The Barbarian Group makes software for any of four reasons:
First, because we thought of something we could do that would be really awesome and cool, and it just so transpired that we actually knew how to build the awesome thing, we actually had the time to do it, so we went ahead and built said awesome thing.
Second, because we wanted to learn how to do something that we didn’t know how to do before, and figured we’d try to get something out of it. This happens far, far more often than one might glean from this website, because most of the time we try to do this, we do not, in fact, produce a useful piece of software along the way. We do generally manage to learn something, though, so that’s nice.
Third, because we thought it might be of use to our clients in the future, and we are prototyping it for R&D or demo’s sake. We are endeavoring to further explore how technology and interactive marketing might mix. We have a whole philosophy about it. We’ll tell you about it some day. If we were better at marketing ourselves, we would list this as number one on this list because, in fact, it’s the driving reason behind all of this. At least that’s what we tell our accountant.
And, lastly, we perhaps came up with a nifty little app during the course of our lives doing design, technology and marketing work and figured we’d share it with the community. No point re-inventing the wheel and whatnot.
You’ll notice that none of these four reasons is directly related to “making lots of money.” We should probably fix that. We’ll add that to the “to do” list.
We officially open-sourced Cinder, our framework for creative coding in C++, to the world three weeks ago. And, as we’ve decided to go with a release early and often style development cycle, today we’re releasing version 0.8.1.
A few of the new features include…
MutliTouch – supported with the same API across Windows 7 and Cocoa Touch.
MSAFluid – CinderBlock port of Mehmet Atken’s Fluid Simulation. As a bonus for Cinder users, the solver on the Mac benches at 2x the speed of the original. You can see what Robert Hodgin has been up to with this new capability in this video:
Audio Synthesis – callback-based audio synthesis API
Numerous enhancements – plenty of other new functionality, bugfixes and improvements
To read more about the new features and download version 0.8.1, check out the libcinder.org blog.
on August 20, 2009 at 12:28 AM
filed under: Software
We just put up a new version of Plainview. This is mostly a bug fix release, focusing on some Flash, kiosk, and bookmark bugs. Saving a new bookmark is now much much faster than in prior versions, a crash some users were experiencing on Flash sites has been resolved, and there is a new preference (actually added a while ago) to have the app automatically return to the start page when in kiosk mode. We’ve also added some visual feedback when a new bookmark is added to keep folks from pounding on cmd-d and not seeing a change unless the bookmarks panel was open.
We do have a lot of plans for the future of Plainview (more on that later) so please keep the feedback coming!
You can download the new version here, or launch Plainview and run the auto-updater.
on July 13, 2009 at 11:50 AM
filed under: Software
There have been a few mentions of our internal C++ library (codenamed Flint) around the web over the last week or two. Over the years we’ve had opportunities to work on some really interesting installation projects and data visualizations, and along the way we decided it would be a good idea to use some common bootstrapping, so that we can get the art side of things rolling a whole lot faster. That bootstrapping has turned into a somewhat larger scale library that makes it easy to do a whole lot of amazing things that used to take us a good deal of time to get working. It goes all the way from simply creating windows and draw-able contexts, to shaders, VBOs, and the once-feared (for me) Quaternion.
At the moment, Flint is very much in Alpha. We haven’t made any plans to release it to the public, but we also haven’t made any plans to not release it either (apologies for the double negative). We should have more news in the upcoming months, as we add necessary features and fine tune everything. We highly recommend checking out OpenFrameworks and Processing if you’re interested in doing high-end graphics or other interactive projects.
Oh, and if we do decide to release Flint, leave a comment and we’ll try to get you on the beta. Again, we still don’t know what the future holds, so no promises ;).
If the benefit isn’t clearly obvious from the title, let me explain why you would want to set up something like this in your office network. Bandwidth is expensive. Especially if you need a bunch of it and require a solid SLA. Apple updates can be HUGE; the most recent Mac OS 10.5.7 combo update clocked in at a whopping 729MB. Now imagine you have an office of 20 people all using the same internet connection to download the same package from the same place. Madness right?
They’ve just saturated your inbound link and business is grinding to a halt! If you’re in this position you’re already too late, and you’ll have to make up for it using some fancy QoS rules or blocking traffic from the Apple software update servers all together. Don’t live in fear of the next Mac OS update because now you have time to set up your very own Apple software update server!
on March 18, 2009 at 09:44 PM
filed under: Software
Google created this great little site to show off the enhanced JavaScript capabilities of their new Chrome browser. They commissioned a bunch of talented designers and developers from around the world to create a collection of rather lovely, whimsical experiments. If you’re feeling ambitious, they’re accepting submissions too! I’m just sad they don’t have a Mac version out yet for me to try. More videos…
on March 09, 2009 at 02:01 PM
filed under: Software
As a Flash developer, games are definitely one of my favorite things to build. Still, as fun as developing a game can be, the dread of getting the nitty gritty of a game set up can sometimes put a damper on that fun. That’s why I’m always on the lookout for great game development platforms that smooth out that process as much as possible.
Rather recently, I discovered Eric Smith’s rather amazing Citrus Engine and I was quite impressed. Built in ActionScript 3.0, it’s a fairly robust Flash sidescrolling platform game engine that allows quick and easy development. It even makes game physics a little less painful to implement, by integrating the Box2D physics engine into the game mechanics.
Here’s a rundown on some key features (from Eric’s website):
Blazing 50 FPS in the browser on current machines, and 250+ FPS on the desktop (or Adobe AIR).
Physics-based engine allows for tumbling crates, pulleys, vehicles, and just about anything else you can imagine, without the limitations of a grid.
The Level Architect visual level editor makes it easier to create level blue prints, then tweak your level to your hearts desire.
Robust documentation includes and ASDoc API and a developer-friendly manual.
Standards-based code API means developers and designers spend more time tweaking the fun stuff, and less time debugging.
Level-based progressive downloading allows gamers to start playing the game quicker by only downloading what the next level needs.
I’m definitely excited to dig deeper into this. Eric says it’s still in beta, but I still encourage everyone interested to check it out. I look forward to seeing him add more awesomeness to this in the coming months.
on February 24, 2009 at 10:16 AM
filed under: Software
Uh… its freaking sick. I will probably never touch Firefox or Camino after this. Page loads are probably around 4 times faster than Safari 3. Its especially noticeable on pages with poorly written javascript. For example, my banking website has a script that runs just after the page loads to display alerts, etc. In Safari 3 the page takes at least 15 seconds to load and actually has one of those awkward “blips” where the page acts like it is refreshed but really its just the js doin’ its thang. In 4 the page loads in 3 seconds and is ready to rock as soon as it loads up. Freaking. Awesome.
I think this new Safari is the Google Chrome for the Mac folks. Grab it here!