So, I’m working on iPhone App #2 and I’m having this problem were I push a new UIViewController onto my UINavigationController. It normally works just fine: I push and there’s a nice smooth animation that slides my new view onto the screen. But for some reason, the newest one just snaps onto the screen without any delay and then causes all the others to snap on instantly, too.

So after wrestling with this for a while, I gave up and decided to play the piano. Of course, it’d been a while since I’ve practiced and things were sounding kind of messy. Exasperated, I said, “Man, I wish things weren’t so difficult!”. At which point, Tracy said, “Maybe you need to pick easier hobbies.”

True, so very true. But then, I get so much satisfaction from successfully doing these things because they are so challenging. Still, I wish things were just a bit easier sometimes…

One of my friends recently made a snow globe app for the iPhone, Noon Snow Globe. Unlike most of the other snow globes out there, this one features actual 3D geometry and animation. If you’re looking for a cute app to show off this holiday season, check it out!

Ever heard about The Spiel? It’s a neat podcast about boardgames. They did an episode called “Episode 68: That’s A Wrap – 2008 Holiday Gift Guide” with over 50 suggestions for boardgames in a bunch of different categories. They also mentioned a few other items of general interest for boardgamers, including the little iPhone app written by yours truly, Mach Dice. So, check them out if you’re into boardgames or take them up on their suggestion and purchase Mach Dice for a friend today! Heh, heh…

At work, I’m what is known as a TD (technical director). What is a technical director? Well, imagine a great artist drawing something with a mechanical pencil. And in this mechanical pencil, there’s a complicated mechanism involving buttons, levers, and rubber stoppers that the artist uses to advance the lead. But once the lead has been advanced, a spring pushes it all back into place so that the artist can continue drawing. Technical directors are like the spring.

Anyways, a number of the technical directors at work are musically inclined and I kept on hearing things like, “We should form a band!” or “A TD band would be awesome!” or “Mach, why isn’t there a TD band?” (I’m not sure why I’m addressed in comments like these, but it happens.) So I decided to form a band. The only catch? I don’t actually play anything. I mean, I once sang in the California All State Honor Choir and I’m a classically trained pianist (believe you me, I can rock the heck out of the first page and a half of the third movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata). But nothing really “Rock” applicable.

Still, what I lack in talent, I make up for in enthusiasm. And somehow, I managed to get a number of very talented TDs to come together to rock out. (Actually, I didn’t do much, I just got the ball rolling.) This past Friday was the band’s debut performance. Enjoy!

That's me on the right as Drift Boss King, Kabuto.

Go see Bolt, now with the new short from Pixar, Tokyo Mater!

A while ago, some of my friends at work started working on a short film based on Cars that was to be set in Tokyo. They asked me if I could help out because I speak Japanese and I said, “Sure!”. Originally, I was just going to be the temporary scratch voice for one character that would be replaced later by a real actor. But they liked what I did well enough that they kept it in the final short.

I based the voice I used on jidaigeki shows I used to watch on TV as a kid (like Kage no Gundan and Abarenbo Shogun, which had the same exact plot for every episode). So if you want to hear what I sound like doing a melodramatic Japanese tough guy voice, Tokyo Mater is now in theaters playing in front of Bolt. So go see Bolt! It’s a very cute film that’ll leave you smiling, especially if you’ve got a soft spot for cats or dogs.

(The image up top is actually from a TV commercial for Tokyo Mater. I didn’t even know my character was in the commercial so it was quite a surprise to hear myself coming from the TV that I had on in the background.)

My second iPhone app is sort of like a drawing program, which can get pretty complicated pretty quickly. There are layers involved, multiple drawing tools, etc. The problem it all needs to fit on a small 320 x 480 pixel screen. Now, I could just make the icons smaller or add a bunch of pop-up screens for different sets of options. But the more icons there are, the more things that need to be explained. If there are, like, 4 icons on the screen, the user has a pretty good chance to guess what they do. But what if there are 20?

The other option is to simplify things. But then the problem is that the app loses some functionality. So then, how do you decide what stays and what goes? I use a 90% rule. If I think that more than 90% of users would use the feature, it stays in. Less, then I think about removing it. The fewer I think would use it, the more that feature has to justify itself.

In a way life is like that too. Life’s just too short to do everything. You have just have to figure out what’s most important.

Spam is insidious. But it’s fascinating from an evolutionary standpoint. It started with simple “Buy my product” emails. Then it quickly focused into topics like sex and money that more people were more likely to respond to. More recently, it’s gone from just email to include things like comments on blogs. Usually, they’re pretty much the same as the email spam, but I started getting comments on my blog like this:

Hello webmaster I like your post “Progress” so well that I like to ask you whether I should translate into German and linking back. Greetings Engel

Sounds sincere enough, right? Also, kinda flattering. But WordPress allows people to list their own URL when they make comments (which is generally a good thing). This lets readers and other commenters know who each other are. But spammers use it just to get people to click on their sites. A quick google search of “whether I should translate into German and linking back” returned about 196,000 hits. So as elated as I was that Engel enjoyed my blog post, I was a little let down to find that there were 195,999 other posts that he enjoyed just as much.

Fortunately, Akismet detected the spam and automatically blocked it. I only found out because I was curious about what the recent spam had been. Yay, Akismet!

Over the past weekend, I had the opportunity to speak at CG Event, Russia’s biggest computer graphics conference. I think there are something like a thousand people attending and it’s filled with classes, presentations, and even a few contests. Check out my Flickr page for more details about the trip.

I found out a great deal about the Russian effects industry and hopefully the people at the conference enjoyed my little talk. I think they were as curious about me as I was of them. They’ve become very successful at doing effects work like set extensions (where you extend a live-action set with CG models) and fluid and particle systems. They’re also starting to really explore character animation and things like pre-visualization.

The greatest thing about the Russian effects industry is that take many of the things that we do here in the US but add a very Russian sensibility to them. They’ve already come out with some incredible effects movies (Nightwatch, Daywatch, and Wanted starring James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie) that are unlike anything we do here. Next year, they’re coming out with a movie called Inhabited Island. I hope it comes out in the US. It’s just a matter of time before they come out with a full CG animation. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

I’ll write some more next time about the fantastic time I had in Moscow (thanks to Sergei, Eugene, and Sergei!) once I’ve recovered from the phenomenal jet lag that I’m starting to hit. Moscow’s time zone is 11 hours apart from San Francisco Bay Area’s and I just had a couple days in Moscow which is juuuuuust about enough to start getting used to the new time zone when I had to come back.

I’m still in Chicago right now, awaiting my flight back to San Francisco. But one of the neat things about my last flight was that I left at 3pm and arrived around 5pm. So the whole plane ride over, it was like the plane was chasing the sun in the distance. Surreal.