Look! It's a snake! To be precise, it's a Boa photostolenfromnationalgeographae constrictor.

Oh Lord, I’m so sorry.

I once heard a story about a magnificent exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair— there was a great monument to the synergy of mind, hand, and electromechanical accomplishment— a fully functional 40 foot steel typewriter.

Children and adults alike would carefully crawl up the giant black injection-molded keys until they reached their favorite letter, at which point they started jumping furiously to activate the spring-loaded key.

When it finally gave way, they’d sit down and marvel at the thunderous spirit they had awakened. There was a magnificent whiffle tree mechanism which spun a solid metal typeball with such heft that you couldn’t help but imagine whether the Earth itself was the type element of God’s cosmic typewriter— his tool for imprinting the ribbon of time with the ink of fate.

They called it an I-beam Selectric.

Sometimes you hear a story which involves the confluence of so many strange coincidences, you’re almost certain that it’s all build-up for some colossal letdown of a punchline.

That’s what the title— “Microsoft Outlook Offline Address Book (OAB) Format Parser in Python” should probably evoke— and if that wasn’t enough, the photo of a BOA Constrictor on the thumbnail should certainly put it over the edge.

I don’t expect anyone in the world to find a legitimate use of something like this, but I feel obligated to write a blog post anyway. So I’ll write it about the vague subject of bad puns— because I happened to name an OAB parser written in a certain snake-related language an anagram of the format which shares a name with a particular snake-related snake.

codenamed stick2

One thing the ajax animator’s pretty bad at is stick figures. Sure it’s not impossible, but it can’t really compare with the ol-fashioned frame-by-frame joint-manipulation likeness of Pivot. It’s called stick2 because the original experiment with stickfigures was named stick.html, and when I went to extend it and didn’t feel like setting up a git/svn repo, I copied the file and named it stick2.html, and with no good project-naming skills, it stayed that way.

Anyway, this was a project that got pretty close to completion in early march, but I never bothered to blog about it until now. It should work pretty not-bad on an iPad J(except the color picker), though honestly, I’ve never tried it.

The interface is pure jQuery/html/css. The graphics are done with Raphael, but the player actually uses <canvas> for no particular reason.

Basically, it’s organized into two panels, the left-side figures-box and the bottom timeline. The figures-box contains figures (amazing!) and clicking on them adds them to your canvas. The two defaults are the pivot-style stickman, and something called “blank” which is a root node with no additional nodes. Though it shows up as a orange dot, unless you add something to it, it doesn’t have any actual look when viewed in the player.

On top is the context-sensitive buttons. Well the buttons in my screenshot aren’t context sensitive, they’re permanent. But when you click on a node, a new set of buttons (and words too!) appears. One is a line and the other is a circle. Click them to add a new segment or circle to the currently selected node. Then are various settings for the current segment (each node other than the root one is associated with a segment). Clicking those allows you to modify them. Also, a red X appears on the right, and that basically means remove the node and the child nodes.

So, now you have some extra nodes, how do you change them? Simply hold it down and drag, and the the segments move as well. But note that the length of the segment doesn’t change as you move it. That’s because by default, it locks the length of the segments. There are two ways to get around it. The first is to hold shift while dragging. The second is to tap the little lock icon on the top left.

On the bottom, is the timeline with live-previews of your frames with a semitransparent gray backdrop of numbers. Switch between each one by clicking on them and add one at the end by hitting the green “Add new frame” button.

On the canvas, there are two yellow squares, those allow you to resize the canvas.

On the very left of the top toolbar, is the play button. Hit it and the figures toolbox minimizes and it plays out your animation. Click it again to get back. Then is a little upload button. Hit it and then a little box pops up with a link to where you can find your animation in a way that you can share and to edit (not actually edit, but more like fork, as each save is given a unique id). Next is the download button which you hit, and get prompted by a big prompt-box which you use to paste in the ID of the animation you (or someone else) has saved, so you can edit it. Most of the time that’s useless as when you send a link with the player, it has a button which says “Edit”.

Sample animation: http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/stick2/player.html?rlsm4lx14c

Try the application out: http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/stick2/stick2.html

Code: http://github.com/antimatter15/stick2

Screenshot

I was surprised to find that one of the main referrers to my site recently has been Twitter. Looking into it, it seems to all be for my quickly hacked together CSS3 Sideways Google. Which uses the new CSS3 transforms supported by Webkit and Gecko (Firefox, Chrome and Safari) as well as the freaky DirectX stuff Microsoft has (Only major browser that isn’t supported is Opera, who is lagging a bit).

And in the spirit of CSS3 Sideways Google, I present CSS3 elgooG

It also appears that the awesome rotateme.org website was built entirely off of the original CSS3 Sideways Google and actually got 1500 diggs :)

So I don’t actually have wave yet, but for all 2 of you (likely less) who have used pygowave, an open source third party implementation of the wave protocol. So there was how I developed it, I read through the APIs and tested on pygowave. So what does VectorEditor do that svg-edit and… erm… svg-edit don’t do?

First, VectorEditor for wave is really really real time. Waaay more real time than svg-edit (not really). But VectorEdit (VectorWave might be a nice name.. I’m going to try using that name from now on in this post) transmits the data such as even while the shape is still being drawn, rotated, or moved (rotation needs work). Another nice feature is that the transitions are animated so things are even more seamless.

Another important feature is shape locking. So when someone selects a shape, it gets locked and can’t be edited by anyone else. If anyone tries, an alert box appears saying “Shape shape:5sdfwef98dfe3ssdf is locked by user antimatter15@pygowave.p2k-network.org”. svg-edit (the latter) doesn’t support moving things after they’re created so it doesn’t really matter then, and I’m quite certain the former doesn’t do any type of locking.

And lets not forget the likely most important, yet totally untested feature that seperates VectorEditor from the rest: IE support, which is inherent since it uses Raphael for rendering, but it may not be necessary since google may be making some shim-type system of hacking svg awesomeness onto IE and making the whole VectorEditor project useless.

So if you want to try it out, go to pygowave, sign up, create a wave and add the

During the last two days I worked a bit on my cross platform, Raphael based vector graphics editor. It now supports Firefox, Opera, Chrome, probably Safari and magically, something called IE. Yes, it works on that nasty terror. Really, the project started with just the idea of being able to support IE. Sure it has a few neat features (multiple select mainly), but the fundamental idea is to support IE and to do so in a stable manner. It’s actually running quite well in IE, though only the latest version has been tested.

Among the updates is a new delete tool that is far more flexible and powerful. It is now not just a button but an entire tool. So while you can still click on it to delete your current selection, you can also use the tool to click on shapes or drag and delete whole groups (not sure what that thing is called). It even has a nice red tint to signify deleting. There is also event listening, vX support (it only uses events and position), and selecting fill, stroke, stroke opacity, fill opacity, and stroke width.

It also integrates well into the Ajax Animator in an almost drop-in replacement type. Maybe eventually something to choose between VectorEditor and Onlypaths. The really only bug features there are multiple select and drag and line editing.

Lines are now done almost perfectly. Dragging them works perfectly and it shows two little boxes on the ends that fan be dragged to edit. This vastly simplifies the old issues with lines and stick figures. Stick figures that inherently satisfy me a lot because that was the highes level of animation I ever did.

It’s probably a bad thing that the developer od an animation application never did anything more complex than stick figures, and probably makes it seem strange for me to even start it. But anyone with more knowledge of animation would not be so naiive as to attempt this.

http://jsvectoreditor.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/index.html

Microsoft and Google have fundamentally different in their business models. Google uses Advertising and Search, with around 98% of their revenue comming from Advertising. Microsoft owns a monopoly on the Operating System business. Especially with the new Google Chrome OS that’s been recently announced, It really brings the question of their positions. Can Google really take Microsoft down? What kind of financial prowess, consumer brand loyalty or user lock-in does it really need to take on Microsoft?

Google is on much shakier territory. I could leave Google just by typing in “bing.com” or “yahoo.com” in the URL bar. Simple as that. Totally intuitive, something that (hopefully) nobody needs to call Tech Support to guide them. Typing 8 letters into the URL bar and pressing enter is all it takes to destroy the Google empire.

However, what about Microsoft. They own a monopoly on the Operating System market. How easy is it to install another operating system? Well, you need about 1-4GB of data for a modern OS, you need to either burn it or buy it from a store (I figure there are probably tons of tech support calls at this point), and then likely reconfigure BIOS, go through menus, fill out several forms and select the specific partition to install the OS to. This point is already unfathomable for a great majority of the userspace.

Google is very different from Microsoft, from their core business models. The Windows monopoly isn’t going anywhere in the near future. Google could be gone tomorrow.