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In the US, when people ask me what I do, and I tell them, it often doesn’t impress upon them how people in other parts of the world use mobile phones in a completely different way. For about a year now, I’ve had the privilege of building the graphics and UI in one of the web browsers and messaging clients in Vodafone’s new Live! 3G service. Recently, Vodafone Live! 3G launched in Europe, and here are their launch adverts: Vodafone Live! Powered by 3G Adverts. (‘Mimic’ is one of my favorites)

I’ve also helped build other stuff for some of the world’s largest carrier services, Here’s a partial list:

• KDDI au / WAP2001 / EZweb
• Vodafone Live!
• NTT DoCoMo – i-mode Europe
• J-Phone JSky
• Sprint PCS Vision
• Orange 3G

So when you see Hello Kitty animating on one of those services, there’s a fair chance that I helped build that. Nifty :-).

Howdy, I’m back from (my first!) cruise to Mexico. It was a great experience, I met some interesting people and have come back surprisingly relaxed and refreshed.

I’ve also turned off comments for the time being, it seems that some spammers have taken my blog hostage, so until I get some verification plugins installed, I’m going to be leaving comments off. But you’re always welcome to drop me a message. :-)

A simple drawing of the character River, from the television series, Firefly. River is quite a complex character; she’s crazy, she’s kind, but mostly, she’s fragile.

Oh, and she has superpowers.

The drawing’s composition is fairly straightforward, but the design it was used in ended up a little bit more interesting.

6″x10″ Pencil on my not-so-new sketchbook with Strathmore paper (Shiny!)

Today, Laszlo released their Rich Internet Applications platform as open source. David Temkin can better describe the importance of this event. LZX fills a big gap in the web applications space, bringing the User Experience bar for web applications (and hell, desktop applications) up to what I consider the right level. Consumer targetted applications should work like their TV and video game counterparts… Macromedia sort of got that, but Macromedia’s application framework support just isn’t quite there yet. (read: it can be done, but it’s painful…)

Downloads are available from Laszlo. In my book, this is a Big Deal<tm>.

I just found out that Joe Kraus has started a blog (he’s a founder of Excite and Architext) which tells tales from his experience on the other side of the VC table. Very interesting, all starting with the funding of Excite with Vinod Khosla.

• Brand New Day – Forty Foot Echo
• Run – Snow Patrol
• Fragile (Free) – Maria Mena

Lyrics was brought to you by the letter I and the word Tunes.

David Hyatt weighed in on Dashboard’s HTML extensions and Apple’s involvement in the standards process. I have been impressed with Apple’s standards adherence and embracing open source in everything they do, (SMB, WebDAV, FreeBSD, KHTML, Apache, SSH, etc.).

I witnessed the W3C / Mozilla+Opera rift at the Compound Document workshop and I’d say that the WHAT-WG was the direct result of infighting among the standards bodies.

In my opinion, to suggest that Apple does not adhere to and support standards is shockingly untruthful to say the least; they set the example.

For one of my pet projects, I’ve surveyed the landscape of open source vector graphics libraries out on the net today. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

Smoke – The first one I encountered that uses OpenGL for rendering. Doesn’t implement a complete SVG set, but has some interesting concepts.

Cairo and glitz – Mono’s System.Drawing back-end (might be GTK) with glitz as a backend to OpenGL. A slightly different approach to stroking segments.

svgl – Not maintained anymore, but offers up some information on how clipping and gradients might work with a GPU. Does not stroke joins particularly cleverly, uses forward differencing for stroking segments.

Agile2D – Related to svgl, only uses Java2D’s path code and an unofficial OpenGL bridge. Pretty decent, however they were left wanting for features not available in their bridge.

Anti-Grain Geometry – Very accurate, however unclear on the performance / accuracy tradeoffs.

I just downloaded SharpMT, mostly on the recommendations of other bloggers and because it supports entries and extended entries. It works pretty well, except that the text editor feels just a slightly bit sluggish in responsiveness, but that may be due to the WinForms text entry box more than anything. (It’s also spell-checking everything, so that might be taking up some time)

Update: It doesn’t appear that SharpMT supports “Convert line breaks” in MT, perhaps I need to set an option somewhere…

In America is a movie about a family’s immigration to America, as told from the pov of their 11-year-old daughter. There’s one beautifully framed shot, in which the daughter gazes out the car window in awe at the wonders of the New World. Sarah Bolger plays the daughter, Christy.

As it turns out, drawing kids is hard. I kept on changing and erasing features, eyes and cheeks didn’t line up and made her look a little cross-eyed, chubbier and skinnier at different times. It also didn’t help that this was a front view, vs a profile or 3/4.

This drawing comes from my new sketchbook (it says Caslon paper, oooh, fancy). It’s a little bigger, which makes it easier to plan space, but I still have to get used to the texture, it’s not as easy to erase.