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Posted by alastair at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I said ages ago (here too) that I�d release the source code for a Finder-style icon view that I had sitting around on my disk.

Yesterday, while listening to the speakers at the first day of NSConference, I managed to find the time to tidy up what I had and to make it build and run properly on Snow Leopard.

The code isn�t perfect � I can think of lots of things that need doing to get it to the stage where I�d want to use it myself in an app � and because it was started way back in 2005 and slowly tinkered with over time, I�m sure there�s plenty that could be tidied up too� but it does provide a lot of examples of using all kinds of Cocoa functionality, some of which is not so obvious until you�ve tried it once or twice.

Anyway, it�s available under an MIT-style license from Google Code.

Posted by alastair at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier today I went to see Avatar 3D over at the Vue Cinema in Eastleigh. James Cameron has a pretty good track record, but I won�t deny being a little worried that the film might concentrate too much on special effects at the expense of the story, but I was very pleasantly surprised.

It would be very easy for the 3-D effect to become the centrepiece of a 3-D movie, but it seemed as if it was carefully thought out. Nice touches included the fact that some of the humans' display devices were themselves displaying images with depth and the various things floating in the atmosphere (including the Atokirina� and the dust after the destruction of the Na�vi Hometree).

The only thing really wrong with this type of 3-D right now is that you can�t focus anywhere other than where the camera is focused. Of course, fixing that is incredibly difficult, since you�d need to be able to adjust the focal length for specific areas of the image in the projector, not to mention adding the requirement of being able to film everything in every shot in perfect sharp focus in the first place.

Pandora itself is amazingly beautiful, particularly at night with all of the bioluminescence, and it really is difficult not to marvel at the amount of work that went into designing the lush and importantly believable landscape of the Pandoran forest and its native wildlife.

Anyway, it�s a wonderful film; let�s hope James Cameron gets to make a sequel. Let�s also hope that unlike the Alien series (which has been fatally marred by the awful Alien Resurrection, not to mention a certain amount of stupidity in the AvP films), the studio knows when to call it quits.

Posted by alastair at 6:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)