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With regard to creative writing, I can say that Internet has ruined my life. Up to 1999-2000, my production (poems, short stories, two novels — a short one and a longer, more complex one) had been quite prolific and without serious writer’s blocks. Then the Web, electronic mail, newsgroups, etc., began a slow but inexorable erosion process: of my time, my energies, my ability to concentrate on a story and forget about the world outside. The time devoted to writing has grown thinner and thinner and today it’s almost nonexistent. The cruel irony is that because of what I do for a living and also thanks to my many technology-related interests, I find myself reading and writing on my Mac(s) all day, something that frustrates a lot of my creative side.
I soon came to the conclusion that it is not possible — for me at least — to creatively write sitting at the same desk, in front of the same setup where I work, read news, manage email, navigate the Web. When your main system is capable of keeping multiple applications open, it’s easy to be distracted by incoming emails and updated RSS feeds. Not to mention the temptation to search the Web by following the spur of the moment — when that happens, the best case scenario is that I find myself two hours later digesting a lot of information I found following link after link, yet without doing anything really productive.
The solution is to configure a setup without an Internet connection. No browsers, no emails, no distractions: just me, my ideas, and the word processor. Now that I’ve acquired the Apple IIGS ADB keyboard you see in the picture, which is the most compact (and robust) of the smaller line of ADB keyboards manufactured by Apple, I connected it to my Macintosh Colour Classic, and I’m using this beautiful compact Mac as a creative writing setup. Its portable counterpart is the eMate 300, which can be easily connected to the Colour Classic for text file transfers. Another mobile solution I’m working on is the clamshell iBook purchased on eBay a while ago, which I’d like to keep as a OS 9-only machine, to act as an efficient bridge between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ world.
Since I started using this setup on a fairly regular basis, the creative drought seems over, thankfully. The effect of returning to a Mac with a 10-inch screen and System 7.1 is certainly interesting. There’s calm and much less chaos in the old System 7; that, and having a single application in the foreground is almost enough to inspire the creative process. I have yet to decide which writing tool to use; Word 5.1, WordPerfect, an old version of Nisus Writer or WriteNow? They are all excellent candidates, each with its pros and cons, although I tend to prefer WordPerfect and WriteNow. For the moment, I’m taking notes with the good old SimpleText and familiarising with all of these word processors. I’ll probably stick with WriteNow — it has a negligible impact on the mere 6 MB RAM installed, and has a simple yet powerful interface.
Furthermore, I must admit that using a Mac that boots in 40 seconds is amazingly refreshing!
The following article was written by Chris Cain for Personal Computer World and published in the March 1996 issue of the magazine. For a more general overview of the OpenDoc technology and what that meant, the Wikipedia has an interesting entry about it. I’ve chosen to reprint this article because I find it to be a good, simple introduction to OpenDoc, which was in my opinion one of the most promising features of the Mac OS system. Sadly it was terminated even before it could grow and improve.
Apple recently released the first version of its component software architecture, OpenDoc, which plays a major part in the company’s future plans. OpenDoc could completely reshape the way in which we work with Macs, PCs and other platforms. In fact, it’s my Utility of the Month.
OpenDoc is officially described as a multi-platform, component software architecture that enables developers to evolve applications into component software, or create new component software applications. In more simple terms, it’s about breaking down today’s monolithic software apps into smaller, more manageable components that can then be mixed and matched to suit every user’s needs.
At the moment, if you wanted to create, say, a newsletter containing text, graphics and spreadsheet data, you would probably edit each piece of data in a separate application and either export it as a file and import it into your main application, or cut and paste info using the clipboard. Either way, you end up loading three or four different packages and using only a subset of the tools on offer. It takes a long time and you can experience problems such as unsupported file formats and lack of memory.
With OpenDoc you have “Part Editors” instead of applications and your work is based around documents called “Stationery”. Part Editors are small sets of tools for doing jobs like editing text, manipulating pictures and so on, and Stationery files are templates for doing certain types of work. Each different type of Stationery contains links to the Part Editors used for that type of job.
To prepare the same newsletter with OpenDoc you would use a piece of stationery that has been set up with links to text editing, drawing and numeric data Editors. You’d then create your data using these and if you wanted to import a file created with something else, you’d just drag it from the desktop onto your document. If you’ve set up a stationery file without a certain set of tools, you just drag the appropriate Editor onto your document and they appear.
The beauty of working like this is that you use only as much RAM as you need for the job, and all tools are available whenever you want them without loading lots of individual applications. Part Editors should also be much easier to develop and maintain than larger applications, and will give small developers more of a chance to compete with large companies like Microsoft.
There will still be room for big applications in an OpenDoc world, but they will need to support embedded OpenDoc parts.
Apple’s OpenDoc 1.0 contains a Control Panel for setting up associations between Editors and different types of data, a few sample Stationery files and some very simple Editors to accompany them. I’ve been putting these through their paces over the past few weeks and have successfully managed to build a document using this method. Although it’s difficult at the start, once you get into it everything begins to make sense.
If you want to see for yourself what OpenDoc is all about, you can download it from Apple’s World Wide Web support sites.
Anyone who has been using Macs for at least the last ten years will surely remember Viewpoint Corporation’s products. No? Well, Viewpoint Corporation was previously MetaCreations. Still doesn’t ring a bell? Maybe MetaTools will. Or the name Kai Krause. Or, even better, the names of the software products themselves — Kai’s Power Tools, Kai’s Power Goo, Kai’s Photo Soap, Bryce, Painter, Poser… See? Now we’re talking.
Browsing my good old magazine archive, I found a very nice and informative feature on the then-called MetaCreations in Issue 77 (Spring 1999) of MacFormat UK magazine. It’s a 4-page article titled MetaWorld and explores the origins of this company, the vision of its charismatic founder Kai Krause (a sort of Jobs-like figure), and the direction the company was taking at the time, with interesting excerpts of interviews with Kai Krause himself and Phil Clevenger (who was the first designer after Krause to join MetaTools, and was then Vice President of Software Development).
The article was written by Richard Hill. Below you will find some interesting bits I chose to reprint. Enjoy.
Origins
[...] Phil Clevenger explains: “Our company was really born on-line: it was born out of an on-line community. It was created around these graphical tips and tricks that Kai Krause did; and as a result, over the years, we made contact with lots of wonderful people. And as we’ve travelled the world and around the country, we’ve made friends with these people, and periodically we run into someone who really understands what we do and has the vision and has the talent to do it themselves. So over the years, the design team has grown.
“The things that became Kai’s Power Tools 1 began as a series of tips and tricks that Kai posted on-line, in the first year or two of America Online. It became the single largest downloaded file on America Online, and now it’s propagated all over the Internet”.
[...] Clevenger was inspired to seek out MetaTools because of the ideas Krause was advocating. “Kai had popularised a technique he called algorithmic painting, with the advent of Photoshop 2, I believe; he was doing all kinds of procedural artwork that people didn’t really understand [the way he'd done it]; he’d done this golden Da Vinci, and posted it on-line, saying I didn’t paint a stroke of this. He wound up getting 10,000 pieces of e-mail saying, ‘Well if you didn’t paint it, how did you do it?’. And so he outlined very deliberately how the channel operations work with luminosity values, and so on; this is stuff that all lived inside Photoshop, that was very difficult to access and very difficult to use”.
Art meets science
With MetaTools, Krause launched a mission to give more people access to the knowledge tied up in graphics software. Underneath the accessible tools of Kai’s Power Tools was some serious mathematics, says Clevenger. “Today that’s very common, but at the time that was extremely new. KPT’s Texture Explorer was one of the first programs I’m aware of that dealt with the notion of controlled randomisation. We’ve often been criticised by people for our approach, and there are certain sub-sets of people who will just never get it. That’s fine with me, that’s fine with all of us.
“But those people criticise us for not providing at times access to numbers and direct configurability by being able to add in numbers. But the rationale behind what we do is very meaningful; we never do anything just to be cute, ever.
“We could give people a dialogue box with a hundred values that they could enter and type in… and then, they could get the results, and so forth. With the notion of controlled randomisation, what we did was to put 12 things on the screen at once with the parent in the middle; you click on one of the mutations around the outside and it generates varieties for you, and you choose anything else from the outside ring, and it goes to the centre and generates another 12 or 15 or whatever it was. Then, by choosing the variables that you’re messing with — the colours, structures or whatever they are — you can then guide the results into a place that is meaningful.
“[...] I’d been working with computers in other capacities before, but once I saw Kai’s Power Tools 1, I actually saw an approach to interfaces that made sense to me. I didn’t have to look at a manual. I come from a creative background — I was a music major in college, a professional musician for ten years — so as a creative person, this approach to interface design really spoke to me. [...]“
Over to you
[...] After all [Clevenger] has watched the fledgling MetaTools evolve into its present form, giving him an understanding of how to make raw ideas into commercial prospects.
“The engineers here, even when they’re building projects, they’ve got all these little ideas bubbling,” says Clevenger. “So there’s this bubbling pot that’s going on all the time, and periodically we look through and take stock of what we have, and try to figure out how best to use it.
“For instance, the first version of [Kai's Power] Goo came about at a time when we had kind of a technology test bed called Amazon; it was basically a bucketful of everything we had, of textures, real-time 3D file stuff and, aw, all kinds of stuff.
“The thing is, you have to look at something like that and think: What’s smart? We could have taken it and done a Photoshop killer, a Live Picture killer; we could have done all of that, but how smart would it have been? We’d have to invest tons of engineering and development time to compete with these products that have been in the market for so long — Photoshop is up to version 5, all kinds of features and time to develop and mature the code. As well as the competitive nature of the advertising, and just scratching and clawing for customers.
“So what we did instead is, we said: ‘Well, we’ve got these brushes that do this funny gooey stuff and they’re faster than anything out there’. What do you do when you’re a first-time Photoshop user? You start cloning teeth into the forehead, you start doing all these childish goofy things; and there’s this little bit of a giggle factor inside somewhere. So we thought, ‘Okay, we’ll put this giggle factor up front, sell it for 49 bucks, and make it a happy thing’. That’s the smart thing to do with the technology as opposed to the obvious thing to do with the technology”.
Growing Pains
[...] While MetaTools built carefully on its Kai’s Power Tools reputation with products like the popular landscape builder Bryce, the whole graphics software industry discovered boom times, fed by fast-evolving computers. MetaTools had to grow bigger if it was to develop beyond the cult status it had won. The sea-change came in 1997, with the aforementioned sequence of mergers and takeovers [Fractal Design had acquired Ray Dream; MetaTools had acquired Specular; then Fractal Design and MetaTools joined to become MetaCreations] that kept the industry and customers alike on their toes.
[...] Kai Krause: “I must admit, at the same time as growing up, some of the things we do don’t easily scale up: in the old days, when we started with five, ten, twenty people, and I’d have some quickie idea worth three or four million dollars, everyone went ‘yeah, this is great’.
“Now, if you’re trying to be worth 67 million dollars, and you’ve got a three- or four million idea, it’s… noise; it’s annoying, and you can’t do that. You see, some of the potential projects we were working on had natural limits as to how big they could have been. In the old days when I did a project with Stephen Hawking — just because it was fun for me to work with Stephen Hawking — it barely had to pay for itself to be worth my time. But as a public company in the larger scope, you can’t afford to water down the overall marketing efforts and everything.
“The question we have to ask ourselves,” muses Krause, “is whether we want to water a lot of little bushes or a couple of big trees”.
For a chronology of MetaCreations’ activity, see this informative Macworld article from 1999. For a detailed profile of Kai Krause, the Wikipedia is your friend.
