The Blog of Glen Moyes

Update: August 2020 I've stopped using Klok and I've switched over to ManicTime . After a few years of use, Klok started to take longer and longer to access certain views within the app. I suspect it was because of the size of the database that was making the app so unresponsive. I also ran into issues with Klok licensing. There's a fixed installation limit that is not advertised or mentioned on their website. I'll probably do a dedicated post on ManicTime at a later date, but I wanted to mention here that I'm recommending different time tracking software now. * * * * * Klok 2 just barely got released! Go download it at getklok.com . Previous articles about Klok: Massively Useful Software (follow up): Klok Massively Useful (Life Changing) Software: Klok

Did you know that Klok has a beta program ? Neither did I until today. Sure you can download a beta version but it's not the current version of the software. Thank goodness because I've been using the public beta for a year and with no software updates I was worried that the project was dead. Luckily I found frequent and recent posts about Klok on their Twitter page and blog . You can be a part of the beta program my making a donation (anything greater than $0). I of course donated because as you might have read on my original post on Klok last year, Klok is totally worth using!

Just checking and reminding everyone that Hackberry Hollow is still in steady production. Here's some recent concept art, showing a sneak peak of Chapter 1. Be sure to check out the blog for more concept art and updates on the project. Yes, I haven't been posting on my personal blog very much, but we do post on the Hackberry Hollow blog every Tuesday without fail, and the content is far more interesting. So subscribe to the RSS feed to get updates on what I'm working on. We're all extremely excited about the project. We got the story nailed and the script is being written (we are almost done with the first volume out of five). The reactions to the script have been overwhelmingly positive, so we definitely feel that we have a winner and can't wait to get this project released. The Animation Academy About 5 months ago I enrolled into The Animation Academy down in Burbank for character design classes and wow, has it been a big help. Also today is The Animation Aca...

I recently reinstalled Windows onto my computer, a ritual that I have done for years to keep my operating system running nicely thanks to Windows bit rot. I usually do it about once a year, in this case it's been two so it really needed a fresh install. The problems with regularly reinstalling Windows are downloading and installing all of the updates, which takes forever since my original Windows XP Pro disc is Service Pack 1. Luckily there's software that makes the process easier. nLite I wish I knew about this program earlier. nLite is an easy to use application that allows you to make a backup copy of your Windows install disc, slipstream the service pack and updates into the Windows install (google for the Windows XP Service Pack 3 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers; it's an EXE file that nLite will ask for to do that), install drivers such as my SATA drivers that I needed to install Windows on something other than my old soon-to-fail IDE ...

Celtx is a great and all for writing stories, but when it comes to online collaborative writing our team uses Gobby . Gobby allows multiple people to work on the same text file at the same time. You don't have to designate one person as the scribe. You don't have to take turns. You can type where ever you want when ever you want, and any text you insert will be highlighted with your user color, so you always know who wrote what. Gobby was created with programmers in mind, so it features line numbering, auto indenting, and syntax highlighting. As writers we ignore those features except for the line numbering. Our text documents can get quite long and it's easy to say "look at line 2053," because they can press Ctrl-I and enter that line number in to zip them to the same line you're looking at. The user highlighting has also been useful for us to tag sections that need attention with bright red or some other obnoxious color that you can't possibly miss. We j...

EDIT: This article has a follow up post about the beta program that was written a year later. And yes, I do mean life changing. Ever wonder how much time you actually spend on a project? If you bid a 40 hour project are you really sure it's going to take that long? How much time does each stage of the project take? How many hours do you spend emailing the client? What about other activities during the day like visiting websites, recreation, and cooking food? Where is your time going? I've wanted to know the answers to those questions for a very long time. I thought I had a pretty good idea, but I could never know for sure without an easy to use timeclock program. In the past I've searched for a free one that does not require a web server and is adequate for single person use, but I couldn't find one. Luckily a week and a half ago I found a very promising candidate thanks to an article on Webdesigner Debot . It's called Klok , an Adobe AIR app and therefore multipl...

[EDIT] Scruss provide some information on how to do this under Cygwin (and Linux I'm sure) at http://scruss.com/blog/2010/05/09/creating-a-truetype-font-from-your-handwriting-with-your-scanner-your-printer-and-fontforge/ I haven't tried it out yet, (when I do I'll post it here) but this could very well come in handy. Thanks for the tip! Many of the designers I know are typophiles. We live and breath type and will search for hours trying to find the right typeface, and when we are not doing that we'll spend weeks trying to create one. Here's a couple of font tools that I've used in the past: YourFonts.com automatically creates a TrueType font from a scan of your handwriting, and FontForge allows you to create fonts from scratch and of course edit existing ones. YourFonts.com [EDIT] YourFoints is not free anymore. It now costs $12.50 + $6.00 if you upload both template pages. For years I've wanted to create a font of my own handwriting. Originally my m...

Adobe Gamma is one of those massively useful programs that many people already have installed but don't actually use. If you've installed Photoshop, it's running on your computer right now. If you haven't actually calibrated your monitor with it, you should do it right away. At one of the places I used the work at, we used the Spyder2 colorimeter to calibrate all of our monitors to have a perfect white point and gamma. Having a calibrated monitor makes a huge difference. The colors on the screen looked more vibrant, the contrast was perfect so you could see all the colors without them being clipped to white or black, the blue tint was gone, and the colors on the screen actually matched the colors that were printed. It was such an improvement that I decided that there's no point in buying an expensive screen if you are not going to callibrate it using a Spyder or something similar. Even our inexpensive LCDs looked like high-end $800 monitors once calibrated. Unfortun...

Like most people, the first time you need to use a macro program it's for something completely immature and nonconstructive. For me, I needed something like AutoHotkey to quickly generate my 3-line Cute Bunny Giving You the Bird ASCII graphic into the game chat before someone realized what was going on—which was usually around the "( ._.) ..!." line—and then they assault it by quickly sending something like "asdf" which decapitates my bunny! I wasn't going to take that kind of treatment anymore, and no bunny deserves to be decapitated, so I used AutoHotkey to create a macro that creates the bunny immediately without having to type it in by hand. No one could stop it and no more bunnies ever died again. Well, that's not entirely true. There were a couple of stray lines of text that killed a few Cute Bunnies Giving You the Bird, but the mortality rate was much lower. Of course macros are useful for constructive things too. This neat little open source Wi...

I've been using this nifty little program for a while. If you've ever used Quicksilver on the Mac and wished something like that existed for Windows, Launchy is it. The way it works is you press a keyboard shortcut (Alt-Space by default) and start typing the name of the program. It has a memory of everything in your start menu and browser bookmarks, so as you type the name it'll show what it thinks you are referring to. For example, all I have to do to launch Adobe Illustrator is press Alt-Space, type "illu" (for Illustrator) and press enter. I don't have to use the mouse to launch the program. I used to have a really organized Start Menu becuase that was my primary method of running programs, but now I don't have to. In fact I don't use my start menu anymore. Even things like the Control Panel are perfectly accessible from Launchy. It's open source and apparently written in Qt, which means that there could be a Linux release soon. Yes, I know the...

Apophysis is an open source program that creates flame fractals. The only thing I can say about this program that contains any amount of profound insight is this: the fractals look awesome! Seriously, tinker around with the program. It comes with plenty of presets and all kinds of ways to manipulate them. I'll probably do a series of sketches based on the designs of these fractal patterns at some point because they look so cool. I'm also planning on using Apophysis to create animated magic/sci-fi effects for use with 3D animations. And I can finally make some cool dual screen backgrounds too. Anyway, lots of potential applications for these images and people will wonder how you did it. Expect more blabbing about Apophysis-generated content in the future.

I decided that I'll start sharing software that I've discovered to be massively useful or just really cool. I'm not talking about popular software, I'm talking about obscure or open source programs that people don't really know about but has lots of value. So let's start. When it comes to recording ideas and collaborating on stories and other projects, our team has used our private wiki for the past few years. Wikis are great because they're accessible online and you can edit any page you want. But that's pretty much all I find them useful for. I have some issues with using wikis: I have to wait for a page to load, tree-like organization of sub-articles is a big pain in the neck for large projects in that you have to click and load a new page to go to the next sub-article, unless you manually create a table of contents, and when you finally get to the page you want you have to go into edit mode to make changes. That's a lot of clicking links and wait...