The Blog of Glen Moyes

I'm a long-time Adobe customer. I've been in a good position to use Adobe's software throughout my education and career. It's been a good experience for me, but only because I was a student when the Adobe software had perpetual licenses. You pay for the software once, and you own it forever. For a lot of the designers and content creators I associate with, they are not as content with Adobe as I am. Working with more students has opened my eyes to experiences that seem to be the norm, and those experiences are far from my own. The root of this seems to be Adobe's current subscription business model. I'm lucky that I graduated when I did, because if I graduated today, there's a greater chance that I wouldn't be a designer. Perpetual licenses saved me after college. I purchased Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium when I was a college student. The student version wasn't that expensive, and I was able to purchase every new version of the Creative Suite w...

A friend of mine pointed me to this today, and this is something that I definitely want to make an announcement of. Come to think of it, I've been doing a lot of announcing and not a lot of creating. Anyway, it's show written by Joss Whedon—yes, the same guy that did Buffy and Firefly—called Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog . I've watched the first part and it's hilarious. It's an experimental project that Joss wrote during the Writers Guild Strike to show what can be done with very little, released on the web, and get compensated handsomely for it—hopefully anyway, but that's part of the experiment. So check it out. Watch all the episodes as they come out throughout the week; Act 2 comes out Thursday, Act 3 comes out Saturday, and after the 20th it won't be available for free anymore. [Edit: You can now watch it for free on their website. However the video will have a few ads.] If you want to support what they are trying to do—and you should—go buy their...

Before I turned to graphic arts my studies and hobbies were in music composition. Like everyone else in the demomusic scene I released music for free and competed in contests like MC6 and 30 minute compos on #trax. I don't compose much anymore but I still have a great love of music and the people who have the craft to do it well. I've been very passionate about independent music over the past couple of years since understanding more about the current state of the record industry. I'm not going to rant too much about this, and I don't think I need to because a lot of people would agree that the situation in the industry, for both artists and fans, is pretty abysmal. This doesn't have as much to do with the RIAA, it's about what artists under a record label have to go through; the record industry doesn't try to make music as much as they try to make celebrities. This is why I've become so passionate about the independent music scene. I still consider myse...

I came across this little gem of a game called Audiosurf a couple of weeks ago. It's a finalist at this year's Independent Games Festival. Today I participated in the beta weekend so I was able to play it for the first time. The thing that drew me to Audiosurf, aside from it being an independent title, is that it's a puzzle game where each stage is generated from music files on your computer, and the same songs become the soundtrack for the stage. The speed and difficulty change with the intensity of the music you provided, and the blocks appear to the beat of the music. This works really well when you play songs that have a strong beat and lots of dynamics. The way the puzzle works is you have to run over a block to put in on the board. The block falls in the corresponding lane (column) on the grid. To remove blocks and to get points you need 3 blocks of the same color touching each other in any configuration. Red blocks are worth the most points while the cooler-colored ...