AIRBart is a small AIR application I wrote to display current BART departure times in the San Francisco Bay Area. Simply choose your current closest station from the dropdown, and it will show you departure times to all of the major endpoints in the BART system.

 It's my first attempt at a serious AIR app, and it's waaay beta, but it's functional enough that I use it every day. Please download it, test it, and give all critiques. This requires the AIR Framework from adobe, which is cross-platform, and thus this should work on mac or windows (and kindof/eventually on linux? C'mon adobe...). 

Mad props to Jonnie of Destroy Today, whose apps look so good I had to make mine fit his color scheme.

 TODO:

• get icons working
• clean up internal logic
• figure out why the installer doesn't tell you the app has a certification

The people I'm hanging out with are awesome.

This is a test of the noisebridge authentication system. You are now tied into the network.

Right now, someone in Beijing is looking at my site. HI BEIJING!

In a few weeks, I'll be seeing my friends from Austria. HI AUSTRIA!

Things happen in threes.

So, I got a semianonymous mail today via the site today from someone saying:

"way to rip off sheone for your header graphic. you're pathetic."

So, I googled a bit, and found Sheone. And, hey, the guy's really good, and I can see why someone could think he was an influence on the style of mediapathic, but frankly I'd never heard of him before today. athough now I wish I had. Also, from an artistic perspective, what he's doing is totally different from what I am (for one thing, he's doing with spray and brush what I have to use illustrator for - mad props for that), he's got a radically different sense of aesthetic. It's like saying that I rip off gutenberg just because we both use type. Yeah, there's some of the same elements (again, totally unconsciously), but we're doing completely different things with it. Like two people can't independantly arrive at the conclusion that linear spattered paint looks cool.

So, in conclusion, Sheone is awesome, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it is an asshat, and everything old is new again.

But hey, my first detractor! 

Seems like it's about time for my quasi-monthly update.

Right now I'm doing some work for a design group here in San Francisco who shall remain unnamed until it's actually official that I'm working for them -- I'm sort of on as a consultant for now with the great hopes (at least on my end) that this will turn into a full-time gig. The precise nature of what I'm doing for them must also remain somewhat hushhush for the moment, but suffice to say that I'm looking into techniques for building realtime 3d worlds in a somewhat more ...controlled manner than the ones I usually build. 

As a result, I'm looking into several new methodologies for doing 3d that I hadn't previously considered. For example, did you know that Director grew up while we were all paying attention to flash? It's all spiffy and high-powered in the 3d realm now. Funny thing, though, apparently no one cared about versions 5-10, so now all of a sudden on version 11 all of the tutorials I find are either written this year or in 1997. There's some significant power, here, though, so much so that I'm considering writing some vj tools in director, which could be nice because it outputs directly to an executable file.

Flash, however, is also keeping up nicely. Check out what these guys are doing with 3d in flash, check out that "99" demo, especially if you're into oldschool demoscene stuff, it's totally a stylistic nod there, and then remind yourself when you're seeing the scrolling ball text that you're watching a flash animation, not a pre-rendered video. And this, Away3d, is only one of three major 3D engines for flash that I've found. It's my feeling that flash is in the process of taking a huge motion towards... something. I think that it may be becoming a significant contributor to the ways in which we visualize information.

I know I'm excited enough that I'm trying to get over my somewhat ambivalent relationship with Actionscript3 (I'm fine with 2, but 3 is very different in some ways that I never liked) just to try to get in on this kind of visual processing power. Even if we wind up not using any of these products for the project I'm working on, I'm very interested to have a command of them for the future.