I broke all the rules, and just started making stuff, without really doing any sketching or planning first. I sort of had the idea it should just be like a big button – sort of like the interface of the app.

So, Blender has lots and lots of menus everywhere. All I know how to do is make a cube! – so let’s start with that.

Cylinders are pretty easy too, so let’s make a big red button.

Mac icons have to be shiny, so lets’s play with the lighting a bit.

Trying to get the shape of the base a bit more natural.

Let’s add another control stick – just a single button is a bit boring! Pretty easy to make out of a cylinder and sphere.

How about adding the word “MIDI” so it’s clear what this does? Wait – isn’t text on icons a bad idea? In general yes, but (just guessing) MIDI means the same thing in other language, so it doesn’t have to be localised. And it doesn’t have to be readable to get the point of the icon across.

Just had a thought – it could be nice if the icon looked kind of like the app itself! So I decided to add 2 blue buttons like there are in the actual app (to send MIDI note on and off messages)

Oops, lighting didn’t work that time!

I want to try and inset the word MIDI into the base of the object. I kind of found a button in Blender that did something like that, but didn’t really work.

If I sit it on top of a blue bar, that would be like the titlebar of the app:

I want the control stick to have a gap in the base to slot into, but I don’t know how to do that! So I sat it on top of a strip thing (rectangle) instead of insetting it.

Played around with the lighting and colour once more, so it more closely matches the app.

Lastly, I slightly changed the camera angle so it matches up with all Apple’s standard ones (eg. Mail, Preview, Text Edit, Xcode, etc. – all use the same angle, documented in the Human Interface Guidelines). If I was doing it all in 2D in Photoshop, this would be impossible, and I’d just have to live with my initial angle I chose (otherwise I’d have to do it all over again!)

To really finish it off, I added a subtle shadow and outline in Photoshop. Still not sure if this was necessary.

I’m very happy with how it turned out, especially given its the first thing I’ve really done in 3D!

I love all the little detail – it’s not that it would be impossible to do in Photoshop, just really difficult to get all the perspective and everything. Here’s a close up shot of the “On” button:

I’m going to have to do all my Mac icons in 3D from now! No, it’s not perfect – a more experienced icon designer and 3D modeller could definitely do a better job, but I’m very happy with my results.

The solution seems to be typing in the numbers lots of times into the different text fields until it works, and changing the anchor point sometimes. It seems to be worse for larger objects?

I almost gave up and tried using Illustrator instead, but the performance would be terrible, having to deal with hundreds of vector layers for this interface design I’m working on…

Trivia: Why was the first release of DMX Assistant labelled 2.0? Because this was 1.0:

(I never actually released it though. Is it still legitimate to call the first public release 2.0? Google Chrome’s on 17, so I can do whatever I want too.)

DMX Assistant

You can now trigger Scenes with MIDI Control Change or Note messages – this enabled you to use a simple MIDI controller to control a simple lighting system, or for a show control system (like Qlab) to trigger a more complicated lighting system.

MIDI Friend

While I was working on the DMX Assistant MIDI update, I had a problem – I always had to have my hardware MIDI controller (a Korg nanoKONTROL) around with me to send MIDI messages to test things with. There’s some useful tools already out there (like Snoize MIDI Monitor) for analysing MIDI going through your Mac, but I couldn’t find any easy way to simulate a MIDI control without using a whole big app really designed for other purposes.

I quickly hacked together a little app that had a “Send MIDI” button and a slider or something. Because it was so useful, I deiced to put in the extra effort and turn it into a releasable product. For some extra fun, I decided to play around with custom interface design (I love my motion-blurred tab transition animation!)

It currently only supports Note, Control Change and Pitch Bend Change messages, but I plan to add more in the future (let me know what would be useful to you!).

You can find both DMX Assistant and MIDI Friend for sale on the Mac App Store. Feel free to ask me any questions and let me know what you think!

I’ve prepared a press pack filled with screenshots of both DMX Assistant and MIDI Friend.

The rig had 15 Ehrgeiz LED Fusion bars (each with 20 individually controllable RGB LEDs) and a range of par cans, fresnels and blinders on 24 dimmers.

For control, I chose to use GrandMA onPC with a 2Port node. (Much better than Light Jockey, which I used last time). The iOS remote was quite fun while focusing! For easier live operation, we also used a Jands Stage 24 in wide mode to get 48 executor faders, using the DMX input of GrandMA. That’s more faders than a GrandMA full-size!

I programmed a range of effects on cues in HTP mode and some speed masters to allow easy on-the-fly control. With 48 faders, there was no need to ever change pages! I also created a simple Quartz Composer composition on my MacBook Pro to control a GrandMA executor with audio input from the drums.

I’m quite impressed that we basically created our own console, sort of equivalent to a GrandMA full-size, for a tenth of the price!

(Well it is missing lots of things – like encoder wheels, executor buttons, touch screens, etc. But for our purpose at least, none of that was an issue – it was great! Still quite difficult to learn and teach others how to use though.)

You can set DMX values to output to any of the 256 Art-Net universes, separated into ‘Scenes’ (submasters) if you wish. All the Art-Net universes being broadcast around your network are visible in the scene list, so you can inspect what your lighting console or other device is sending, and to HTP merge into a new universe for output.

You can find out more about it and buy it on the Mac App Store.

I’d love to know what you think!

I’m not sure if this was around before Xcode 4 or not – I only just found it now.

I’ve created a new page with all my free design resources for download (all 2 of them!… there should be more coming sometime though). On that page, you can find some new whiteboard vector textures. I made them by slowly brushing off whiteboard marker from my whiteboard. It creates the dirty cracked look, as seen in the ‘Stock’ graphic above. There will be many more of these whiteboard ones to come (I’ve got a stack of .JPGs to process).

I hope you find them useful!

The McFarlane Prize is for Excellence in Australian Web Design. It’s judged based on accessibility, usability, the design, and the code behind it all. I submitted DouglasHeriot.com when it wasn’t even finished yet (it still isn’t, but it was even less-finished than it is now), and didn’t ever expect anything to come of it.

It was 6 months ago now when I got an email:

They said they were going to publish a book of the top 50, and I had 2 days to send in a few things! I sent them everything they asked for, and then didn’t hear anything back for another 6 months.

Today, I got another email, saying that I can now get my free copy of the book!

You can see a preview on the publisher’s website. (I’m on page 42-43)

Method #1 — Add Anchor Points Tool

This is a pretty bad one. My first solution was to just use the Add Anchor Points Tool to add a bunch of points just before the end, and then drag them around to where I really wanted them to go! Not fun.

Method #2 — Join

My next idea was to just make a new path, then join the 2 together. It works, but you don’t get to see the bit in the middle until the end. This is especially annoying if you want to make it curvy.

Method #3 — The Pen Tool

This is the proper way, that I eventually found by accident, and then in the help files as well. It’s like what I was originally doing in Freehand, but slightly different. Instead of using the ‘Direct Selection Tool’ (white pointer) to select the end point, you use the regular Pen Tool to select the endpoint first, then you can keep drawing like usual!

There’s 10 days missing!

I can’t really explain it all, but there’s a pretty interesting article on the Panic Blog that does it pretty well.

To make these, I just spray-painted a couple of pieces of paper, and scanned them at 900dpi. My scanner isn’t the best, but it isn’t too bad. The brushes aren’t super sharp at the largest size, but they do all go up to around 2500px diameter.

Stay tuned for set 2! (the back side of the paper has some interesting textures as well…)