256 New Pixels for a GreaseMonkey Logo!

Sorry for the lack of updates last month. I had been sick for a month in May due to some deadly allergies, as well as breathing the construction dust from my new apartment (and as well as various turbulent personal matters). That means I have quite a big list of blogs I have to catch up writing!

For most geeks, today is the Firefox Download Day. However, what's more exciting to me is the release of GreaseMonkey 0.8 last week. Besides a great slew of fixes and new functions, it also revealed a new logo I updated for the GreaseMonkey dev crew a while ago.

The story began with a emoticon pack I did for Trillian back in 2001. As Trillian became popular, quite a few people had fallen in love with its emoticons, due to its vast selection and simplistic design. The emoticons were later ported to Trillian fan sites in GIF format, and of course, later leaked to the whole Internet (something you can never stop).

Eventually, the main developer of GreaseMonkey Aaron Boodman searched on Google for a monkey image, and some monkey.gif came up. Perhaps the square-eyed Trillian monkey were cute/decent/handsome enough, it begged for adoption and ended up in the early builds of GreaseMonkey.

It went full circle when I downloaded my copy of Firefox 1.5 and a friend pointed out the use of the monkey. I'm rather surprised and pleased that the emoticons had found an unlikely home, as it would be usually kidnapped by some Trillian instant messenger clones! I wrote an email to Aaron, and got a reply a while after.

The new logo is a visual update of the old happy and smug monkey... :] I attempted to keep the essence of the smile and updated it with better drawing techniques. 16x16 is a particularly difficult size, as I cannot include too many visual information - It has to be simple, clean and crisp.

The large version references the Firefox logo and Aaron's comment on how he thought the original monkey is Donkey Kong. I expanded on these ideas and make a full logo out of it, so it looks like the ones from Firefox or Thunderbird. While Firefox 'ruled' the web by encircling the globe, and Thunderbird delivered a email on its beak, GreaseMonkey changed the web by swinging around and greasing up the Internet's series of tubes (no pun intended!).

So that was the short story. I hope you like it, and like the logo as well! (If you don't, I'm sure some Stylish scripts can fix it for you... hahaha) Either way, enjoy and go download it now!

Delightful New R160A Trains

New York subway have finally made its step forward to the 1990's with a new set of trains, and I'm very pleased with them. It features a few good designs that are unique to the New York subway system. Here is my brief photo encounter:

 
As there are way too many stations in the New York subway, it is impossible to fit the whole subway map on the display. As a result, only stations on a single line are displayed. The use of a completely electronic display allows trains to be coordinated to run on other lines for peak hours. There is also a LCD monitor on the far left to allow display of various subway promotions.

This is a nice flushed detail for accommodating the altering roof heights. The black plexiglass blends in with the LCD display very well. Commuters are amazed by this detail as they ride to the Hipster Capital.

 
There are external speakers on every train. This is necessary for New York subway because it is almost impossible for MTA to install a speaker system on its 500+ platforms. Putting speakers on the train ensures that stations are announced properly instead of the train operator speaking gibberish.

Oh my, My Apple Genius!

The song and music video, conceived by my talented activist great friend Miss Lauren Larken, criticizes the veil between a person being truly personal and a technical support acting personal for your services, while suggests that a corporate love is perhaps possible as well as we break our preconceptions and let our imagination go wild.

The kids staged a few improv dances inside and outside Apple Stores around Manhattan a couple weeks ago. I was in the dance, too, making fun of the Apple products that I love and hate, while handing out heart-shaped balloons that resemble their oh-so-glorious logo.

The video was released on Valentines' Day, and a few performances followed.

On the back side of the project, I also designed the animation for the opening and the karaoke session. Everything was done in Adobe AfterEffects and Illustrator, the same tool I used for the over-the-top Trillian Astra preview movie. (Watch it over and over again while it's still up!)

Faking the space with some simple polar distortion. Well, not so good.

Simple 3D layers and motion paths were used, plus a few custom space-y background effects inspired by tutorials of Andrew Kramer. His tutorials are intuitive and helpful, and I would recommend everyone to watch them if you are interested in animation effects more advanced than Flash.

"Subtle arrogance" through font weight: Notice how there is hardly a U, there is only i.

Imitating Apple is always educational, as you learn how to restrain yourself from using way to many effects while giving the products a nice professional finish. Just having a few pixels or centimeters off will ruin your composition, while picking the wrong highlights and shadows will end up looking like a fake. However, make sure you don't end up ripping off the whole design!

"A Good Skin"

Not exactly a feat in design, but a feat in code optimization.

This skin was made as a proof of concept long time ago, when I designed the Custom Windows feature. As skins get more and more complex (Trillian Cordonata is 700+KB of hand code), the goal is to create a new subsystem that allows creation of skin in the least amount of code possible.

The solution is to have a base skin that encompasses everything that needs to be skinned, and to allow major parts of the skin (e.g. Contact List, Chat Windows) to be swap-able. It is unprecedented in any skinning engines in the world, as Trillian slowly becomes highly intricate and increasingly complex.

Originally based on Stixe, Custom Windows allow creation of skins that is semi-dependent on the base skin. The result is the ability for users to mix and match bits and parts of a skin, and the ability for skinners to easily create a skin as a weekend project.

"A Good Skin" contains around 20 lines of code, and only take an hour to bash out the graphics and codes.

Comparing the months and years spent on Trillian Cordonata, this is quite a feat.

You can download the skin here for a test drive.

An Icon for a Group of Chat Rooms

Another day, another incremental build forward for Trillian Astra. As the new build 77 features a new Chat Room Browser UI design, I designed a few new icons to accompany it.

The main problem of a "Chat Room" icon is that there is hardly ever a general icon designed for it. A search on Google Images for idea reveals nothing particularly interesting:

Most designs retreats to the method used by Chinese characters as concepts get more and more complicated, i.e. 3 chat bubbles imply that it is not 1-to-1 conversation, thus a chat room or a conference:

This design would work, but, until the concept of "Chat Room Groups" come up in the Yahoo! Chat Browser. And very soon we would find ourselves drowning in the vortex of the most complicated Chinese character if we put forward such logic:

The solution is to replace the icon with a new concept. In this case, I drew a little House with a chat bubble blowing through its chimney to represent a Chat Room. As users learn that a house represents a Chat Room, they will also understand that a few houses represents a group of Chat Rooms. (Let's see how many other chat clients and chat sites would rip this idea off.)

I know, this is pretty minute, but it saves you from a bubble bath in the Chat Room Browser. :)

The Best House Ever

Somewhere in East Hampton, architects (and artists, or poets) Madeline Gins and Arakawa had built a house that defies death. (NYTimes interview)

It's an adventurous sandbox enclosed within the protective shelter of a box. That's what fending off bears in wild nature cannot give you. The green ceiling reminds you that you are protected in the grace of architecture.

While adults put expensive toys (e.g. stereo, cars, gym equipment) inside their house, in this case, all those expensive toys happened to be a playful (and challenging) landscape.

This is like playing in a MMORPG/Second Life sandbox in your Xbox or Playstation, but now magnified to reality... but what isn't?

You can climb around the landscape the house, and reach the orange electric socket on the ceiling.

The artists declared that the design of the house is not to make you accept reality, but to defy it.

It's the best house ever, yet.

A Blank Vista Logon Screen

After having installed Windows Vista for a year, I got a little bored by the blue and green Aurora logon screen. Since I'm not particularly interesting in having outer space, sexy women, XP-inspired landscapes or some arbitrary corporate graphics as the background of the screen, I decided to make my own:

A blank screen.

It turns out that this is the best background in my opinion. Though very likely to be opposed by the marketing department for its lack of product identity, or to be criticized by the head of the graphic design department for being lazy, the black background seems to be the best transition between the computer turning on till the wallpaper shows up after logging on.

The black blends with the edge of the monitor screen, very much so the way the Vista design team decided that a maximized window should have a black edge.

I had also flashed my BIOS for a blank boot-up screen as well to match the whole experience.

To create a black Vista logon screen is easy. Simply go here to download a free copy of Logon Studio Vista, courtesy of Stardock. All you need to do next is to create a black bitmap in any size. Here I made it in 640x480 and saved as a PNG. The UI of the software is fairly simple, and that's what makes you think that it is a safe process to customize your logon screen.

Mourning

Little turtle - R.I.P. 2006 - 2008.

One of my little turtles had died this morning.

On Graffiti and DRM

This is my off-topic take on the news of Adobe crippling Flash video with DRM, from BoingBoing:

Seth Schoen, staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and one of the world's top DRM technical researchers, has written up an analysis of the DRM that Adobe has built into the latest version of Flash for videos, which prevents video viewers from making mashups and re-edits of the video they see on the net.

Amazingly, Adobe seems to have entirely missed the fact that the reason that the Flash video format has taken off is that it's so fluid, versatile and remixable -- not because they sucked up to some Hollysaurs and crippled their technology.

Lots of computer software begins its life as a tool for piracy, then turn 'legitimate' later on. This will be no exception.

Speaking of mashups and re-edits, I can compare them to graffiti. I'm not saying that there is no good or interesting art that comes out of it, but these day I have an ambivalent feeling that the cost is just too great to make these activities desirable.

In graffiti's case, lots and lots of public facilities and private houses are vandalized just because someone wants to write their name on it, while decaying neighborhoods, disrespecting other users and wasting a lot more money than needed in restoration.

Yes, I know that there is a Banksy in 1 of 100000, and I know that some homeowners are so open that they let everyone graffiti their house. (Besides, those who are committed to do it will find the leeway.)

In the re-edit/remix's case, lots and lots of videos are just exact duplicates of the original, or just plain horrible work, just because someone wants to tell the whole world instead of his friends one single joke, while encourages the use of the medium for piracy and opens up an irreversible flaw for author who just wants to release their videos as CC:BY-ND-NC.

Yes, I know that there is a (you name it) in 1 out of 1000000, and I know that there are plenty of filmmakers who happily lets others cut their film into pieces. (Those who are committed to remix will find the security loophole.)

With that said, I'm not saying that I support DRM. But I think the DRM is more acceptable - if it is not forced on all videos, and if the author has the choice on whether the video will have it or not.

Anyone who can shred some light on this dilemma is welcome. :)

New Direction

Hello all, sorry for forgetting to post here for quite a while. It has been great times for me, since I'm busy with work and a few great projects with my friends and for myself had started.

I noticed that while it is hard to type anything specifically for the blog, I realize that I type a lot when I am writing in response to blogs or forums. Therefore, from now on I will also post those epic essays of mine here as a record and for all of you to read.