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At A Glance: Pixound Jam Studio

By Arden, January 14, 2006

At Macworld, I had the chance to play around with Pixound Jam Studio, a nifty little application for turning pixels into audio tones. The main premise is as such: you move your mouse around the screen, perhaps over an image or a document, and the RGB values for each pixel translate into a different instrument. You can change the amount each contributes, as well as varying the pixel difference tolerance for smoother sounds.

So far, the practical applications for Pixound can be counted on your fingers. But it is a very fun toy, and is useful for DJ’s, particularly irreverant musicians, and anyone who just wants to hear what their art sounds like.

EDIT: Oops, meant “Pixound.” Silly me.

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A few more minutes with Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster

By Arden, January 13, 2006

(Listen to this interview - 8.57 MB)

This is Arden at DT Geeks again. I’m here with Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster, who has agreed to an interview and is looking just a little bit tired. So, let’s get started: do you have any interesting short stories of your earlier life, by any chance?

How early?

As early as you want to go.

Well, I guess, you know, there was one time I tripped over a dinosaur, I don’t know. I’m really old! Uh… I don’t know, I started programming when I was 12. My dad actually enrolled me in a college course in Basic, and I’m actually old enough that I started programming on punch cards, on a Cyber NOS system, so that was my big start into computers. It’s gotten a lot more fun since then, but, yeah I don’t know.

So why exactly did you decide to start programming? What prompted you to take that route?

It’s a really cool way to sort of play with your mind, to do things entirely in your own head. It’s always seemed like a game to me, and I’ve always loved it. I actually wanted a computer all my life, and when I was, you know, 13 or 14 I actually, well I’d just write down programs in long hand on a piece of paper, and I just used to program and program with all these pieces of paper in a notebook.

Did they work?

Uh, I don’t know. I mean,…
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Google Video

By UnnDunn, January 12, 2006

Another proprietary video player? Don't we have enough of these things?

I bought a video from Google and I have mixed feelings about the whole experience.

First, I like the Google Video player. Despite its hefty download size, it’s small and lightweight It plays Google Video - free or purchased - and it does so very well. Nothing more, nothing less.

The process of buying and downloading video is also very smooth. You download a small pointer file and it opens in the player, which then downloads the full file (after checking that you have ther right to play it and downloading any codecs necessary.) If your download gets interrupted, you just reopen the movie and it will resume downloading. And that’s it.

The problem is… well, another proprietary video player? Don’t we have enough of these things? Seriously, I’m getting tired of this crap. QuickTime, Real, Vongo, WMP, now this. And none of them work with each other (except that you can play Vongo movies in WMP.)

And then when all of these services fail, all the companies are going to complain about how bittorrent is killing their business. No idiot, you are killing your business! BitTorrent already provides me with a much better video download experience than any of these services, and not just because it’s free. RSS support means BT automatically downloads the stuff I want, in a format that can be played by almost anything and is converted automatically to PSP format for on-the-go viewing.

You would think that Google, of all people, would have a clue about…
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A few minutes with Cris Pearson of Plasq

By Nick, January 11, 2006

(Listen to this interview - 4.57 MB, link fixed)

So I’m here with Cris Pearson of Plasq, and in case you’re not familiar, it is the company that makes Comic Life, a program that allows you to take the photos from your iPhoto library, apply effects and such to them and make your own comic book. It’s one of the cooler apps out there for the Mac; it won an Apple Design Award, and Deep Thought gave it a 5 out of 5 rating when we reviewed it some months back. So, first of all, because you may be unfamiliar to our readers, we’d like to get a little personal background on you and your company.

I do user interface design, graphic design; we started up Plasq to kind of be an open company to get people to come in and do their apps under the Plasq name--that’s how it worked previously--we’re heading towards incorporating. How far do you want to go with it?

As far as you want to go.

Yeah. About me?

About you...anything you want. Tell us a little about yourself.

Okay. I’ll tell you who’s at Plasq. There’s people from — you know, I’m from Melbourne, Australia; and the programmer for Comic Life, he’s in America, then there’s a guy in France, and a guy in Geneva, and another guy from Melbourne as well. So, yeah, we’re very spread out.

So, we’re [Deep Thought] similar in that regard; we’re kind of spread out. How, as a software…
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Interview with Ben Counsell of Realmac Software

By Arden, January 11, 2006

I was fortunate enough to arrange a meeting with Ben Counsell of Realmac Software, who was more than happy to be interviewed about his company’s brainchild. The interview ran for about 7 minutes, covering the topics of RapidWeaver’s features, how it compares to iWeb, and some other general stuff [listen - 3.26 MB, MP3]. But enough about me: let’s get to the interview.

---------------

All right, I’m here with Ben Counsell of Realmac Software, developers of RapidWeaver and the new competitors to iWeb. Let’s get started. First, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself and about Realmac.

Okay, cool. Umm… basically, I do all the CSS and XHTML for RapidWeaver, so the templates, I code all of those. Dan and Simon do all the Cocoa programming, the actual application. Realmac Software is a small Mac-only software company based in Brighton, in England, on the South Coast. We’re running for about 3 years now. But RapidWeaver’s really taken off over the last year, been in development for 2 years, 2 and a half years, but it’s really sort of taken off over the last 6 to 12 months.

So, for those unfamiliar with RapidWeaver, could you describe it a bit?

Yeah, it’s basically an easy-to-use, powerful website creation [tool], so it’s all drag and drop. It’s got some iLife integration; we have iPhoto and .mac, and it’s really a visual editor for your webpages. Whereas Dreamweaver’s a lot more coding, RapidWeaver is a lot more visual.

What were some…
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