi-protocol IM client, uses this for its message windows.
- Most every coder's editor offers live web previews. I think SubEthaEdit was the first. It's addictive to tweak your HTML/CSS in realtime.
There are probably other tools that use this. This is what I can think of offhand.Why? Learning to create compelling images is hard. It takes about five years of fairly intensive practice and study - figure drawing, observation, caricature of the world around you.
Anyone can learn to draw, just as anyone can learn to program, but whatever the discipline, they have to put in the time to practice. Being able to make effective small-scale graphics like icons is harder than it looks at first; theres little space to get the point across in. (Blow up screengrabs sometime; take a look.)
If its appropriate for your program, consider some kind of skinning mechanism - that can net a number of looks for the thing from users, for little visual effort on your part. Especially if youre willing to run a little archive on your site.
(Sorry, no links - there's some elements of this muck that are terribly easy fodder for trolls, and we practice mild security through obscurity.)
And no, Stuffit Expander can't compress stuff. Use the DropStuff program that's sitting right next to it.
I always found Windows's tendency to put the menu bar in program windows an obnoxious abberation. It was at the top on the early Macs, it was at the top on the Amiga.