Mr. Softie | mr. softie

Mr. Softie Goes Cross-Platform

September 12th, 2010 by admin

During the last few months, Mr. Softie development took a new direction. We put aside the extensive list of new features we want to experiment with to concentrate on making Mr. Softie accessible to a wider audience. The limitations inherent in the original decision to use the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), which meant producing a Windows-only application, became increasingly obvious as more people were asking about a OSX compatible version of the software. The idea of running Mr. Softie in a virtual machine like Parallels often lead to blank stares through a thick barrier of entry; it was time to put what we knew aside and leap into cross-platform development.

Enters Qt, a cross-platform application and UI framework that is a peanut butter solution to the hair loss caused by years of MFC use. The idea was simple, stop adding new features for a period of time (as short as possible) and port the code to Qt. It took a bit longer than expected, mostly because of the many Qt features that use different approaches than MFC, and the easily underestimated hours of finicky cross-platform UI tweaking, but we made it to version 1.0b for Windows and OSX.

Needless to say that the trailing ‘b’ in the version number could be an uppercase at the moment. Most of the features that are present in the last windows-only version of Mr. Softie (v0.9.6.9) made it to this first Qt version. Many features were improved. Arranging text objects forward and back is more flexible than before and can be applied to any type of text objects (i.e. glyph, word, passage) unlike the previous passage-only limitation. Transforming is simpler, no need for a shortcut to rotate objects, handles are available around the selection. There are too many changes to list here.

With every major code transformation comes an infestation of bugs. During the next months we intend to play with Mr. Softie, find those bugs and clean up the application as we release updates up to a stable 1.0 release. Until then, enjoy our experimental typographic text editor.

Download: 1.0b for Windows | 1.0b for OSX

Tags: cross-platform, download, mr. softie, Qt, release
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Cellar

March 25th, 2009 by admin

Cellar (draft)

Tags: mr. softie, typography
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hyperion

March 20th, 2009 by admin

hyperion

Tags: mr. softie
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A Poison Tree – anger and wrath

March 15th, 2009 by admin

I decided to create some sketches based on a poem called A Poison Tree, written by William Blake.

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I water’d it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with my smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veil’d the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch’d beneath the tree.

The poem is very evocative and I wanted to explore ways of enhancing the expression of the words through the SoftTypes developed in Mr. Softie. Each line of text will be augmented, morphed, dissected and molded differently, resulting in almost a graphical representation of the poem itself. The examples were done by capturing the screen and then bringing it to After Effects.

First examples:

Font: Chiller

In this first example, I also wanted to create masks for a background video from the shapes of the glyphs. The result is interesting, as it adds yet another layer of meaning to the text.

Wrath with mask

For the second example, the same lines of text with the same SoftTypes are manipulated differently and no mask was applied.

Wrath

Some still images:

Anger with Leak and Rubber SoftTypes

Wrath with Clay and Rubber SoftTypes

Link to files:

Wrath

Tags: a poison tree, blake, mr. softie, nicolas munoz, sketches
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early sketches

March 13th, 2009 by admin

Here are two sketches that I showed before the break. The goal of the first was to explore Mr. Softie’s export capability, and produce a short video using After Effects. The piece is a short rhyme whose behavior attempts to illustrate (abstractly? I’m trying to get away from this word) its meaning. It’s nothing amazing, but jhave commented that it might interesting, given the topic of drinking, to do sketches while essentially getting drunk… So, if anything, I’m happy with the discussion that came out of it, as well as the effect given off in the last frame. I haven’t tested jhave‘s green-screen technique, but it seems to work well for Nicolás.

The next sketch is an illustration that reads “And of course the nightly news will deceive you”. I started in Mr. Softie, applied some behaviors, cut up some text, and exported to Illustrator and added texture/color in Photoshop. The idea is to play with primary, nationalistic colors (blue, white, red) and use black for expression. It’s very much a work in progress.