Khoi Vinh's Blog, page 169

Back for the Holidays: Hel-F'ng-Vetica Tee-Shirts

The good folks at Wire & Twine and I are bringing back my Hel-Fucking-Vetica tee-shirts just in time for the holidays. These shirts have been enormously popular, selling out of all of their previous runs, and they haven't been available for four years. Now until 5 Dec, you can pre-order from a brand new run and get your very own. If you're in the U.S., they should get to you in plenty of time for Christmas. The shirts are just US$25 each, and because this is a pre-orders period (a very short one!), all sizes are in stock.

Order yours today here.

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CaptureNotes 2 Sponsorship

CaptureNotes 2 is more than just a note-taking app for the iPad. It lets you record audio while you type.

While there might be other apps that let you take notes and record, CaptureNotes 2 brings an entirely new feature to the experience: Flags.

Flags are intelligent bookmarks, allowing you to place specific marks in time during a recording to follow up on in later review. For example, if you were using CaptureNotes in a class, you could mark things like test questions, text references, follow-up requests, or even make your own custom flag set. In a meeting at work, you could mark action items to follow up on.

When it comes time to study for your test or compile your to-do list, you can sort notes by flag type, taking you back to that specific piece of audio recording and notes.

Note-taking is also available on imported PDFs and email sessions. CaptureNotes lets you store your binders and notebooks on Dropbox.

CaptureNotes 2 was recently selected as app of the week at TiPB, and is sale to celebrate. Capture everything at school, work, or home with CaptureNotes 2.

Feed Sponsorship

CaptureNotes 2 is more than just a note-taking app for the iPad. It lets you record audio while you type.

While there might be other apps that let you take notes and record, CaptureNotes 2 brings an entirely new feature to the experience: Flags.

Flags are intelligent bookmarks, allowing you to place specific marks in time during a recording to follow up on in later review. For example, if you were using CaptureNotes in a class, you could mark things like test questions, text references, follow-up requests, or even make your own custom flag set. In a meeting at work, you could mark action items to follow up on.

When it comes time to study for your test or compile your to-do list, you can sort notes by flag type, taking you back to that specific piece of audio recording and notes.

Note-taking is also available on imported PDFs and email sessions. CaptureNotes lets you store your binders and notebooks on Dropbox.

CaptureNotes 2 was recently selected as app of the week at TiPB, and is sale to celebrate. Capture everything at school, work, or home with CaptureNotes 2.

Canon Really Made This Mouse

People on Twitter got a kick out of this so I figured I'd post it here, too. Canon really thinks there's a market for its new combination calculator and mouse.

To me, it's a sublime example of how groupthink can produce shockingly hideous design. Even the name — it's called the "X Mark I Mouse Slim" seems like a compromise between two different internal groups at Canon, each with only the dimmest grasp of good taste. On the other hand, if you're smitten by this design, you can buy it here.

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Everything Is a Grid

In spite of the title, this blog post from the talented Mac and iOS developers Bjango is not quite about grids in the way that I've talked about them in the past. They focus more on the issue of screen resolution, and the different approaches to scaling up interfaces in iOS and Android. It's smart stuff, and illustrates some of the learning curve I had to climb when I started working on Mixel. Worth a read for sure. Read the full article here.

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Textastic Feed Sponsorship

Who says the iPad is only for consumption? Textastic brings the power of a desktop text, code, and markup editor to the iPad.

Textastic supports syntax highlighting of more than 80 languages, and if that's not enough, you can extend it with TextMate-compatible syntax definitions and themes.

The visual find and replace feature and the list of function and class names let you quickly navigate documents. A cursor navigation wheel simplifies text selection and the extra row of keys above the keyboard makes it easy to type common programming characters.

As you create, you can preview HTML and Markdown files locally. Once you're done, connect to (S)FTP and WebDAV servers as well as Dropbox. It even includes a built-in WebDAV server that allows you to quickly transfer files to your iPad wirelessly from your Mac or PC.

Textastic for iPad is just $9.99 and is available on the App Store

Why Mixel Requires Facebook Login

It's been a crazy week since we launched Mixel last Wednesday night. The feedback has been tremendously positive, but there have been some dissenters too. Particularly regarding our requirement that users login with Facebook.

We've heard many times that this is a challenge for some, a nonstarter for others, and downright offensive to a few. It's been a heated discussion, and we've listened carefully. After finally catching my breath a bit, I managed to put together our thoughts on the subject. In the interest of making it as digestible as possible, I've framed it as a Q & A, and you can find it over at this link on the Mixel Web site.

Hopefully this will help clarify everything that we've been thinking about this topic. But to sum up quickly: the reason we use Facebook login is that it lets us build the Mixel community around real names. This is by far the most important element of Facebook for us, and the document explains why.

I'll also add one more thing. It's probably not much consolation to users who feel left out of Mixel to hear this, but it was a very difficult decision for us to go with Facebook, one that we didn't take lightly. In fact, I agonized over it almost right up until we launched, and kept asking friends, colleagues, advisors and investors for their input. No one offered a strong enough counter-argument to Facebook though, and so we stuck with the decision.

I also realize that my answers will not change the minds of people who are dead-set against using Facebook. Nevertheless, we value and pay close attention to all the feedback we receive, and it pains me to know that some people have dismissed Mixel before trying it solely because of our login system. We don't believe there's a viable alternative today, but hopefully that will change tomorrow.

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Mixel and Primitive Tools

The actual art-making tools available in our social collage app Mixel are pretty basic, with no modes and no calibration options. We shipped them that way for a good reason: we didn't want people to feel that Mixel is a software application that they have to 'master.' A few moments is all you need to learn how to use all of the tools in the app, top to bottom.

Some people say that the tools are primitive, especially the cropping feature, which is downright imprecise. That one in particular is something we definitely want to improve, and we even intended to make it more powerful before we shipped the app but we ran out of time. We also left it as it was because we saw something really interesting in our beta testing that informed our whole attitude towards creative tools: imprecision is liberating. No one who tried to use Mixel's crop tool to cut out a foreground image from its background ever felt that they were somehow "not using it right." The tool is so rough and inexact that people believe there's really no getting it wrong.

For us, that was a powerful realization, and one of the key insights that helped us make something fundamentally different from all of the other art software out there. The hugely constraining limitations of our toolset in effect let people off the hook, unburdened them of the pressure to make things perfect. It lets users create mixels in a few minutes, casually, almost without time to let their inner inhibitions about Art-with-a-capital-A take over. That's exactly what we were going for.

Knowing Your Own Tools

We were lucky enough to nail those tools down pretty early in our development process without spending a lot of time refining them. In fact, the vast majority of the design and development effort on the app was spent on building all of the social gestures that wrapped the creation tools — liking, commenting, sharing, reusing pieces and remixing mixels — and getting those key interactions right.

So the toolset as it stands today has been essentially the one I've been using for a good six months now, day after day. At the time we launched the app last week, I was pretty confident that I knew them inside and out and, understood the full extent of their limitations and capabilities.

That all changed when I saw people start pouring into Mixel late last week. Something unexpected happened then: I'd open up my iPad, fire up Mixel and see something made with those same tools I'd never thought of before, something ingenious or unexpected or just plain beautiful. And this would happen again and again, several times a day, every day since last Thursday.

People Get Ready

Here are a few examples of that. But before I show you the work, a side note: you can now link directly to the works themselves within Mixel (the app) if you're viewing the sharing pages in mobile Safari. That is, if you're reading this blog post on your iPad, you can click the thumbnails below to see each collage at full-size on the Mixel.cc Web site. From there, you'll see a new button that says "Open this in Mixel." Tap on that, and the iPad will open up the app.

Jeremy Zilar

Jeremy insists that Nicholas Kennedy Sitton should get credit for the technique he used to 'collapse' this street scene here. Still, Jeremy is the one that introduced it to Mixel. It's just one photo, cropped, slightly reduced in size and rotated in place, over and over. The effect is mesmerizing.

Ariel Aberg-Riger

Most of my own Mixels have been kind of overflowing with imagery, edge-to-edge within the canvas. But Ariel has been building a body of work within Mixel that's delightfully minimal.

Graham Hicks

It's pretty hard to get more than one straight angle when cropping an image in Mixel, but Graham somehow manages to get a shattered glass effect in the way he arranges his collage pieces. Look carefully at how he aligns contrasty shadows within an image with similar shadows within others to create the illusion of fault lines that run throughout the composition.

Christopher Lewis

There's no text tool within Mixel, which was a purposeful omission; we wanted to encourage people to express themselves visually rather than textually. But Chris essentially scratched out an alphabet using images. It's beautiful but the best thing about it is, like everything else in Mixel, it can and has been reused by others.

Paul Soulellis

At first I thought Paul pulled off the cloudy, atmospheric effect in this mixel with a transparent PNG of some mist or cloud forms. But looking closer at it, I realized the misty effect is just the same image of the moon, enlarged so tremendously that its edges become distinct.

Luke Lambert

This mixel by Luke blew me away when I first saw it. It's also a great showcase for the new open-in-app button from our Web pages that I mentioned above, as it demonstrates an artistry that's only viewable within Mixel itself. Once you open it to its full size, you'll see what I mean.

It's All (Visual) Talk

Finally, just to be clear: Mixel is not just about showing off your kung fu collaging technique. The core of the experience revolves around art as conversation. That's best demonstrated in the many, many, many remix threads that are happening within the app right now — almost all of the ones I've listed above are parts of great threads, or will be before too long. Here's my favorite remix thread that I came across this evening; it was kicked off by Ian Adelman with this hilarious identity cross-fertiization.

If this all looks like fun to you, that's because it is. People are telling me that, in the few short days since it was released, they've become practically addicted to Mixel. You can download it here and get your fix right now.

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Mixel Day One

Mixel, our social collage app for iPad, debuted at around midnight Wednesday, and so I barely got any sleep last night. I spent a long, tiring, exhilarating day today watching new users pour into the network, as well as responding to tweets and emails and generally trying to keep tabs on everything Mixel-related. We got some really terrific, very generous press coverage from lots of different outlets, and I'll try and gather those in one place soon for those interested.

At about 6:00 I went home, read a few stories to my daughter and gave her a long hug before putting her to bed. Laura and I had a nice dinner together and then we sat down to watch some television. Just before we went to turn on the set we both checked into Mixel — and suddenly it was an hour later.

I'm just stunned and flabbergasted and deeply, deeply humbled by all the activity on Mixel during this, its first day. There was a constant stream of likes, comments, new mixels and remixes flooding in, and it kept me completely transfixed. I should really be sleeping right now, but I couldn't turn in without acknowledging what this means to me.

Many of you may know that developers cannot freely send out pre-release versions of native iOS apps to alpha and beta testers — Apple imposes distribution limitations — so for the past eight months my co-founder Scott and I have been using Mixel with just a few dozen other (awesome) people. To now see thousands of people join in, many of them doing amazing and beautiful work, and many of them apparently having a great time, is very much like a waking dream for me. In fact, I think I'm avoiding sleep because I'm secretly afraid that will put an end to it.

In short, I'm touched by the enthusiasm and the experimentation and the feedback and even the criticism. We're very proud of what we built but we're also very cognizant of the fact that not everything we did was perfect, not by a long shot. There are many things that we did right, many others that we executed in less-than-ideal ways, and even some things that we got just plain wrong, and there's even an already pretty healthy debate over which ones are which. I'm going to address some of these in the coming days and weeks, and we're going to fix everything we can as soon as we can — maybe not to everyone's satisfaction, but we are listening closely to what is being said about Mixel, I can assure you of that.

Right now though I just want to say thank you to everyone who gave even a tiny fraction of their waking hours to Mixel during its debut day. It means a lot to me.

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Introducing Mixel

In my post from August titled "What Comes After Reading on iPad," I argued that while the iPad is a game-changing reading platform, there has been perhaps too much emphasis on that one particular aspect of the device. Apple's "magical and revolutionary" tablet brings with it many other transformational qualities that are being undervalued at the moment, and at least a few of them will spawn new businesses and maybe even new industries.

I talked about a few of those opportunities in that post, but the one that interests me the most, and the one that I'm betting on in a big way, is the fact that iPad is an ideal digital art device, one that requires little or no training — no mouse to master, no pen and tablet to plug in. Straight out of the box, it's a powerful, completely intuitive tool for self-expression: just use your finger to make a mark.

Even better, for the very first time in decades of personal computing history, we have an ideal digital art device in the hands of a mass audience, a huge and still-growing user base composed not just of professional artists and early adopters, but of people from all walks of life who are embracing the liberating simplicity of this new platform.

That's big. It changes what's possible for visual self-expression in a huge way. Now anyone can do this — anyone. They just need the right software. Creating that software is what my co-founder Scott Ostler and I are trying to do with our new company.

Our app is called Mixel. It's a collage-making tool and a social network rolled into one. With Mixel, anyone can create and share digital collages using images from the Web, Mixel's library, or your own personal photos from Facebook or what's right on your iPad. You can watch a video (directed by the inimitable Adam Lisagor) that describes all of this over at our site, Mixel.cc.

Why watch it when you can try it out for yourself, though? As of today, Mixel is available for download in the App Store. And it's free.

Everything That Can Be Social Will Be

Sharp readers will likely challenge me on two points of what I've said so far. First, there are a lot of art apps for iPad already: Brushes, SketchBook Pro and ArtRage to name just a few. Second, even with all of these apps — and many of them are very well done — it's hardly true that everyone is using them. People of all levels of artistic skill might very well download them and give them a spin, but in all likelihood most will use these apps only a few times, unless they're committed hobbyists or professional artists. The rest will forget about them and leave them to languish on their iPads.

That's where we think the power of social software can be a difference maker. Like multitouch tablets, social software is capable of many amazing transformations, including the idea that activities that were previously reserved only for experts can be democratized and made doable by anyone. The list of such transformations is long: journalism, filmmaking, fundraising, photography, even design and programming, to an extent. We think art belongs on that list, too.

Everyone Can Make Art — Again

Our goal with Mixel is to turn the act of art-making into something incredibly easy, fun and even addictive. Just as importantly, we also want art-making to be deeply social. Mixel is a social network of its own — you sign in with Facebook, and you can find and follow anyone on the network to see all the great work they're producing. You can also comment, like and share the art, just as you would on any other social network.

But we chose collage for a very important reason: it makes art easy. Photos, the component pieces of every collage, are among the most social and viral content on the Web, and allowing people to combine them into new, highly specific expressions of who they are and what they're interested in is powerful. Collage also has a wonderfully accessible quality; few people are comfortable with a brush or a drawing implement, but almost everyone is comfortable cutting up images and recombining them in new, expressive, surprising or hilarious ways. We all used to do this as kids.

Mixel is a social network of its own, where you can follow anyone else and their work.

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Mixel shows you everywhere else any given image is being used. In the case of this fish, the menu reveals five other mixels that make use of it.

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Because of the componentized nature of collage, we can add new social dimensions that aren't currently possible in any other network, art-based or not. Mixel keeps track of every piece of every collage, regardless of who uses it or how it's been cropped. That means, in a sense, that the image pieces within Mixel have a social life of their own. Anyone can borrow or re-use any other piece; you're free to peruse all the collages (we call them "mixels") and pick up literally any piece and use it in your own mixel. If you don't like the crop, the full, unedited original is stored on the server, so you can open it back up in an instant and cut out just the parts you like. Mixel can even show you everywhere else a particular image has been used, so you can follow it throughout the network to see how other people have cropped it and combined it with other elements.

The thread view turns collaging into a visual conversation, where anyone can remix anyone else's work.

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You can also remix any collage in Mixel, creating derivative works that get added to a thread of remixes. This is probably the funnest part of the app, because it lets users engage in a kind of visual dialogue — you can see in examples like this one how Mixel users riff off of one another's work, exchanging ideas through visual means. That's exactly what we're hoping for, too: we don't want people to think of making art as a monumental task, something only a few people can do. Instead, we want people to think of making art as something casual, informal, fun and conversational. And we've worked really hard to make Mixel a platform for conversation that everyone can join. Download it today and let us know what you think.

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