Analog Digits

I'm on MacVoices

2008-06-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

If you're interested in Audio Units plugins for expanding Apple's GarageBand software, take a listen to the latest episode of MacVoices, where I talk with host Chuck Joiner about the vast realm of third-party plugin manufacturers, mentioning some of my favorite software instruments and effects.

Roll Your Own Web Pilot

2008-06-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

I'm a contributing editor for Mac|Life magazine, and a recent feature article I wrote for them has been posted on their website. Make Your Own TV Show is a look at the basics of putting together a pilot for a web-based episodic program, and covers the whole affair from a guerilla-videographer angle, from low-end cameras through some of the essential theory and practice of editing, and my picks for some of the websites you'll want to consider for distributing your show. Enjoy!

A Fair & Balanced Universe

2008-06-07T18:24:00.000-07:00

So there's this planet, and on this planet, there's a guy who made a lot of money beating people up.

What kind of money? Well, he has a home described as follows:

"The 54,000-square-foot home has 109 rooms, including 17 bathrooms, three kitchens and a bowling alley."

Yes, all that for punching people.

And he's apparently delinquent on paying his $3000 monthly child support.

If the asteroid hits tomorrow, it'll be a day too late.

Damage can be good

2008-06-07T07:35:00.001-07:00

In my eternal quest for cool audio plugins, I've come across a bounty of wonderful, inexpensive goodies from the fine folks at Audio Damage. They make excellent-sounding effects, and I'm particularly taken with their DubStation, which is a fantastic simulation of an old bucket brigade-style analog delay - twist the delay time knob, and thrill at the recreation of the pitch-stretch artifacts that are just sooo much fun. It reminds of when I first laid my hands on an original Electro-Harmonix Memory Man delay, in 1975 - it arrived in an order I had placed from when I was a dealer for them in Caracas, Venezuela (and that's a whole 'other story from my youth), Mike Matthews had them send me a prototype (he was thrilled that he had a teenaged authorized dealer in South America). I plugged my guitar in, and was blown away by what came out of the box. The DubStation took me right back to that time, and it's only $39, the best delay deal on this planet. Their Reverence reverb is just perfect, sporting a slick sound and just about zero processor footprint, which boggles the mind. It's $39 as well, which is just ridiculous, given that the closest hardware counterpart will run you well into the hundreds of dollars. Vapor is a gorgeous, shimmering choris effect which works wonders on guitar tracks, and is subtle enough to be useful on all sorts of tracks - vocals, keyboards, drums - and it's $29. There's a bunch of other amazing plugs that these maniacs make - Dr. Device is likely to make your head explode - and they all represent a truly astounding value for the price. I can only imagine what would happen if these folks decide to make a softsynth.

Perfect Pitch

2008-06-05T18:23:00.000-07:00

There's an excellent article about Antares Auto-Tune in the current New Yorker Magazine, with a detailed look at how this venerable pitch-correction tool gained an ancillary following based on what essentially boils down to a quirk in the software. Good reading.

Cool Online Art Toy

2008-06-04T17:48:00.000-07:00

I just adore weird little graphics programs, and bomomo is a really nice example of what can be accomplished via a web browser. It's a ton of fun, just click on the tools and drag them around the canvas, and prepare to be delighted. I wish there was some control over colors, but hey, it's free. The closest thing I've seen are the particle brushes in Studio Artist, which are just too much fun.

Then there's Groboto, which has some similar types of fun procedural drawing abilities, all in glorious 3D. If you don't about this wonderfully creative, fun application, you should check it out, especially if you have kids who want to play with 3D and are daunted by the complexity of a typical 3D modeling program.

So why doesn't anyone build a standalone 2D painting application with this kind of functionality? Bomomo is a nice toy, but it makes me want something more substantial. Where is Mark Zimmer when you need him?

And I'll try to update this blog on a more regular basis. Sorry about the delay between the last entry and this one... life gets in the way of blogging.

I am speechless

2008-04-16T17:21:00.001-07:00

Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band.

U-He is da bomb

2008-04-13T17:46:00.000-07:00

So if you're into software synths, then you need to take a look - and give a listen - to the rather amazing Zebra software synthesizer. Another example of a great software instrument engineered by one primary creator, Urs Heckmann, Zebra is a smooth-sounding software synth supreme, with extensive modulation options (almost as intricate as an actual analog patchcord synth) and an absolutely gorgeous sound. It's almost a desert-island software synth, and at $199, it's a steal. In fact, if you have an old hardware synth laying around, you can get $50 off the price of Zebra by sending in a picture of your old gear with a "Retired by Zebra" sign - it's called the "Dinosaur Crossgrade", and it's got to be the coolest upgrade policy in the industry.

I should also mention that their MFM2 (More Feedback Machine) effects plugin is probably the most insane echo/delay device that you can plug into a signal path. It's got 4 separate delay lines with extensive modulation options, and is capable of producing a staggering range of effects, including chorusing, compression, filter-combing, distortion, the list goes on and on. It's $79, and it makes most of my hardware delays sound downright stupid.

We love small developers, and Urs is really cranking out gold. Must be the German beer. If you want a taste of the genius of U-He, and you're a Mac musician, check out the free Audio Units synth from these guys, Rumblence:zoyd. A simple interface, but the sounds that emit from this thing are just juicy.

Perian CODEC for Mac Users

2008-02-10T19:28:00.000-08:00

If you're a Mac user, you've likely run into the frustration of dealing with AVI files.

Here's the answer: The Perian Quicktime component.

It's free. Download it, install it and forget about your media codec problems.

You're welcome!

The Aural Holy Grail

2008-02-06T04:13:00.001-08:00

In the realm of visual effects, no one has yet been able to create a CG human face that can blend in transparently with live action and withstand extended closeup shots. The closest anyone has gotten is the Gollum character created by the folks at Weta Digital, and the fact is that while it's a play on a human face, it's not an actual human in the film, it's just a fictional character. The primary problem with this issue is that we are all very aware of the nuances of facial expressions and details, as we spend a large amount of our life interpreting these cues from the people we interact with on a daily bases, whether in person or through our consumption of television. We're still waiting for a synthetic human face that can convince us that we're not seeing CG.

In the playground of musical technology, there's been a similar avatar: the simulation of an acoustic piano. Up until recent times, the best you could do to approximate the sound of a piano, was to employ instruments made of up samples of actual acoustic pianos. This approach has worked to some degree, with virtual sampled pianos including Synthogy Ivory, Akoustik Piano, Virtual Grand Piano and a host of other offerings. Part of the problem with these products is that they consist of many multisampled files, in order to convey the difference between notes struck hard and those played softly, and these samples tend to make the supporting audio files eat up anywhere from 15-35 gigabytes of hard drive space. On top of that, many players claim that they just don't feel right when played, that these sample-based instruments lack the responsiveness of a real piano, the entropy of the interactions between string, hammer and wood.

In the last year, this crucial milestone has been reached, and the very first software-only modeled acoustic piano has appeared on the market, and man, it's just stunning. It's called Pianoteq, and it's a true breakthrough that has caused huge ripples throughout the music industry. Created as a labor of love by a team at the Institute of Mathematics of Toulouse, Pianoteq absolutely nails the sound, response and dynamics of an actual physical instrument, and offers a deep level of control over a myriad of modeling and playback parameters, to the point where the average pianist will likely be somewhat overwhelmed. No matter, just load it up and play to your heart's content. Because it does not use any kind of sampling technology, the whole plugin weighs in at less than 15 megabytes, which is nothing less than astounding. Put this in a laptop, attach a nice 88-note weighted key controller to the computer, perhaps a pair of foot controllers (for the sustain and Sostenuto pedals), and you have the best sounding piano you'll ever be able to lug to a performance, for a whopping $360. While I'm primarily an electronic musician, the sound and playability of this marvel makes me glad that I'm alive at the moment in history when true innovations like this one exist. My hat's off to these folks, they've made something truly groundbreaking and uniquely special. In fact, I'd go so far as to call it awesome, with respect to the true meaning of that word. Check out the sound demos, you will not believe what your ears are hearing.

Is Software Innovation Dead?

2008-01-21T17:42:00.001-08:00

This was one of the first years that I did not find myself in San Francisco in January, for the annual MacWorld Expo. I figured that I would be able to go on the web and get a sense of the kind of cool software & hardware gadgets to show up on the show floor, the one or two things that would knock my socks off and give me hope for the world of creative software.

Well, it looks like I didn't miss anything. Outside of the Apple announcement, there was precious little to see on the floor at Moscone that folks didn't already know about.

I can think back to years past, taking a trek through the Developer's Pavilion and scoping out the one or two neat software hacks that no one know about, and sharing the discovery of those cool toys with my fellow expo-goers back at the infamous "Office" (if you have to ask, forget it, I'm not saying anything else about that moniker). I clearly remember gazing at the very first version of Cinema 4D ever shown publicly, and to see it running on a dual-processor Mac G4 was quite the thrill (unlike trying to get Infini-D to work properly on a multi-processor Mac, which almost drove me to madness). When we first laid eyes on Todd Rundgren's FlowFazer screen saver, my friends & I thought we had died and gone to heaven - no one had seen anything like it on a microcomputer. Hanging out at Todd's house, messing around with all those outrageous FlowFazer modules that never did see the light of day, was just too much fun.

There were lots of gems that we would seek out, and nothing made me happier than to let people know this stuff existed, that the world of applications was bigger than word processing, spreadsheets, databases and all the other well-worn software categories. How many different ways can you move words around on a screen? Once you learn Microsoft Word, that's about as far as you go in the realm of writing, and let's be clear, the vast majority of folks who depend on the Microsoft Office, haven't explored the majority of tools, command and menu options that are in the programs that make up the suite. It's not like Photoshop is very different in this regard - I'd like to have a dollar for every Photoshop user who has never taken the time to even open the Calculations command, much less the Custom filter. Most of the program remains a mystery to everyone except the most devoted users.

When it comes to software development, Photoshop plugins are an excellent example of how much of the third-party development world has largely dried up - if you doubt this, step back and think about what cool Photoshop plugin you've seen released in recent memory. If you've been using Photoshop for awhile, consider what it was like 10, 15 years ago, with wild new plugins being released on what seemed like a monthly basis. I'm not trying to downplay the excellent work that companies like Alien Skin Software are doing, but in many cases, companies produce plugins which essentially duplicate Photoshop functionality, predicated on the lack of knowledge many Photoshop users have about how filters and other commands work together to produce complex results.

In the case of the recent MacWorld Expo, the biggest software release was... Microsoft Office 2008 (and in a rare exception, it was even available early in the year that makes up part of the name). OK, if you're an Office user, this was good news, but seriously, how many ways can you type a word? Is there anything earth-shattering about this software? Did Microsoft add Keynote-style cool transitions, is there a 3D confetti effect? I suspect that anyone happy with running earlier version of Office in Rosetta is not likely to jump at the chance of giving Microsoft more of their hard earned greenbacks. Good enough is, well, good enough.

I wonder if Apple had a dedicated demo station showing off Logic Studio, and the amazing thing which is the Sculpture synth, of the luscious sonic sweetness of the Delay Designer. I am fully aware that MacWorld Expo is a consumer show, but there are lots of people who would probably consider themselves professional media creators, who attend the show hoping to find something they didn't know about, some hidden gem that would open new creative possibilities. Based on the coverage I've seen on the web, I'm going to guess that the majority walked away from the Moscone expo hall somewhat less than blown away.

The most interesting software for doing creative stuff on a Mac - Studio Artist, MetaSynth, ArtMatic Pro, Groboto - could be seen nowhere on the show floor. The rather amazing Cheetah3D - a full-fledged modeling, rendering and animation package, Mac-only and priced at $129, was not there. I won't go into the issue of all of the music software companies which chose to pass on Expo this year - I'm gonna guess that they were all headed to NAMM instead - but the fact that most of them did not even bother to have any kind of representation at the show is telling.

I've always felt that the audio industry presented an opportunity to learn about how innovation works in high tech in general, and the fact is that the excitement and innovation these days remains quite healthy in the sound software biz. In fact, the rate of release of new software synthesizers, effects and audio libraries so far outpaces just about anything happening in video or imaging, that it's a little scary and very frustrating. Computers have more processing power than ever, to the point where we no longer lust after faster and faster processors - most of us are fairly happy with dual-core Intel Duos, and while I would personally love to have a top-end Mac Pro tower, I'm surviving quite well without it (of course, if I had to edit a bunch of uncompressed high-def video, I'd be sure to build one of these monsters into the budget). Has the software kept up with the harware? I think not, and this trend shows no signs of changing anytime soon. Who will release the next amazing, mind-blowing visual effects package? How about an image editor that takes the prowess of Photoshop and harnesses the largely-untapped CPU power to implement a next-generation interface that will do the heavy lifting?

Or are we doomed to a future of Photoshop 18.1 and Microsoft Office 2012?

And on a completely different note...

2007-12-31T08:00:00.000-08:00

James Brown didn't have a drinking problem - no, it was more like an alcohol solution.

An Innovative New Interface

2007-12-30T11:28:00.000-08:00

This is a fascinating, original approach to taking audio synthesis in a new direction, utilizing a set of physical instrumentation devices that interact with their host surface. Learn more about the project and team.

A True American Hero

2007-12-30T11:19:00.000-08:00

Some of us long for leaders that sound like this man, a true hero, a thoughful, intelligent human being with absolute integrity and honesty.

The Z axis

2007-12-30T09:50:00.000-08:00

I have to remind myself that writing a blog does NOT mean that every post requires a specific word count, brief entries can be as useful and interesting as long ones.

Ah, hell, I'll remember that for the next post. This one has more than a few words, 'cause I have more than a couple of thoughts about, well, color.

The last couple of times I appeared on the Tech Night Owl Live, I brought up a topic I've been thinking about a lot lately - the unused "Z Axis" of current computer displays.

Back in the dark ages of the beginning of multimedia, 8 bit color palettes kept artists and programmers awake at night - the art of making color images look good with a constrained set of up to 256 colors, was the difference between the average designer and the one who got the sweet gigs. Around 1989 or so, I plunked down $10,000 on a Howtek flatbed scanner which sported an optical resolution of 300 dpi and needed a GPIB interface plugged into an original Macintosh II. I used this boat anchor to scan a series of 8x10 chromes of cars for the Oldsmobile Consumer Computer, an ambitious touchscreen kiosk project that was one of the highlights of my NYC multimedia career. In order to make the images look as good as they could with the "Mac II system palette", we tested a variety of color imaging software, including Color Studio, PixelPaint and some other obscure dithering applications. In the end, the software that provided the absolute best color reduction was a very early Photoshop, 0.36 if memory serves me correctly. It didn't have a tool palette yet, just some rudimentary menu items, but it did an amazing job of reducing the 24 bit scans to 8 bit images, which we then loaded into Hypercard using the VideoWorks II player software. Full color Hypercard, yesiree, which even fooled John Sculley (not a huge achievement in and of itself) and Jerry Pournelle (of Byte fame) into thinking that we somehow magically endowed Hypercard with glorious color.

I'll devote a future blog entry to the trials and tribulations of the "Netscape palette", "Mac & Windows system palettes" and the "web-safe 216 colors", the bane of web designers up to recent years, but now largely forgotten, and for good reason.

The main point is this: every computer that has shipped in the last, what, 6 years or so, has at least 16-bit color, but more likely 24 bit color graphics. That means that everyone has a full range of deep, rich colors for displaying images and video. Good stuff.

Meanwhile, the often neglected side of this situation is that every computer has lots of color available for interface design and implementation. But you would never know this by looking at the interfaces for most applications software, which mostly look like they're stuck in the mid-90s.

24 bit color is now the lowest common denominator. 24 bits of memory for each pixel works out to be 16,777,216 colors, and is usually rounded off to "16.7 million". What's 77,216 colors when you've got millions, right? What are we doing with all these colors? Anything? Nothing?

Look at the desktop of your computer. It's got icons for applications, documents and folders. It probably has a cool - or dorky - image loaded as a backdrop. It's a flat, two-dimensional construct, with X and Y dimensions. If it's anything like my desktop, it's cluttered with all sorts of stuff, not unlike many real desktops.

Apple releases a new version of OSX and one of the major new features is that the dock can now contain "stacks" of icons, which looks like a software rendition of the leaning tower of Pisa. This is the best that Apple can do for expanding the amount of virtual real estate for icons?

It's time that we turned on the Z Axis of the screen. While the X and Y dimensions of the screen are fixed, the Z dimension - depth - is wide open. You can move into the screen endlessly, without ever hitting the back of it, if software was designed to let you explore the virtual terrain. Imagine using the 24 bit color display in a way that takes advantage of the fact that files are time/date stamped by the OS. You've got documents on your desktop, and as time goes by and the documents remain unused, they start to recede into the background, getting smaller and dimmer until finally, they either vanish or are automatically placed in an "inactive file" folder, which softly blinks when it's starting to get too full.

Imagine editing a video clip by moving around it in 3D, and creating looped video by wrapping a clip back onto itself, Moebius-style. How about storing your files in a virtual representation of the world's deepest file cabinet, organized chronologically. Look at the Time Machine component of Apple's Leopard to get a good idea of what I'm talking about, it's a somewhat crude - but workable - version of what I've got in mind, but instead of being implemented in a modal fashion, I want it to always be there. I want to be able to store groups of related digital photos in clusters that I can push back "into" the screen, and where they can be retrieved by holding down a modifier key while scrolling on my Mighty Mouse ball. It works for Google Earth, why not my desktop? With the proliferation of virtual worlds such as Second Life, the essentials metaphors are in place. Let's see how we can use the virtual depth of the screen as an organizational tool, as the equivalent of the Hole in the Pocket that Jeremy gives to Ringo in Yellow Submarine.

24 bit color means that every shade of every color is there for the taking. We've yet to see true color coding at the OS level - a handful of color labels is nice, but we're talking transparency, subtle shading and true dimming, all used to clean up our acts.

And don't get me started on all that CPU power sitting there unused most of the time, and how it could make itself useful by keeping a watchful eye on you and how you interact with those files crowding that desktop.

We'll delve into that topic shortly.

The Mozart of Creative Software

2007-11-04T17:34:00.000-08:00

In a hundred years, when historians look back on the early development of computer technology, they will see things very differently than we do, and will likely appreciate things that don't appear on our current radars. When Van Gogh was doing some of his best work, it was the support of his brother that kept him from completely losing his sense of self. History has treated Van Gogh far more kindly than his contemporaries, and it's quite possible that he would have been both deeply gratified and furious at the way that the value of his artwork skyrocketed - not that it had any impact on his own rather frugal and difficult life. Like so many great artists, Van Gogh was only truly appreciated after he left the planet, and while this is sad, it's an unfortunate way to treat creativity. My buddy Paul Mavrides suffers from the same reality - his visual work stands alone. He is the single most amazing artist I've ever had the pleasure of calling friend, and his impact and talent will be truly appreciated two hundred years from now. It makes me sad beyond words.

The world of software development is often a relatively anonymous one, where teams of people gather together and work with one another, while being managed by other teams of people who in turn, must answer to other managers, account executives and other assorted power players. Lots of software ends up being designed by committee, and let me tell you, it shows. But you already knew that, if you've ever launched Microsoft Word.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course, usually involving pairs of personalities, two humans bound together by serendipity and circumstance. As far as bitmapped graphics software, there are three pairs of deeply talented geniuses that, in essence, created the industry for image editing software on personal computers. Mark Zimmer and Tom Hedges produced The Realist, which later became ImageStudio and ultimately ColorStudio. They also cooked up the original version of Fractal Painter. Then there's Keith McGreggor and Jerry Harris, the dynamic duo behind the rather wonderful PixelPaint. It all culminated with the brothers who changed the world, Tom and John Knoll, and their historic garage project, Photoshop. I'll be writing about these folks in future blog posts, as I was an integral part of all three efforts. Lots of stories, some good, some great, and some which will leave you scratching your head and wondering why certain people made amazingly bad decisions.

But this entry will look at one single person, someone who has never really been recognized for his awesome (and I don't use that world lightly) contributions to the software industry. When future software engineers look to the past for inspiration and understanding, they will all talk about the one crazy Frenchman who could only march to the beat of his own drummer.

His name is Eric Wenger. He is the Mozart of the software world.

You might not know the name, you may not be familiar with the fruits of his coding prowess. If you're a friend of mine, you've heard me sing his praises. And for good reason - Wenger has consistently been the lead vision behind some of the most creative applications to ever see the light of day. He is a one-of-a-kind, simply unreal genius, an artist, musician and tool maker unlike any other. His creations have been a large part of the reason that I stay interested in the field of software design.

I first encountered Eric while I was at the original MacUser magazine, back in the days when Felix Dennis ruled the roost and Steven Bobker locked himself in his office for days at a time. A box arrived at the office, with a cryptic cover and the words "Art Mixer". As I was the resident graphics guru, it was dropped on my desk without any explanation. I opened that box, installed the software from the multiple floppy disks, and spent the next few hours clicking, grinning and gasping, absolutely and totally amazed by what I was seeing. Art Mixer could do things that remain unmatched by any software - 3D paintbrush strokes with depth prioritization, nested graphics documents with realtime, dynamic links, 3D image mapping (in 1986!), and lots of other totally unique and utterly wild stuff. I proceeded to spend some of Felix's money on a long distance call to Paris, and spoke to Eric at length. His English was better than my French - an easy thing to accomplish - and we spoke for a couple of hours. He was pleased that I understood what he had done with Art Mixer, and I was blown away by his creativity. We stayed in touch over the years - mind you, these were the days before the Internet, so email was not quite as universal as today, but I resigned myself to big phone bills, economic considerations thrown to the wind.

I first met Eric in person at a MacWorld Expo, and it was instant friendship. He is a charming, brilliant and irreverent individual, and that last attribute deeply endeared him to me. I think he appreciated my enthusiasm and interest in his work. He mentioned that he was dipping his toes in serious 3D for the first time, and mailed me a disk with an early version of his first 3D modeling and rendering package.

It was called Bryce. His first 3D program, and it was a planet builder. It was clear that Eric was on another planet, a better one than ours.

I fell into Bryce instantly and completely, and the thing that really hooked me was the Deep Texture Editor. I had never seen anything quite like it, the power behind it and the range of bizarre and luscious textures it could produce blew my mind wide open. I would place a camera inside of a semi-translucent sphere, spend hours tweaking the ABC components of the procedural noises, and stare at the rendering process with a child-like wonder that made happy. I was hooked. This was fun in a way that software doesn't often feel like - I wanted to wrap my brain around it for hours, days if left to my own devices. And I'll tell you a secret - Eric has a version of Bryce that renders images way faster than the commercial releases, and lets him attach sounds to objects in a scene, and render animations with the surround sound audio tracks, complete with corresponding Doppler effects - as you zoom by objects, they increase and decrease in pitch. Very cool stuff.

A year or two later, I met a guy named Kai Krause at the Ted 3 conference in Monterey (Adobe had invited me to do some demos in a room they had at the event). He introduced me to a longtime hero of mine, Roger Dean, and in exchange, I told Kai about this amazing guy I knew in Paris. That's how Kai got ahold of Eric, ironically. It was my fault.

Bryce was released by Kai's software company, and that provided Eric with an income, and the inspiration to head off in new directions. The thing about Wenger is that he is the kind of person who does not want to learn anyone else's way of working, he's too impatient to master an interface that does not work along the lines of his own thoughts and creative process. He'd rather make his own tools. He's an artist who makes his own brushes, mixes his own paints, finds canvases that are made of exotic materials, coming up with stuff that no one else has ever considered.

From this mind, we have MetaSynth. And ArtMatic. Then there's VTrack. And Videodelic. And others which may or may not come back to life. Only Wenger knows.

Eric does not make software that falls squarely into existing categories. He creates entirely new metaphors, original and innovative approaches that no one else seems to ever consider. In the world of sound design, MetaSynth is a secret weapon. No one will admit to using it, for fear that their competition will find out about it and add it to their own arsenals. At the most basic level, it converts images to sound, putting an original spin on the player piano roll and extending it into other dimensions. It's a synthesizer that looks at a 2D image and considers every pixel a discrete oscillator. Most synths have one, two, maybe three oscillators. MetaSynth has infinite oscillators. Just about anything can be an oscillator: complex wavetables, samples, granular audio generators, jelly sandwichs, anything. The Image Filter is an Ultimate Audio Monster, terrifying and gorgeous.

MetaSynth is totally unique, capable of conjuring sounds like nothing else on this planet, and there is absolutely no equivalent, no competitor, nada. You've heard it in movies and music, but you'd never know it. It's an 8000 pound invisible gorilla. It stomps on the terra and emits the most outrageous aural entities that anyone could ever imagine.

Inspired, Wenger decides that he needs a source of wacky, complex images to feed to MetaSynth, something designed to make procedural textures that he can convert to sound. Forget Photoshop plugins, Eric wants something that fits his uniquely warped mind. He comes up with the most single terrifying, mind-bending, immersive visual synthesizer ever conceived, ArtMatic, and adds its insane, phase-modulated animation abilities almost as an afterthought. Ever since first touching this algorithmic beast, my life has never been the same - Artmatic is the one program I can absolutely lose myself in at any moment, it's the ultimate high in software psychedelia, and there's nothing like it anywhere else in the galaxy of applications. It's become one of my own secret weapons, and I'm happy to admit it on this blog. I've rendered High Definition animation with it that looks like nothing else you've ever seen, and I've cooked up a luscious procedural texture that is 32,000 by 32,000 pixels in size. At 72 dpi, it's a whopping 45 square feet.

People buy Macintoshes in order to run Wenger's software. He's never bothered to port his code to Windows, and it seems like he never will, or let anyone else do the port. Apple barely knows who he is, and has never tried to support his coding efforts in any serious fashion. It's not like Wenger is concerned about Apple's lack of interest in his creative output - he doesn't seem to care much about commerce, he could give a damn about publicity, he's a terrible businessman. I know that his business partner will likely send me a scathing email if he reads these words, but it's the honest, unvarnished truth. Eric makes tools for himself, and if you want to go along for the ride, great. But don't expect software design by focus groups here, Eric knows what he wants and that's all he really cares about. If you can't figure out his software, it's not his fault. You'll need to look at the world through his eyes in order to get the best use of his software.

Eric is Van Gogh with a mouse, he's Mozart with a MIDI keyboard. He's the most talented software artist in the world, and the implications of his work will only truly be understood many years from now. Without his contributions, the world of creative software would be a much poorer place. You won't find much about this man on the Internet, but I suspect history will treat him better than we did. One day, I will visit him in Paris and be amazed at whatever he's made since the last time we laughed together. Eric, thank you for your creativity and your wonderful mind. You made the fields of graphics, animation and audio creation more interesting, and you've shown us what software can be when it's the product of a single, strong creative vision.

First Post - Long Live the PC!

2007-11-04T06:16:00.000-08:00

My first post on Analog Digits will serve to set the stage and tone for this blog, as I have had a longtime fascination with the ineptitude of the "technology press", especially as it exists in mainstream media. The folks who are paid to cover the tech beat seem largely clueless when it comes to actually understanding any kind of objective reality regarding how and why people use specific forms of technology.

The Associated Press released a story about how PC sales are in decline in Japan, supposedly due to the continued proliferation of dedicated devices such as cell phones, video game consoles, camcorders and other vertical digital gear. The assumption is that the recent slowdown in the volume of new computer purchases is indicative of the upcoming demise of the desktop computer.

According to an IDC "analyst", Masahiro Katayama, it's game over for PCs.

"Consumers aren't impressed anymore with bigger hard drives or faster processors. That's not as exciting as a bigger TV," Katayama said. "And in Japan, kids now grow up using mobile phones, not PCs. The future of PCs isn't bright."

Here's my take on this: for the average consumer, the current generation of personal computers has reached a point where the speed is simply good enough for the kind of things they're like to do - cruise the web, word processing, digital photograph editing, listening to music, and anything else that falls under the umbrella of consumer applications. Folks who enjoy video games have long known that dedicated hardware circuitry - such as chipsets devoted to 3D rendering - are always going to provide a superior gaming experience than a PC, and the best games are typically released for dedicated gaming systems.

The notion that a mobile phone is somehow going to displace or replace a PC is patent nonsense, and for one simple reason - applications. People don't use computers, they use the applications that run on computers. Is there a possibility that Photoshop will one day run on a handheld device, and deliver all of the power and flexibility that can be achieved on the desktop? I don't think so. Screen real estate is already an issue for folks trying to do image editing on smaller laptop screens, and we're not even going to discuss the concept of video editing on anything smaller than a 15" display. Anyone who has ever spent time in Adobe After Effects knows that the best single addition to getting the most from that software, is a dedicated display for the timeline window (and folks involved in the days of creating interactive multimedia with VideoWorks/Director probably remember the joy they felt when they saw the Score window on a separate monitor for the very first time). The power that can be put into a handheld device is constrained by scale, and this means that for the foreseeable future, we're not going to have applications on mobile devices that can vaguely match their desktop counterparts.

All of these cool miniaturized gadgets are great, but let's remember that they are all designed using CAD software, on the fastest desktop machines money can buy. If you create music, spend time rendering complex 3D animated sequences, edit and create HD video or build websites from scratch, you already know that there will never be enough power in that CPU to truly make you feel satisfied and complete. You already need a faster machine, and it's quite likely that you'll tap that next machine out within a year, after laying down 15 tracks with Logic Studio and the Sculpture synthesizer. You freeze tracks all day long, and it makes you wonder when they'll be able to put a 20 core chip in your desktop without emptying out your bank account. Musicians want more tracks, more inserts, more instances of digital delays, reverbs and instruments. There is never enough processing power for making music.

The world needs producers as much, if not more, than consumers. Someone has to write, orchestrate and record all that music that you download from iTunes. Someone is busy right now, as you read these words, coming up with the next 3D animated creature that will make you drop $10 on a movie ticket and another $10 on popcorn and a drink (and ultimately, another $20 on the DVD). The next great miracle drug that will save your life one day, is going to be the result of great minds using powerful computers to model the molecular bonds and interactions that make up a specific compound that will heal the sick cells in your body. Medical researchers may use cel phones to talk to their peers, but they rely on their computers to sift through the CAT scans and MRIs images.

The great promise of technology is that we can all take charge of our destinies, and become active producers instead of passive consumers. Many years ago, Alvin Toffler came up with the idea of the prosumer, which has now come true to a good degree. The principle idea behind "Web 2.0" is that the content of a site is generated by the actual community, creating a productive, positive feedback loop. The loop is essential in a healthy technology ecosystem - the producers drive the innovations, and the consumers provide a venue in which the usefulness and potential success of said innovations can be judged by the marketplace.

The consumer world is indeed ruled by an internal set of assumptions and parameters that are different from the realm of the producer. Regardless, it's the producers who will guide the future, with the consumers falling into line based on the marketing manipulations that create the desire for products that will make them happy (or dimply distract them for a few moments). I'm not really happy about this particular state of affairs, and deep down inside, I want people to realize that there's an amazing array of opportunities for them to express their creativity with the truly awesome power of the applications which exist on desktop computers. In future blog entries, I'll be writing about many of these applications, and hopefully, anyone reading about Groboto on their iPhone will run home and download it for use on their iMac. Should we set our sights for a future where we'll be able to use fully-loaded applications on handheld devices? Sure, but that will require an entirely new type of display technology that looks like nothing we have today, as well as input devices which tap directly into our minds. None of this is likely in the near future. Someday, possibly, but not soon. And by that time, the amount of sheer power that will live on a desktop, well, now there's a compelling thought: perhaps we'll have an operating system that watches us, learns about how we work, and anticipates what we'll be doing in the next minute, or next hour, and filters out everything that's in the way. Most of the power of your computer lies dormant at any given moment - it'll be interesting to see how that unused power is put to work, behind the scenes, to make your computer truly easier to use.

The desktop computer is here to stay. It's an infinitely configurable, highly flexible, insanely customizable symbolic manipulation device, capable of blending together all relevant forms of human communications media. A mobile phone might let you listen to music and watch television, but if you want to actually make the media being consumed by the masses, you'll need the real deal, the desktop computer. Accept no substitutes.