The stuff of science fiction.

Technology changes fast these days. In fact, it changes so fast that a device in my science fiction graphic novel, Earthling! went from sci-fi to commonplace between the time I wrote the first draft and the books release.

I wrote a first draft of what would become Earthling! in about 2004. Back then it was called. Bud and Gort, and I was thinking of making it into an animated short film. As the story developed I created a handheld computer that all the kids on Cosmos Academy would have. It took the place of textbooks, provided email and video calls, has a voice recognition system that can go a little wonky, has class schedules and can, of course, be hacked by industrious, inquisitive kids. I called it the Blip.

It came about when I wrote a scene with the students at their lockers and I started thinking, would they really have lockers? If this is a culture so advanced that they can harness the power of a black hole, they wouldn’t be carrying books to classes. They’d have portable computers…right?

Well, the Blip is just another in a long line of sci-fi handheld computer devices. From Star Trek to Philip K. Dick, science fiction stories are full of handheld, powerful, touch controlled, easy to use computers. But I never guessed that between my first draft in 2004 and 2012 when Earthling! comes out, that students would actually be carrying handheld, powerful, touch controlled, easy to use computers instead of text books.

The real world caught up with my science fiction gadget. The only thing the Blip has on an iPad or iPhone is that it folds down. But I’m sure that’s the next thing coming from the labs of Apple Inc.

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The iBooks Author discussion continues…

There’s been a lot more coverage about the Apple initiated iBooks Author program. I’ll post a few links to interesting articles and discussions. There is definitely a prevailing feeling that a lot of the text book companies early attempts are lacking in interactive features. Which I expect. But I also expect that to change over the next 18 months. This article at Apple Insider looks at some of the issues. It warns the conventional book publishers that basically providing a PDF where you flip pages is NOT what the audience is looking for. That alone is not a step into a new form of textbook that encourages interactive, student directed learning.

This is also an interesting new tool that will let you build Flash like animations utilizing Css3, so the animations can easily be dropped into iBooks Author. It’s by web developer Sencha.

And here is a review of iBooks Author (The new Apple application) that lets you build ebooks for the iBookstore for playback on an iPad. This is by Steven Sande and Erica Sadun who are ebook publishers. They wrote the following conclusion on the new iBooks Author application:

Conclusion

Let me reiterate one key point: iBooks Author is designed for creating textbooks. If you’re thinking about using it for other types of books, you can — but understand that this app may not necessarily be the tool you’re looking for if you want to create and sell books on all ebook platforms.

iBooks Author does a great job at what it’s designed for, and I think we’ll see a lot of incredibly interactive books hitting the iBookstore in the near future. Is it perfect? No. But for a first release of a new app, it’s pretty darned close.

There is a great discussion after their post on TUAW.

I’m going to dig into the app in the next week and see what I can do with a picture book project I have sitting here. It will be interesting to see what kind of interactive elements I can add using my set of digital tools.

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I say E-Book, you say i-Book.

I’ve already spent a lot of time talking with friends about the new Apple iBook Author App, the updated iBooks app, the updated ePub format and of course Apple’s textbook and educational product direction.

Of course there’s been an uproar about the license issues, but there’s always someone to freak out about Apple stuff. By the way, you can watch the full presentation here if you missed it. It’s very interesting.

I haven’t had much time to look at the authoring tool in detail and I know there are serious questions about technical aspects of the software and about distribution. For instance, it only makes books for Apple’s electronic store. And the templates are fairly limited, though with a little HTML 5 and JAVA script you can do a lot more if you want.

But It seems to be a pretty powerful tool for a FREE, version 1.0 piece of software.

I mean, there was very little in the way of native Dev. tools before this. So it’s a good place to start. I have no doubt that it will allow people to make some junk but it will also let a few people make something truly original and exciting. Something that wouldn’t make it through the vagaries of the large, corporate publisher or media company.

As we get more and better tools, the interactive/ebook market will be less dominated by the need for expensive expertise to generate a worthwhile e-book experience and will allow for the best content to stand out. We’ll get to see what resonates with a broad audience and what doesn’t based on the material/story. Not just the ability to get through the technical hurdles.

It will continue to stoke the fires about what a book is becoming. There is no doubt that in a hundred years books will be digested on a screen much more often than in a stack of dead tree pages. I’m not saying this is good or bad. Heck, in a hundred years I’ll be gone anyway.

But it’s exciting to see what individuals can do with a tool that allows publication and national distribution with a click of a button. My hope is that we might see a renaissance of content not unlike the underground press of the 1960′s. And we can use all the renaissances we can get these days.

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Business Man. The newest action figure trend.

A company wanted to make a Steve Jobs action figure. This isn’t the first time this has been tried. Apple stepped up legally to block the last one and they just did it again to stop this attempt.

I’m not sure if this was a collectible toy, an action figure, an old fashioned toy-toy or a doll.

But my inner geek kind of wanted  Bill Gates and Steve Jobs action figures so they could debate the history of personal computers. And when things got ugly, Steve could use a pump-action karate chop on Bill. Bill would fight back by firing spring loaded boxes of new versions of Windows at Steve, burying him in piles of mediocre but plentiful software.

Then they could settle down, get back in their seats and laugh about IBM’s OS/2 Warp.

Hours of fun that we won’t get to have.

Though I have to admit, the level of detail in the Steve Jobs action figure is rather creepy…

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Steve Jobs

It seems like everyone is writing something about Steve Jobs. Here’s my 250 words.

I can’t remember a time in my life when Apple products weren’t part of it. Even through the bad years, the clone machines, the Simpson’s joke. I fondly remember the short time I worked with Apple on Quicktime products, worked at their Macworld booth (I designed marketing materials and logos and oversaw the printing, THEN drove them up to the show floor from Los Angeles in a rented U-Haul) when I first moved to California. I saw Steve walking the floor shortly before he was officially back in charge.

What Steve Jobs has meant to me, what Apple (and Pixar) has meant to me is similar to what Charles Schulz has meant to me. That sometimes, good guys win. Sometimes the people who focus on just doing great stuff come out on top. That financial success can be a by-product of doing great work and not a scheme focused on extracting ‘revenue streams’ or ‘upgrade cycles’, or taking advantage of people. Apple was a successful capitalist enterprise, no doubt. But it always seemed to be a best case scenario of what capitalism can be.

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Introducing Good Dog Publishing!

At long last the Cave Bear and Duck read-to-me comic book is due in Apple’s App store for the iPad shortly – for FREE! What exactly is it? It’s an all ages appropriate funny animal comic book presented with finger friendly iPad page swiping as you’d expect, with pop-up thumbnail navigation and a soundtrack that can be turned on or off with the voice acting talents of Tom Kenny!

It’s a great little e-reader that Good Dog built from scratch so we can keep adding more good stuff to it.

Thanks to the wonderful work of the engineers at Good Dog Publishing, an amazing composer, Joe Toscano who wrote the catchy theme, Mr. Wallin our copy editor and corrector of spelling and tons o’ thanks to Tom Kenny for bringing both characters to life. Tom is better known as the voice of that sponge guy – Spongebob Squarepants. He’s also a versatile actor (I recently spotted him in the very much not kid intended but amazingly dark and funny Robin Williams film World’s Greatest Dad) and musician who brought a ton of energy to the project from the very first moment, literally. And that was without touching any of the donuts and sugary treats that were sitting in the recording studio.

I also have to thank Vicki Arkoff who helped put the pieces together on this project. Good Dog is wagging its tail just for you! And Ken Min for providing security.

Good Dog Publishing is already working on several interactive projects that explore new ways to navigate a story so we can turn the idea of a ‘page turn’ on its butt and take advantage of the unique technology and the close reader relationship the iPad offers. We want to stay focused on great narrative experiences that can be expanded with the technology. Not generating work geared at the technology.

In addition to pushing boundaries with narrative structures, we also plan to expand on the fun that comes from adding new dimensions of sound,  music, animation and voice acting to ‘reading’ a comic book.

And the Good Dog in the Good Dog logo below? That is my dog Angel. A good dog indeed.

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Cave Bear and Duck headed to the iPad

I’ve discussed how great the iPad is for comics on this blog before. But the more time that passes the more intrigued I am about getting work out for the iPad and any of the devices that follow in its footsteps. And in the next month or so I will be releasing a 27 page Cave Bear and Duck issue on the iPad. It will feature a few interactive elements, but to start off with, it will be very much a comic book that you can enjoy on the iPad.

I set out  to create a simple, solid (no crashes please!) code base to build an e-book or ‘enhanced book’ platform from. And we have that. The reader is in final beta and looking great. I’v been working with two developers and we have a lot of plans about how to expand the platform and create even more dynamic, narrative structures and navigation methods.

Cave Bear and Duck will be a FREE download at the App store. It features pop-up navigation, opening theme music and a ‘read to me’ sound track, featuring the dialogue from the book, read in the characters voices. I just got back from a few days in LA to record the soundtrack, and it’s awesome! I don’t want to give too much away, but one of the best voice actors in the business stepped in to create Cave Bear and Duck. (More on this closer to launch.)

The voice performance encourages younger readers to better understand the dramatic aspects of the story by hearing the written dialogue performed with character voices. It enhances an understanding of how the words can live ‘off the page’ and is a fun perk to having a device that can present audio playback.

I don’t believe that adding sounds or music to a comic book will make a better comic. The book still needs to look good and have an appealing story. But it’s a small step in building out possible new features for enhanced books.

But even without any new media bells-and-whistles, the iPad is a seriously wonderful platform to read comics on. As the prices drop on this type of  reader, there is no doubt that it will become the main method for digesting books and comics ETC. I’ve purchased and read several comic books on the iPad already. While I may not end up at the comic book store as often, I don’t have to fill up as many bookshelves either.

I’ll post more about the comic as it gets closer to release. I will also be launching a small website to support the books we release (part of the contract to release Apps from Apple’s store). We will also list upcoming projects from other artists who are creating fun, all age, child friendly material to take advantage of this relatively new, and rapidly evolving platform.

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Just keep swimming…

My favorite advice in an animated film is from Dory in Finding Nemo. Her mantra of “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming…” I hear that playing over and over in my head when I tackle projects that are difficult. Or when something I work really hard on never sells, or even worse, sells but the deal is not workable. “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming!”

Below is a page from a graphic novel that is near and dear to me, and a few other people (you know who you are!) and to use more movie jargon, ‘I just can’t quit this book…’

I am busy right now working on another graphic novel called Earthling. And when I need a break I usually take out an older manuscript for a few hours and give it a quick read. I see if it’s still working or smells rotten with age. Some projects I can toss away. They aren’t working and/or I don’t feel they have a commercial enough angle. This book is, I think, practically an anti-commercial project. But the book still fascinates me. It’s an odd book that I have no idea how to sell it or to whom it would sell. It’s not comfortably a kids book, nor a middle grade or YA. It’s a bit of a stretch for my style and it’s not an easy story to classify. It’s just something I liked doing.

Recently on another blog a writer was answering a question about how difficult it is to work on projects when you feel there is no hope for them to be published, or bought or sold or read or whatever. And that is true. It’s hard to take up any creative project in this day and age and feel it has a chance of breaking into the mediaverse unless you are already part of the digestive track of the beast. Add a couple of hundred rejections in a lifetime and you can understand that the will to create can be killed off completely. That is a rational decision to make. And that’s too bad. Becasue as much as I need work to sell in order to pay my bills, I probably spend more of my time on projects that don’t sell for whatever reasons. And those projects help keep me sane. At least as sane as I can be. More importantly, for many, many years I worked other jobs and did my drawing and writing on the side. But I still did it. I worked on it relentlessly. This makes me think that selling the work is not the main reason I’m doing the work, as much as that contradicts the title of ‘commercial artist’ which I surely am.

At the 2:12 point of this YouTube video Steve Jobs sums it up perfectly. Jobs is speaking about why he does what he does. ‘Because it’s such hard work any rational person would give up. If you don’t love it, you’d give up. And that’s what happens to most people. The ones who are successful love what they do and they persevere. And the ones who didn’t love it, quit. Becasue they are sane.’

And that’s why, one day, even this project will see the light of day as a completed piece. Just keep swimming, just keep swimming…

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Apple vs. Google.

Welcome to my off topic, technology rant Tuesday.

Looks like both companies are putting on the giant, inflatable boxing gloves. The mobile casual computing/entertainment space is real now. And the future of watching entertainment is going to be brand based. Not channel, not time, not network, not cable company.

The one thing I never hear analysts talk about when they discuss the upcoming war between the Google phones and the Apple phones is the power of the iPod Touch. Apple is the only player with a non-phone device that shares the platform. It greatly expands the platform, and allows for people to own a phone and an iPod Touch. It’s a super cool, portable computing iPod. No phone contract needed. The phone and the particular network the phone is on isn’t what matters in the long run.

It’s the width and depth of the platform. By looking at the Touch market along with iPhones you have an attack on this segment that Google will never have until they step out of just making phones. Of course they don’t have the iPod and iTunes integration to offer a product with compelling multimedia wings.

Soon Apple will release a tablet/reader that will attempt to be the portable casual computing machine of the future. The platform will grow again. Add calling over wi-fi and the Touch could grow in a different way. Add video conferencing to the tablet and it grows out again. And they share a common development platform.

Too many companies haven’t cast a wide enough net to understand what portable, casual computing is. The phone isn’t the centerpiece. It’s just a feeder. And look at the money and resources the mobile phone companies have wasted on horrible technology through the years. Phones were difficult to maintain, they offered no good content, and the hardware was bottom of the barrel in design and interaction. These mobile phone companies had no vision other than getting people to sign onto contracts for phone service. They limited technology development because it wasn’t in their interest or abilities to expand it. They were mostly fat, happy cats. Every once in a while they would buy one another, or fight over dropped calls or who signed more people, but they never looked beyond the end of their noses which were mostly stuffed with dollars.

One company changed that. But already the phone IS the MacGuffin. Everyone is now chasing the wrong thing.

Apple has made everyone take their eye off the ball, to use a horrible sports analogy. The phone companies still have no idea. So they create lots of phones with ‘touch screens’. Because that’s what’s good about the iPhone right? Touch screens. And making sure you can slide stuff around, we need that, right? It’s like adding rubber wheels to a horse drawn cart and calling it a Mercedes.

Useful devices are the key. A common, robust platform that supports casual, multimedia enabled devices is the promised land.

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Amanita Design

I’m usually not a big fan of video games. I mean, I play them – when I have time…if I have time…when I USED to have time. But the standard 3D graphics have gotten stale to me. There’s something about the ‘shininess’, the surreal amount of texture detail, the hang-up on recreating reality (Look how real it looks!  Who cares? Have you ever looked at a  Van Eyck? He had hyper-surrealism/hyperrealism down in the 15th century. )

And I am not a fan of Flash as a development platform, an animation tool or whatever Adobe wants to sell it as this week. I do some work in Flash. But I rarely find it the ideal tool for anything other than hyperactive, marketing driven websites where the first thing you do is turn off the music, turn off the animation and try and find an HTML version where you can at least bookmark specific links… ANYWAY, the following post deals with a video game that’s done in Flash. So much for my cranky dislikes.

I saw this game on the Apple download page and decided to look into it and it’s really quite a cool game. The free demo works on OSX. The game play is pretty inspired. It’s not HALO – thank goodness – the body count isn’t the defining accomplishment but it’s fun to interact with, inspiring to look at and I wasted some time with it and it felt good!

The company is from the Czech Republic (Is it still called a Republic?) . Their website is here and they have some fun point-and-shoot type games (look under FLASH GAMES at the top of the page). They all feature inspired art direction, intriguing character design and innovative interaction with the scenes. Wonderful, fanciful illustrated worlds that feature a great deal of humanity in the art. They give me a real sense of seeing things from another human beings perspective. And that, for me, is usually a defining factor in what makes Art. Show me something about how you perceive the world. It doesn’t have to LOOK like the ‘real’ world. In fact,  don’t let the real world interfere if you have a strong enough vision. That’s why this work feels special to me. 99% of video games out there have no interest in presenting a point of view that resonates beyond what we precieve as ‘reality’. Even the most ridiculous, outlandish constructs in video games are rendered with the upmost care to make sure they look JUST LIKE WHAT WE SEE all the time.

This company has been doing work for quite some time and once again I am behind the times. Nothing new in discovering that. But it’s new to me and I really enjoyed it.

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