Reflections: A Body of Water
It's cold in January, even at The Station
I learned a lot from this show. What a great experience! The only real bummer was the biggest lesson I learned:
Always have a good grasp on:
- Who is available to help you.
- When they are available to help you.
- What they are willing to do.
When we moved in to the space and started working on this set, I just had it in my mind that I'd be doing most of the work. I was totally incorrect, and I feel I wasted a good deal of Sierra and Aaron's time as a result. Luckily, they didn't kill me.
Other highlights I learned from this show:
Always lay down a primer coat when covering a scene on the floor or walls.
Beautiful floor from Rhino shone through 2 coats of paint
Thankfully, Sierra didn't kill me for this one, either. She painted over Rhino's floor twice with our beautiful watery blue before we decided it had to be primed. She went over that floor 4 times for this show!
Attention to detail
At one point near opening day, we were getting a few last-minute things done. I think I was screwing a board to cover a doorway and painting it. In the meantime, Sierra was taping off the edges of the watery-blue floor and painting the outside freshly black. It looked so sharp! Sometimes I overlook how such a seemingly simple little detail can make the space look so much better for patrons.
Sunday work calls can make a big difference
Rob fixed up this nasty angle
For some reason, I was nervous about the Sunday work call. I was still mad at myself for not making the most of Sierra and Aaron's time from the beginning. So, I prepared specific tasks I could assign to folks for the work day.
Everyone who came was a huge help. We really maximized our time! Amanda painted a bunch of white wall pieces. Rob undertook some carpentry work after stating that he "doesn't really know how to do this," and his work was fantastic. This, that, and the other -- by the end of the day, we really were almost ready.
I need to make a point to attend more work days and strikes for other shows...
Macintosh image programming blast from the past
Manipulating image data has been a big part of my life, both hobby and professional. Today, the Wayback Machine gave me a blast from the past, as I was able to dig up old screenshots of my Image Extractor and TIFF Tool programs.
Prepress lead to programming
I worked in prepress since the early days of "desktop publishing," when a 32MB SIMM for your Mac was $1,200, FreeHand and PageMaker were viable and owned by a company called Aldus, and Adobe products weren't even available for Windows. Back in those days, necessity really was the mother of invention. Some imaging challenges often made the difference between shipping a product on time or late.
AppleScript and RealBasic
That's when Ken and I got busy with AppleScript and I built Image Extractor, and later TIFF Tool. Our TSI Graphics coworker Bill White, who has now been at Wolfram Research a number of years, introduced us to AppleScript by loaning us his copy of "The Tao of AppleScript" book. From there, we went to FaceSpan, moved development to RealBasic, and the rest of my career moved on from there.
Image Extractor - Extracting from PostScript
Image Extractor screen shots and info pages (PDF)
Image Extractor started out as a plain AppleScript, received a user-interface facelift using FaceSpan, and eventually became much faster as a compiled RealBasic cross-platform product. This was the first product I'd ever had featured in a magazine - an April 1998 edition of MacWeek.
Image Extractor user interface
Image Extractor, at the time, was the only easy way to pull embedded raster data out of PostScript, PDF, Illustrator, and FreeHand files. We used to get native Illustrator files from clients, with embedded image data, but we were unable to make changes to that embedded data. I know that sounds ridiculous -- and it was -- so we made Image Extractor and stopped losing days of production while waiting for clients to provide us with bitmap originals we could edit.
TIFF Tool - Learning the tags
TIFF Tool screen shots and info pages (PDF)
My next step was to provide more services to folks using TIFF files. After reading The Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats and the smaller Graphics File Formats, I became obsessed with the Tagged Image File Format (TIFF.) I built TIFF Tool originally to help me better understand the nature and capabilities of TIFF files. Later, I added editing capabilities and exporting to other file formats and PostScript.
TIFF Tool user interface
To this day, it amazes me that TIFF files aren't used more extensively. I wonder sometimes if Adobe hadn't been building the Portable Document Format (PDF) -- PostScript's little lean sibling -- if TIFF would have been the universal cross-platform format of choice. I found it interesting that the TIFF 6.0 spec, published by Adobe, always seemed to be behind the times. Only recently have the JPEG compression abilities in TIFF files been added to PhotoShop. I wonder if Adobe now figures PDF has been entrenched long enough that TIFF poses no threat?
The future
My future is more about data mining and artificial intelligence than anything. But those early days of extracting raster data from PostScript, and of understanding the flexibility of TIFF tags, definitely provided a solid foundation for what I do now.
A few PDFs from the Wayback Machine
- 1998 MacWeek Image Extractor article
- Image Extractor screen shots and info pages
- TIFF Tool screen shots and info pages