| |
 |
• Xanthic Eye: Blog |
Syndicate this Blog:  |
|
 |
 |
| I like McIntosh apples... |
May 18, 2007 |
|
 |
Yikes, it certainly has been a while since my last update... I'm still around, just super busy. But I am enjoying every moment. Life here in California has been pretty nice so far, and I am adjusting pretty quickly. Biggest thing I miss so far from Florida is the weather, and the beaches. The weather as well as the beaches is colder here, though I hear that when it gets hot, it gets VERY hot. I miss the rain a lot though. I think I can probably count the times I've seen rain here since I arrived on one hand.
My cats have finally begun to adjust. They were having such a difficult time. The move across the country really messed with their heads, and left them very hyper and even a little aggressive. But they've made a complete 180 degree change, all thanks to cat costumes.
Posted by Xanthic at 1:41am EDT · Comments (3)
|
|
| Califoooornia! |
January 14, 2007 |
|
|
Happy New Year to everyone! Hope everyone has had a great start to 2007. A lot has happened over the past few months and I thought I should share some of that with you all. The biggest change would probably have to be moving out to California. I got hired by Apple Computers (which is now Apple, Inc...) and relocated here back in December. I'll begin the story with my trip...
Most of the month of December I spent traveling and on the road. I drove up to North Carolina with my family to spend some time together and relax. After a few days we became a bit bored, however. It seems that we visited North Carolina at the wrong time or something as just about every place in the area was closed for the season and all attractions were not opening until the Spring time. There wasn't any snow either, which I was sort of bummed about as I had never seen snow. The Smoky Mountains were very beautiful, though, and were quite a lot of fun to drive through what with all the twists and tight turns. All in all it was a nice change of scenery and a nice opportunity to bond as a family.
From North Carolina, we began the journey to California. It took us roughly 5 days to reach San Jose. We stopped at a couple of states along the way and saw some sights as well. Saw snow (it was actually more like dirty gray slush) at a Wendy's restaurant as we were approaching the end of Texas. Then we saw a lot of snow in Arkansas, which I didn't think we'd be seeing there. Arkansas always struck me as a non-snow state... but I guess I was wrong. Later we made one stop in a very deserted and scary town late one night in New Mexico if I remember correctly. We were super tired from all the driving and had been driving through a whole lot of dark nothing for what seemed like hours until we found this one tiny town in the middle of no where. It had a few run down most likely empty houses, a gas station which was out of business, a tiny post office and a motel which as chance would have it, had vacancy and was open! It also had cow skulls all over the place and a bunch of ancient rusted cars parked in the parking lot... sound like something out of a horror movie to you yet? As you can guess, we didn't stay there. Just continued to drive till we found the next major city and a hotel with no skulls outside.
We finally made it to the San Jose area on the 24th of December and went to visit some family from my father's side of the family. It was a very fun experience meeting them all, I had never met any of them before. It was interesting seeing how large the family is, by the end of the night I had met so many cousins and family members that I couldn't remember anyone's name... I still can't remember most of their names, heh. It was very nice though, and its very comforting to know that I have family here that I can visit when I get lonely.
Oh, one portion of the trip that I haven't mentioned yet was that the whole trip was made from Florida to California with two of my cats... loose in the car most of the trip. Yeah, it wasn't an experience I'd like to repeat...
The rest of December and beginning of January was spent moving into my apartment and unpacking and organizing. I picked my apartment pretty much blindly off of the Internet, so I was quite scared that I would arrive here and find out that I had picked a horrible apartment in a terrible neighborhood. The reality however, was that it was a very nice apartment actually. It's located near many malls and is in a quiet and calm neighborhood. The apartment itself is very nice as well, freshly remodeled and pretty spacious and laid out nicely. All in all, I am quite pleased with the way the apartment turned out to be.
Now on to what most of you are only interested in... I am working for Apple now. This was my first week there and was quite an incredible week to begin on (iPhone, can you believe it?!). I'll be working in the Mac OS X team designing interfaces and such. So there you have it... thats pretty much what has kept me busy for the last 2-3 months. Not sure what will be happening with the site now, but I will be doing my best to keep everyone informed on any changes.
Posted by Xanthic at 3:05am EST · Comments (16)
|
|
| Busy Busy Busy |
October 24, 2006 |
|
|
Well, its been quite a long time since my last blog entry, and I have been up to quite a lot. The biggest thing to happen in the past few weeks is probably my graduation. I finally finished school a little over a month ago, and have begun the quest into the "what do I want to do with the rest of my life now" scenario.
Also, I never did get my external hard drive to work again. Data recovery services were too expensive, so I opted to save my pennies for when Apple would release their next major computer update. A little while later, they released the Mac Pro, and I knew I had to have one. Typically I try to wait until they release the Rev B updates, but I couldn't contain myself and ended up purchasing one about 5 days after they were released. All in all, I am quite happy with it, its incredibly quick, especially compared to my Powerbook G4. Once memory prices fall a little, I plan on purchasing a few more gigs of RAM to speed up Photoshop some more.
Lastly, the major project that I am currently focusing on is the Wonderlost series of paintings I started almost a year ago. They are progressing nicely, and I hope to be able to devote more time to the series and get more pieces done quicker now that I am out of school. Currently, three of my finished pieces can be seen in the Portfolio page. Of the three, my favorite is the Caterpillar, she is the most refined and detailed of the three, and in my opinion my best work to date. I plan on giving the series its own special page outside of the Portfolio page once I create enough pieces to warrant it. And who knows, maybe I'll release the pieces as posters or something, though one of my goals is to make some sort of art book with all the characters once I am done.
Posted by Xanthic at 9:49pm EDT · Comments (1)
|
|
| Mount, damnit! |
August 3, 2006 |
|
|
My external hard drive has gone on the fritz... *sigh*
Without any warning, it just stopped working. It won't mount, System Profiler identifies it as an unknown device and restoration apps like Data Rescue II and Disk Warrior do not even show it in their listing.
The timing couldn't be any worse also as I am in my final quarter of classes, and a corrupt hard drive was not something that I wanted to deal with. Fortunately I had backups on about 70% of my school work. There is a lot of other data that I will miss if the drive truly is unrecoverable... such as the majority of my Xanthic Eye master files (I luckily still have all my V9 files safely stored on my PowerBook), old freelance work, work in progress and more.
Moral of the story... backing up more often is indeed a good idea. *sigh*
Posted by Xanthic at 10:08pm EDT · Comments (4)
|
Yippee... I submitted TiCons 4 to Apple's downloads page, and was surprised to find it as the featured download this morning. 
I also realized I never told you guys what we ended up naming the kitten. She's been dubbed Chispy. The names a playful twist on the word "chispita" which means "tiny" or a "little bit" in Spanish. We also got another kitten... too many cats, heh. This one is totally black, looks like a tiny panther. He's been dubbed Mr. Peepers.
  
Posted by Xanthic at 2:10pm EDT · Comments (6)
|
|
|
|
Theming on OS X is tough... very tough. Moreover, it is tedious. The sheer number of buttons, slices and states is completely overwhelming at times.
Why am I talking about this? Well, I decided to get back into theming recently. Jumping back into it has made me remember a lot of what turned me off about it before, though. A lot has changed for the better. ThemePark (the application used to create and compile a Guikit - the most popular format for themes in OS X) has become increasingly more intelligent and easier to use. I remember having to create a button image, as well as an alpha mask image and a click mask to create a button when I began building TiSkin. Newer versions of ThemePark allow me to import images directly from Photoshop and it handles the creation of the alpha mask itself, greatly reducing the time it took to create a theme. However, theme creation is still quite a nightmare. the number of slices you have to make for a single button sometimes is insane.
Another aspect of theming that bothers me, is the inconsistency. Granted its not any better on the Windows side. But its quite a mess on OS X also. Many application developers insist on using their own aqua-like GUI elements, resulting in an inconsistent theming experience. And a lot of these graphics are hard-coded into the apps, making it almost impossible to easily replace GUI elements even by hand.
And since I touched upon the subject of Windows, why are there so many themable applications on the Windows side, while we here on the Mac side have nearly nothing. Peecee users have everything from themable calculator apps to themable notepad apps. Now I know that the Mac does have alternates to many of the themable extras and apps for Windows... but their theming is handled by the OS (or via ShapeShifter). This can be viewed as both a problem and a blessing. Its problematic becuase this simply adds to the complexity of theming. Instead of just creating a theme that is applied to the OS and every app it runs as often happens in OS X (unless you run into a hard-coded nightmare like Garageband), you instead now have to create a system theme and a theme for each separate themable app. This is something that ShapeShifter somewhat aids with their AppSkins functionality. However, it is a blessing in that you have theming freedom. You can theme you calculator differently than your notepad and system for example. Another reason independent theming is a blessing is that most of these themable apps use modern theming engines, which usually include freeform theming. This is what really interests me, and really makes me wonder. Why is it that with all the amazing graphical abilities built right into OS X, do we not have an abundance of freeform themable apps? Why hasn't the floodgates been opened? I mean, at least give me a freeform themable audio player! *tears up at the memory of the long gone Audion*
So what is the point to this rant? Well, I just wish it were easier to theme on OS X... *loud whine*
Posted by Xanthic at 10:49pm EDT · Comments (7)
|
|
All content contained herein is copyright 1999-2008, Raymond Sepulveda, The Xanthic Eye. All rights reserved. |
|
|
|
|
