...when I'm not in Canonical Towers.

I've been busy day and night recently. I feel I should catalogue my various half-finished projects.

1) I'm building an OS X Cocoa version of Animata along with a Quartz Composer plugin and the elements of a suite of live performance software based around all the work I did at the start of the year but unified into a neater package, to make it more fun to use and to improve performance (and so that undo works!)

2) I'm writing a semi-autobiographical graphic novel that I will be publishing in the App Store (as a follow up to my first one)

3) I'm writing an iPhone version of Mood Tracker

4) I'm recording a bit of dubstep here and there

5) I am working on a music-oriented internet dating website with my sister

6) I am working on André Durand's new website

7) I am maintaining the Facebook Mood Tracker app

8) I am polishing and documenting my ActionScript framework and planning to do some proper screencasts about it soon

9) I also have some music-based iPhone apps underway. I'm planning on starting some Ubuntu audio hacking soon to discover some nice open source ways of producing interesting sound from these apps (I have the graphics working already)

10) I am worrying that I am doing too much code and not enough art.

The first thing I did after installing Ubuntu 9.04 was to head straight for the Appearance settings to choose a desktop picture. Here's what I was offered:



Naturally, a panic ensued while I tried to work out how to synchronise filesystems between OS X and the VirtualBox Ubuntu installation so I didn't have to drown in brown every time I looked at Ubuntu.

For Ubuntu 9.10 we asked people to submit images on Flickr, and selected 19 of these for inclusion on the CD. Here's what you get now:



Much nicer.

Here's the default appearance on 9.04 and then 9.10.





It's not a quantum leap, but it feels like the lights have been turned on. The new default background is an organic version of the previous one - warmed up and subtly intriguing. The icons have been smartened up, the window title bar is darker yet somehow less intrusive, the 'panel' icons (top-right) are monochrome, and generally colour is being used more where it means something and less where it only adds visual noise.

I feel that we've managed to move things forward. There is a lot of work to do on a million other aspects of Ubuntu so I hope people won't get fixated on things like the default desktop too much - these are matters of taste and there are no correct answers - you have to trust that we have a long-term vision and that decisions are made to move things in a certain direction. We don't think you'll be disappointed when things really start to come through over the next few releases.

I always planned to make my millions and then spend them philanthropically, on a technological venture. Nanotech, bioengineering or artificial intelligence - some scientific enterprise for the benefit of humankind.

Earlier this year, when the credit crunch was in full swing and I was never sure how my rent would get paid, and my creative attention continued to fracture and fray with a new idea coming every few days - ideas never really completed to perfection and production continuing to gravitate to 'proofs of concept' instead of actual works of art, earlier this year when loan terms were shouting out my dreams, and compromise (awful compromise) could no longer be avoided, earlier this year, all of a sudden, I received a phone call from a balkan witch.

Ivanka (she's not really a witch) said she was putting together a team at a company called 'Canonical'. I'd heard through mutual friends that she was involved in some sort of altruistically-oriented company, and I'd seen a photo of the impressive view from her new office via Twitter. I didn't know that much about what she was actually doing.

Canonical is the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is an operating system, like Windows (blaaaaargh) or OS X, but free and open-source (source as in source code, which means you can read or change the source code if you want, which you can't do that with commercial operating-systems as they think that they need to keep their source code secret so nobody can steal their work). I had been using Ubuntu as a Windows replacement on my home computer and second work laptop for a couple of years, so I knew what it was. Actually, I didn't really use it (I used, and still use, a Mac) - I ran certain applications on it and it had Windows XP on a VMware instance (this is how you should run Windows - as a virtual machine in a little sandboxed window, where it can't do any damage and its incessant idiotic securlty warnings become a source of mild amusement instead of irritated, impotent frustration). I had seen Ubuntu run productively as a primary operating system by one of the developers in my team at LBi, so I knew it could work well (if you were sufficiently motivated to run an open-source operating-system).

Canonical was started by Mark Shuttleworth, who made an absolute shit-load of money in the dot com boom. I tell people he invented the little padlock in your web-browser that lets you shop online. Obviously it's a bit more complicated than that. If you're interested, read his wikipedia entry. Canonical is not your run-of-the-mill short-term-profit-oriented company. Mark wants to make something that will last, with the highest possible quality, and give it away for free. Windows isn't even on the map here - the idea is to compete with Apple and make the best operating system.

So, was I interested? Well. It would certainly be a detour. I had quit my Flash job a year earlier in search of something more meaningful, in search of a way to make money from art. The thought of abandoning this plan made me very sad. I did not want to feel I was admitting defeat. But there were many upsides. I liked the idea of working with Ivanka. I liked the idea of meeting Mark (he's been to space, which is reason enough to want to meet him). I really liked the idea of learning from Mark - to see how he was making a techno-philanthropy project work in real life. The opportunity to be part of a design team instead of a technical team was also novel (albeit scary). So I decided that it chimed well with my long-term plans and would be a good way to spend my early thirties while my artistic enterprises baked away in the background. So, following an enjoyable job interview, I signed up.

So here I am. I'm back doing Flash (after a frantic couple of weeks trying desparately to find a better way to produce prototypes than with Flash). I'm making a fake version of Ubuntu in which we prototype user interaction designs, and I'm working with some very good people. And finally, after a few months of intensity learning about how everything fits together, I'm ready to start talking about it. Because there are a great many things that need to be proposed, discussed, defended, developed and denied.

Dear Michael Bay

Thank you for that two and a half hour epic of indistinct muttering and non-existent characterisation saturated in testicle jokes and ludicrously contrived situations designed around showcasing Megan Fox's cleavage.

Honestly, why would I mind you riding roughshod over my childhood memories. You know what's best for me. Sure, no - why should the characters in your films bear any relation to the characters from the 80s comic books or cartoons? Why should they look similar? You just go ahead and chuck it all in the bin and make up your own thing. I'm sure nobody will notice.

I NOTICED, MICHAEL. I NOTICED.

Here is what Ratchet looks like:



So who the fuck is this guy?



And why the fuck does he look exactly like this guy?



And why, in the first film, wasn't Jazz, like, a white sports car with a stripe? You couldn't have painted a big blue stripe down the middle of a modern sports car?

I have a few notes for you Michael.

Ironhide is RED. Optimus Prime is RED. 'Red doesn't work on film' you say? What? Um. I'm pretty sure I've seen red in films. All sorts of films. Three Colours Red. The Hunt for Red October. Films like that. They wouldn't put 'red' in the title if they couldn't put red in the film would they? NO MICHAEL THEY WOULDN'T.

Also: Starscream is WHITE with RED BITS. So you can tell him apart from the other two otherwise identical Decepticon planes Thundercracker and Skywarp. I remember, because I had the toy of Starscream. When I got him for Christmas, my first Transformer toy, when I was six years old, I was overjoyed. Overjoyed. He was my dream come true. I couldn't believe my luck. Little did I know that you were WAITING FOR ME MICHAEL. WAITING TO TAKE HIM AWAY FROM ME. WAITING TO MAKE HIM LOOK LIKE SOME SORT OF INDISTINCT STUMPY TRIANGLE-LOOKING THING THAT LOOKS ALL WRONG BECAUSE YOU THOUGHT IT WOULD BE "COOL" TO TRY AND MAKE HIM LOOK LIKE THE DECEPTICON INSIGNIA MICHAEL. YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD DO BETTER. WELL YOU DIDN'T. YOU DID WORSE. HE LOOKS SHIT NOW MICHAEL. HE LOOKS THE SAME AS ALL THE OTHER SHIT LOOKING ROBOTS IN THE SHIT FILMS WITH WHICH YOU'RE RAPING MY CHILDHOOD MEMORIES.




Also, Bumblebee was a VW Beetle. It was the 80s. They were in the 80s. That's what cars they had then.



The only thing you seem to have brought in from the 80s is some backwardly racist 'jive talking' characters.

I will refrain from spoilers because if anybody else reading this letter is anything like me then they'll want to see your film regardless of any bad reviews because they hold Transformers so dear that they're willing to embrace any live action realisation because they've been waiting for it since they were little children. And they probably think 'how could Giant Robots Fighting go wrong'? And then they'll go and see it and they'll realise that Giant Robots Fighting can indeed go wrong. It just takes enough hubris and a big enough budget and enough of a contemptuous disregard for the history of the phenomenon. It can go very wrong. Very wrong indeed.

I read the UK Comics in the 80s. I loved them. Every Saturday morning I would sit in the front room waiting to the paper delivery to hit the mat. From, like, 5:30am or something. Until 9:30 or whenever it was. I would read the stories with glee, read them again, then read them again, until the pages turned to rags.

Reading some of them again as a grown-up, I realised that the beauty of having SO many distinct characters meant that there was a healthy churn - a lot of danger, a lot of death, new characters constantly emerging, fostering a writing style that didn't need to be super-protective of a central set of characters because there were always new, more exciting characters around the corner. And in the comics, thanks to Simon Furman et al, the robots were characters. Some were likeable, some were heroic, some were annoying, some were super-cool, some were treacherous, some were incompetent, some were psychotically evil and hell-bent on destroying the Earth, and it worked.

In your second film I did not at ANY POINT feel concerned for the safety of ANY of the characters. With all the buzz-saws and shrapnell and barbed metal and pointy hooks it was pretty unbelievable when any of the human characters lasted more than ten seconds in the situations in which they were placed. Even the robots didn't seem to be in much danger. It was all dust and masonry and near-misses and as a result it was boring and irritating and it made me MAD.

I wish I could see a Transformers film with a Furman screenplay, set in the 80s, with much simpler robots, with Soundwave with a robot voice and Megatron that transforms into a small gun. That would be so much better than this shit you have been putting out, Michael Bay.

Thank you for your time Michael. We shan't speak again.

Regards

Michael Forrest

I'm just not feeling it with any of the music software I use at the moment.

Ableton Live has served me well since 2001 but I have developed a fatigue to the lack of user-oriented visual design. It's so grey. They've added all of these sonically fertile software instruments and effects over the years but everything looks exactly the same - my biggest pet hate is the icons:

[grey list of folders]

[grey list of audio effects]

[grey list of virtual instruments]

[grey effect racks (you can tell cos of the bisecting line)]

[grey list of presets (#777C84 instead of #575C66 - way to give visual cues guys!)]

This wouldn't be such a problem if it wasn't just one big long list. If you get lost, the only thing you can do is read the labels and try to keep track of whether you're indented by 6 or 8 pixels from the left. Ableton: would it kill you to at least put that icons for different sorts of things in different colours?! Please, you gotta help me out here!

Then you've got the horrid looking parameter settings:

Electric piano my arse! I love the sound, but just look at the equivalent in Logic:

Logic Pro - Electric Piano from Michael Forrest on Vimeo.

Big knobs. Less frequently used controls hidden. Colours, textures, animation, references to the real world - these can all be used to create visual cues that make software more fun and productive. With Ableton, all I can do is squint irritably at the damn thing.

I got so pissed off with Ableton's interface that I made my own.

Grimonium Interface from Michael Forrest on Vimeo.

However, this software layer relies on an undocumented API that seems to change between minor revisions of Live! So I can use it with Live 7.0.1 but not with 7.0.14 and certainly not with 8.0.1!

And you broke my knobs!
I have been listening to a lot of dubstep recently. I decided to have some fun and make a bit of knob-tweaking dirty synthy fun stuff by using the knobs on my MicroKontrol. I started having fun with the controls mapped to rack units but imagine my horror when it dawned on me that I could not record my knob tweaking. Short of bouncing down to audio (no!) there was no way to record my tweaks. I searched the Ableton forums and found a few people complaining of the same bug in Live 8.0.1. A few weeks later and there's still no sign of a fix. Or even an apology. Or even a comment. For a company who put a whole section in the user manual of their software about how they use test-driven-development to keep out the bugs, this is unacceptable.


So... now what?
Logic Pro does better in a lot of the areas where Live fails, particularly since Apple took over. However, not all is rosy in that world either.

Logic's undo functionality is complex to say the least. Certain types of action (mostly to do with timeline edits) can be undone. Knob tweaks cannot (you have to click 'compare' to revert back the state from the last save). Automation edits seem to be undone but I can't quite work it out. Mixer settings cannot. So if accidentally nudge one my hardware controller's faders, I can wreck my carefully tuned mix. This makes working with Logic stressful and nervewracking. I can't experiment if I can't safely undo mistakes!

I love the big customisable icons though.

The retrospective recording is cool (where you can be playing along with midi and decide you like what you just did and press cmd+shift+c insert a recording of what you just did from the buffer).

The automation is sort of cool but also a little terrifying (and kinda annoying the way you arm it)

At least it's in colour. I always liked the way you can see everything, but I still get a bit scared using it.

Logic sometimes abandons playback when things get too hard. The first thing that excited me about Live was the warning dialog shown before the audio gets stopped due to a program operation, so this behaviour in Logic feels really anachronistic to me now.

Logic is always breaking up, stopping, and has a really long latency when pressing play and record and so on. It feels heavy. And can be awfully fiddly if you need to use certain secondary features (try setting up an arpeggiator, for example).

And so....
Logic Pro: I like using you to master tracks. I like your effects, I like your preset libraries, and I like your virtual instruments (the ones I can figure out anyway).

Ableton Live: I love you, but you need to start thinking about your appearance. Presentation matters. Human intuition is complex and you should start trying to understand it.

I'm seriously thinking about looking elsewhere for somebody that really understands me... Perhaps Propellerhead have the answer:

I've been tinkering with Mood Tracker again (my Facebook app - try it here http://www.new.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=25355222452 )

I've made it so you can edit your reports and added in some new charts. Personally, I'm finding it rather instructive. It's nice to have some hard scientific data to hand when making decisions about how to change your life. You should try it. Prioritising, of course, the activation of the IM bot 'Auntie' who will make sure you keep your data fresh!

When I was creating assets for my Bread Bin game I made sure to name things usefully at the earliest possible stage.

So here's how my PSD looked:



This allowed me to use Photoshop's "Export Layers to Files..." script to create a folder of images in my (sprouts-based) Flash project's assets folder.





Note that when exporting to PNG files, the layers can be automatically trimmed, resulting in a folder like this:


The next task was to get rid of the leading numbers in the file names (I wanted total purity of file name :) ), a task for a bit of Ruby: