Rino's Tools

Using OmniGraffle for quick annotation

Rino Jose — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:35:42 +0000

There are a bunch of tools for adding annotation to an image. You can fire up any number of image editors and then place text on top and add lines and such. I’ve found that this is typically too manually intensive for me. Normally, I just want to put a box around something and add a label. For that OmniGraffle is perfect.

Here’s a quick screencast showing how you might use OmniGraffle to annotate an image:

OmniGraffle is like Visio, but better. I’ve been able to export swimlane documents from OmniGraffle to Visio and have them work just fine. If you have multiple canvases in an OmniGraffle doc, they’ll be exported as a multi-page Visio doc.

OmniGraffle is a good program to have on hand for quick annotation or for creating documents with nodes and connections.

NetNewsWire, Times, or…Flock?

Rino Jose — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:19:21 +0000

For a long time, NetNewsWire was my RSS reader of choice. Recently I took a look at Times and was really impressed by its interface—lots of innovation. Instead of e-mail as the metaphor for news, Times was more like a newspaper. The look of it was spot on.

It was fun to look at my news feeds in Times, but after a while, I got tired of clicking from tab to tab. Doing this felt a little sluggish…like a wet sponge. Also, if you have more than 4 feeds on a page, it’s somewhat tedious to scroll each section up and down.

I didn’t really want to go back to NetNewsWire—for some reason, reading news this way made me feel a little anxious. It was like I had to read every article. I was about to punt until I remembered that the browser I was using for organizing my social media accounts could also manage news feeds. That browser was Flock.

Flock is Awesome

If you haven’t used Flock, you should really take a look. It’s rare to see an app that integrates so many things feel and still feel well-architected. Let me just show you how Flock’s feed reading interface compares to NetNewsWire and Times:

Flock isn’t prettier than Times, and it’s not more powerful than NetNewsWire, but it presents information in a way that I find easy to consume. Its ability to integrate newsfeeds with social media feeds in one overview is extremely helpful. Whenever I take a break from work and want to see what’s going on, I just bring up the “My World” page and am instantly up to date. It lets me see what’s happening right now alongside what people are saying right now.

Give Flock a try. If you haven’t seen it before, it will change the way you think of browsers.

Learning the Basics of Kinemac

Rino Jose — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 06:47:21 +0000

First impressions

OK, so me and the other 88,000 people that bought the MacHeist 3 bundle are starting to look at kinemac, a real-time 3D compositing and animation program. It had the biggest price tag of any app in the bundle weighing in at $300. Is it worth it? Based on what I’ve seen, I’d have to say yes!

I have Motion 2.0 from the original Final Cut Studio suite. I’ve used it for a few things, but never really got the hang of it. While you could preview things in real time, it felt sluggish at times, especially when you tried to change anything.

After trying some of the sample kinemac projects, I found that when they say “real time”, they mean it. It’s amazing how snappy the playback is. I was selecting things and fiddling with things, and the app kept smoothly rendering as if I were playing a game. Pretty cool stuff.

Getting Started

Let’s fire up the app so I can explore a little. It looks like we have four main areas in view. There’s a toolbar at the top. A stage just below. A sprite/timeline area below that, and an inspector area on the right.

The inspector feels familiar from using the apps in the iLife and iWork suites.

From the toolbar, you can switch between the selection and the pen tool. There are buttons for adding and importing 2D and 3D sprites. You can group sprites, add cameras, and lighting. You can go to fullscreen as well as hiding everything but the stage.

Let’s animate something!

I want to do something like move a cube around. How should we do this? It looks like we need to add keyframes to the timeline. We can set the keyframes by going to the inspector and clicking on one of the keyframe icons. We can advance the playhead, change something about the sprite in question and then add another keyframe.

Keyframes in the timeline are draggable. To move between keyframes hit the Tab key. To get rid of a keyframe, you have to go to the inspector and “option click” the keyframe icon that you’d like to get rid of. There are more details on the kinemac site.

Let’s animate something better!

OK, animating something in 3D was neat, but my lack of artistic skill is shining through. There must be a better way of doing this. Let’s take a look at one of the sample projects (kinemac_ring).

If you select a sprite (or sprite group/folder) and then press Command-3, you’ll bring up a window that let’s you vary the animation of each parameter using a Bezier curve. It looks like their animations are using nice smooth curves.

It also looks like by grouping sprites, you’ll be able to apply an animation to the entire group and have any nested animations work as expected. Keyframes in the timeline only appear when animated objects are selected.

Add images to objects

OK, the animated cube is much smoother now, but it’s pretty boring. Let’s drag my company’s logo onto one of the faces of the cube and see what happens…Wow, my logo is moving and rotating in space! That’s awesome. Here’s what it looks like:

Going Forward

Well, I think I understand the basics of this app now—at least enough to learn from the example files on kinemac’s site. I’ll write more when I use kinemac to redo the overview screencast for my company’s flagship product.

Feel free to comment!

Howdy!

Rino Jose — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 02:55:22 +0000

Whenever I learn a new tool, I find myself wanting to jot down notes on what I’m doing and how it’s going. I tried doing this using a text document (via TextMate). I experimented with TaskPaper for jotting down things to try next. I tried posting things to an internal blog using MarsEdit. I also gave Scrivener a try.

For some reason, I’ve always come back to MarsEdit for jotting down my thoughts as I learn things. Not sure why, but there’s just something about the interface that is conducive for me:

So I’ll start using MarsEdit again to post my thoughts on learning new tools, but this time I’ll post to this blog. Hopefully, you’ll find some of it useful!