Monthly Archive for March, 2007

pretty flowers

Published on 30/03/2007 in everything. 1 Comment

So, did I ever mention how much I love my mac? Or rather, macs in general? I’m having a real “macs are awesome” day today, mostly because I suddenly remembered a couple of things and then put them together.

Thing 1
Delicious quartz animations. Have you ever seen Apple’s RSS screen-saver? It’s a screen-saver that produces beautifully animated spinning text from a given RSS feed, and it’s made in Quartz Composer.

I must stress that these aren’t movies (though there are preview movies – Quicktime required – on the site), they’re dynamically generated animations. They are made using maths.

Anyway, the point is that it can be used to create all sorts of gorgeous animations (like the ones in that link), if you know what’s what, and all though a layered drag-n-drop kind of interface. Primarily these are used as screen-savers, or for some niche purpose in applications. Visor, for example, can use one as its background. Boy, is that pretty.

Anyway, moving on to…

Thing 2
You can run quartz animations as a desktop background. Or, more accurately, just in front of the desktop background and right behind the icons and windows and whatnot.

You can also do this straight from the terminal, if you’re a real man.

Put them together and what have you got?

You’ve got me at once loving the Mac OS (though please, do let me know if other systems can do this, because that would be nice) and also wondering how I ever put up with plain old static desktop backgrounds. Not to mention hammering the hell out of my three-year-old computer. I’m using Kaboku right now, if I but had the technology I’d be using the Rimpa animation.

That picture doesn’t do it justice. Those flowers? They are moving, gently swimming back and forth and all over my screen. It’s pretty fucking zen.

I can’t wait to see how gracefully the brand new machines at work pull this shit off…

I wrote the news today

Published on 08/03/2007 in everything and music. 0 Comments

OK, so I didn’t, I read it. In my defence, I’ve been listening to that New Pornographers album and it’s good and stuck in my head.

Speaking of news, this just in: I have “one of those faces” or something. In two days two people I’ve never met before have sworn they knew me from somewhere. One was a random customer at work, the other was a guy at Derby uni’s comic book society. I totally don’t know them, honestly.

Yes, I joined a comic book society at a university I’m not even going to. In my defence, Nottingham doesn’t have one, and even if it did I totally wouldn’t make an extra commute just to talk about comics. As it is the kids at Derby’s are pretty cool, and I got to read the new issue of Hyperion vs Nighthawk a day early. \o/

Speaking of comics, Captain America died today. The issue has out-sold despite being over-printed, re-prints are apparently imminent. Personally, I see two instances of history repeating itself here. Most obviously the hype that surrounded Superman’s death and re-birth – let’s hope we don’t get Electric Captain America! The second instance is what will surely happen if Steve stays dead and he is replaced as Captain America (which will surely happen, since the title sells). In this case I predict a reader-backlash so severe that Marvel has to bring back Rogers Coke-Classic style.