If a wee bit of the old Copland* doesn’t get your juices flowing on a Monday morning, then you might want to check yourself for a pulse, my friend. Check out the following (clicking the full screen button highly recommended):
Of this very cool project, creator Eleanor Stewart writes, “I created a music video for the classical music work ‘Hoedown’ from the Rodeo Suite by Aaron Copland. It is a stop motion animation in which various characters, inspired by Cowboy and Western films, come to life from the musical score. It was made for my final year degree in Visual Communication at the Glasgow School of Art.” [Via]
* Extremely tangential, ostensibly bonus info: The Photoshop team includes a few veterans of Apple’s mid-90’s Copland OS effort & the subsequent switch to OS X. In talking about “demoware,” I recently asked engineer Russell Williams, “Didn’t you guys do Mac OS Copland in Director? ;-P (That was always the half-joking rumor, anyway.)” He replied, “No, it would have been much smaller and faster if we had. 🙂 Also, the early developer releases of ‘Rhapsody’ (roughly OS X minus Carbon, or Classic plus Cocoa) were shipped on the Copland kernel, so it actually worked.”
That reminded me of another excellent and unusual bit of stop motion, that I keep meaning to send to you.
Tiny url wouldn’t shrink it so here’s the long link
http://66.196.80.202/babelfish/translate_url_content?.intl=fr&lp=fr_en&trurl=http%3a%2f%2fwww.fubiz.net%2f2009%2f01%2f26%2fher-morning-elegance%2f
Confusingly, it’s the 3rd image down that’s actually the video.
OMG. That’s a gem of a piece of trivia: Rhapsody on the Copland kernel. I vaguely remember rumors about Apple maybe trying to salvage Copland’s kernel, but always assumed it was just made up.
[I get the impression that Copland, like any big project, had some really good parts & some bad ones (and probably a lot in between), but Apple just couldn’t get all the pieces to align in a reasonable amount of time. I believe Russell worked on the NuKernel. –J.]
After all, NeXT’s Mach kernel was pretty highly regarded. I wonder what the technical reasons were for sticking with Mach in the end. I mean, other than the fact that it was tried and true.
I would describe Rhapsody not so much as OS X minus Carbon, but as NeXT plus Platinum. I actually didn’t like it with the Platinum look — it looked phony, like a fake Mac — so I’m glad they eventually replaced Platinum with Aqua.
I have to say, though, that I preferred the heavy gray look of the NeXT. I wish they had kept something similar to that with just a touch of prettiness and color added, rather than making OS X so bright. I guess Leopard kind of does that in a way. Finally.
But I digress.
Interesting tidbit. Funny how things change in this world. Apple begging to you at that time…
[What’s your point, exactly? That Adobe is now “begging” Apple for something? –J.]
Well, don’t you want flash on the iPhone?
[Sure. But who’s “begging”? –J.]
In this case the word “begging” lies in the eyes of the beholder. If you ask someone at Apple if they think that they were begging for Adobe to port their Suite over to Cocoa (when OS X was being born) they would probably answer with a bad word…
[If Apple had proceeded with their plan to go Cocoa-only from the start, they likely would have sunk the company. No third parties (Microsoft, Quark, Adobe, Macromedia, etc.) would have found it feasible to spend years rewriting their apps from scratch, selling no new versions in the meantime, just to get to an OS whose market share was (c.1997) tiny and shrinking. Vendors would have simply abandoned the Mac platform, which is why Apple wisely rethought things.
I’m not going to get into the whole Carbon-Cocoa thing again. Nothing about Cocoa per se makes one’s app better, and I’m not going to exhume that dead horse for re-beatings. –J.]
At least I have been begging GOD to inspire someone to create a kick ass open standards based graphics suite.
[I don’t know what you mean by that. Do you want it to be open source? Do you want it to be written using AJAX or something? I don’t know what your goal is. –J.]
By the way you have a great blog and thanks for making the time to answer my comments (it’s an honor)
One program (it wouldn’t necessarily have to be open source) of the suite would be a mixture between css edit (from macrabbit), Firefox firebug, Safari’s web inspector, FireFox’s firefinder extension, textmate, JQuery or something like cappuccino, Object Oriented CSS, XHTML+CSS design patterns and it would generate Valid (syntactically and semantically) and clean XHTML or HTML 5 code.