KaiView
I'm not likely to work much on KaiView in the near
future. It just has too many loose ends: the drawing model
is not well-supported, yet, the TOM community is very small
(very unfortunate), the model-view seperation needs a lot of
design work which rather bores me at this point, and there
are many issues I haven't even touched yet. In the meantime
I'm writing some C code - today I wrote some basic image
manipulation code which is supposed to become my learning
ground for assembler programming (maybe). I'm also very
happy with the select loop I wrote lately. Together with an
idea from the TOM library select loop it's going to be
pretty good, I think.
Fashion and the 90s
In the late eighties/early ninetees (when Al Gore was
just about to discover/invent the information super highway)
we saw a short period with exceptionally many examples of
good design (industrial design, magazine typography,
fashion, user interfaces, ...), of taste, of style! Why is
it that the era impressed me so much, while I think the time
that followed was a big dissapointment? I can't quite grasp
what it was that I feel was so superior. Is it a personal
thing, closer related to my own life then to the world at
large ? Or could it be the rate of change increasing,
technical advancements, NeXT, Bill Clinton replacing Bush,
the web starting to become commonplace ? It almost felt
like a renaissance, as if design could reach a new plateau,
combining the knowledge of classic artists and architects
with contemporary advancements in materials and production
technologies. And then it stopped. Before the hill top was
reached, so we could see what's beyond, it just stopped.
Style went away. SGI produced the O2 case (and other
companies featured other egg-shaped unnecessities),
magazines where drunk by possibilities, color, craze of
geometric shapes! Fashion without style reigned...
What comes next ?
To me, it's not quite clear what we're up to. Retro, then
OS X, a Chrysler that looks like my great grandpa could have
owned one - is there any direction I don't see, yet? Sure,
diversity is a good thing, but just as the 90s where driven
by joking about the 80s, there is a lot of 90s-bashing going
on, too. "Old fashioned", "out of style" they're saying ...
so what's next ?
Doing nothing
It's been a long time since doing nothing has felt so
good! Watching the birds against the summer sky, smelling
the scents of barbecue, distant noises from the streets.
It's so beautiful!