Thoughts From Kai…

“KPT Vector Effects…”

…what would be a good tagline for this package?

“We don’t make your logo, we shatter it”

…hm, somewhat obtuse.

“Draw a line in the sand to your competition!
                                            ...and then bevel it!”
…hm, too cutesy?

The fact is that we have been thinking about “doing something with vectors” for a long time. When I brought out the first “Kai’s Power Tools” I was regularly besieged and accosted in elevators and after speeches by, well, “illustrious” characters (ahem). 

“What... you hate vectors, eh?” they’d say.

“...think you pixelboys are better than that, hm?” they’d mutter.

And I’d sweat it a little and do a classic handwave demo in the air of something vectoresque that might one day actually transpire.

There really wasn’t any reason for not doing it, it was just that at every stage, some bigger fish knocked on the door, wanting to be fried... LivePicture and Bryce and Convolver, many updates, CDs and a zillion images, all fell in our lap. (Well, luck will open the door, but you have to stand right in front of it, dressed snappily and ready to jump, or else luck will be very fickle about the whole thing…) (One company name I suggested instead of the apocryphal “HSC” was “Three Percent Luck.”)
Seriouslessly, we are all very pleased to finally have made the jump and have this baby ready. 
Like all babies, it’s smallish and pink and its hair may still fall out since they are all starting at the same sinewave level and will hit zero the same time, which later gets all jumbled up in chaos.

You knew that. What you didn’t know was how this puppy was born.

Sure, this is one of the less orthodox introductions to a software package, but then you expected nothing less, I bet. You know I will do anything to get you to really read the damn intro at least, even if you may be too uppity to read the whole manual no matter how many maps to unspoiled treasure we may print in it.

So if it’s a non-linear story with bad puns about nuns peppered into it that will get you to finish reading this, FINE. So be it. Here goes…

If you have seen me on some stage somewhere spouting about pixels electric and tortured artistes and chopmode 55b you probably also heard me expound on the value of online communication.
I often tell anecdotes of our chatrooms and blacklists at the Hyatt hotel after 485 of the virtual beings showed up with their actual analog molecules to poke, and more classic handwaves about how you all share the same printer problems and acute lack of sleep. 

Well this IS one of the stories like that. 

Sree was literally in my chat on AOL one Tuesday eve, (keyword KPT, take the A42 south to Rottingdean, then to Nairobi and ask around) and told me about his new package called “CoolTools.”
“Cool, dood” I said. And then added impishly, “Oops.”
That happened to be one of our little registered phraselets, as well as our CEO, John Wilczak’s online name (no big secret, he is freely reachable as such ). “If it’s still early in the game, maybe you can still change it,” I said. “Hey lets meet next week at Macworld in SF and chat a little.”

And so we did. Sree is a very good guy. We fell in like within nanohours. 

Through several very, very event-filled days, he joined us in Santa Barbara, melded with our team, and we partnered up. From the beginning, Sree had the goods. The stuff was hot. 
What we added was basically a structure to roll it out in a way befitting the opportunity.

And oh yeah, an interface.

Yeah, about that interface... ; )

When I did KPT almost 3 years ago, it had 24-bit objects, soft shadows, multilayers, anti-aliased text, hierarchical graphical popups, realtime previews, and special new controllers. Well....not all was well received. An amazing amount of “critics” got so hung up on the “oh it’s so non-standard” part that they unfortunately often never got to appreciate that it was done for a reason and not just to be different. And some of them had Tursphephobia, the dreaded allergy to turquoise spheres.

We finally did advance to all the diamonds and stars and mice one could want, even the highest rating ever given in the main weekly, but so often did I hear the ludicrous summary “Kai’s trying to design all PCs to look like spaceships,” that I really thought I had to prove something: 

Interface design has very little to do with the color and shape of the buttons. It’s all in the process and flow, the structure and symmetry— hiding the complexity of the underlying events from the user.
I thought that in Bryce I had achieved the “it doesn’t look psychedelic, spacey, or shippy” level of UI, but here in Vex its almost an inside joke: It’s as far away diagonally as I knew how to go: 

Black and white, square, with lots of text on it. Ha!

And I would hope that it STILL has flair, subtlety, uniqueness. That it still invites, and is a bridge towards experience, rather than a hindrance. You’ll be the judge of that.

Gulp.

One angle is likely to be debated often, and that is the reliance on numbers and, in general, the approach of typing in specifics, versus moving a parameter in realtime.
My approach is more the creative one, and I trust my eye. For me 0–255 is an aberration concocted long ago by programmers, inflicting these logical sounding ranges on humanity for the sake of ease of coding. In my eye,s it’s silly. One doesn’t dial in the volume on a radio to “162.” You yank it until its about right, maybe one iteration of too much, too little… ah, thats it.
(In fact there ARE radios where you have to dial in “162” and I loathe ‘em.. ha! Almost as much as the condescending “Objects in mirror are bigger than your brain” signs on car mirrors.)
For me, exploring such parameters as “Extruding in 3D” or “Rotating it in perspective, bevelling, or shattering” are all freeform processes in which its almost nonsensical to attach absolute values to a parameter. I would just as soon see each one be totally analog and realtime.

What people really MEAN when they request numeric input is actually something entirely different. They are mistaking it for repeatability, re-apply across multiple objects, saving exact “perfect” settings. This is the world of “production” rather than creative “play.”

Well, I still don’t buy that entirely, because I am just as sensitive to the need of repeating the happy accidents, and I, too, want to be able to affect multiple objects or files at different times with exactly the same settings and values. Yes, yes, but that is done ANYWAY! You can very easily re-apply an effect, you can save it as a named preset and apply it again to others, or use it later. You even get graphical preset previews... all while, during the design stage, dragging the parameters and trusting your eye.
Still, they will want to type in 0.00001 for bevelling depth, as we well heard during Beta.
So, the numbers are in there just as much. Command-click and each slider has a numeric entry, Option-Tab and all numbers are shown, use Tab to hop from field to field to field and type it all in. You can pretty much navigate the whole damn thing with just the keyboard, numbers, and a couple of modifiers. 

Knock yourselves out.

And then observe if, in the end, it is not back to the simple case of “trust your eyes, watch the preview.”

Well, I am not much to argue religion. So you just get it both ways, anyway. That settles it : )

Another item of contention will be why there is indeed so much text on there and not “all icons.”
Well, really, I am all for graphic representation where possible, but there are limits. We have progressed from a hieroglyphical manner to the abstraction of language for a REASON: Many shades of meanings are simply not expressible in pictographics. 

As Einstein said, “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” There is something wrong when we have icon bars wrapping around us on 3 monitors and yet it still has to say TRASH under that little can...

Yes, I could have had a bevel and depth and metallicity in some really neatoid gleaming cybercool “eyekoan”, but in the end, I think it’s often contrived. There are times where it’s the other way around: In the mutation tree in textures of KPT, I really resented adding little numbers to each sphere and in Bryce many items such as creating a cone or rotating clockwise or raising the fog COULD indeed be done with the actual representation of the items themselves, no words needed... Those may be iconic in nature, they are not icons per se.

Its a long story. I’ll write it down somewhere else some other time, but heck, this is my intro and it’s part of the story. Any normal company prez chapter would have been long over anyway, so what do you care ; )

If Sree and I appear hatless, its because Phil Clevenger did a bravura job of development managerism. He took my initial sketch which was done faster than I care to admit to anyone, lest it look like it was merely a lark, and extended it out into the full set of tools you see now. He extrapolated my style in an almost eerie way, often creating missing elements in a manner so “Kai” that I had the uneasy feeling I am no longer needed around here. 

I sent in a hazy sketch of structure and look and the Sree/Phil axis spits out complete toolkits. Neat.
Let that kind of prove happily that there actually is a ‘look’ to it and a feel, not a random concoction of buttons and windoids. And just about all of it ( with the possible exception of the easter eggs) was done with intention and design. For instance, the entire row of basics like “ok/cancel/reset/add/delete” etc. are almost entirely faded away so as to not clutter your visual field. We firmly believe that after just a few times using the package you know darn well where these staple items are to be found, so they light up when you move over them, using the Illustrator/Freehand underline highlight metaphor, and otherwise are hardly there at all. Many of the basic principles we already tried in KPT and Convolver, and some could be taken even farther. Yeah, we know its not like System 7 or Windows. Tough Cheeseshop.  : )

In the end, we were actually very happily surprised at the ease of controlling what can technically only be described as a so-called “shitload” of options and features. There are a few more key combinations there than I would normally tend to design, but only in the spirit of the host programs being equally “key oriented.” (For instance, with some keys down you can drag handles out of points, or have the movement of multiple points mirror each other.)

Sree is clearly buttless after this process. In an untiring effort, pulling not only all-nighters, but all-brainers, he attacked problems way beyond the call of duty, driven to stick whatever he could in there, to squeeze the maximum performance and flexibility out.

As I always say “a true artist never finishes, but merely abandons his work.” So none of us is really mentally “done” with this set. Rather the opposite: It’s at the 99% stage that one REALLY finds out what all could be done and how it all might work in that parallel universe with the “other other earth,” that is just nicer and we all live 12 minutes in the future.

If you see a Vector Effects package with a sticker saying that it’s from that other place, buy us one, too.

This one is quite a “grabbag of wonders” as it is, though. 

I do hope that you get a chance to drift a little, invest some time to discover the features and, more so, their implications and multiplier effects.

It’s very easy to write in a comparison matrix “has multiple levels of twirl or other effects,” or “the warp envelope presets can be subscribed to in the distortion filter.” Its yet another thing to actually realize what a universe of options that can really bring!

I never design anything for the sake of “getting it” in the first 10 minutes. I do like to ease the curve, but really, I would like to reward those that are getting to be real users and then find it is all “just so.” Too often we see reviews as if I sent them a brand new thing called a “piano” and they write: “Yeah, it’s a string and a hammer, plink plink plink, doesn’t do much, but it looks kinda purdy,” and that’s a real shame. I wish Chopin could come in for a real demo of the depth.

Which is why we are shipping a very small doll of Sree in each package which can be wound up and run the whole set for you..... cool, hm?

Sreeriously, though. I really want to thank the Beta community in our secret rooms on AOL for a great deal of feedback. Minutiae is one way of saying it and anal-repentive should have no ‘p’ in it.

We release this baby on its own reconnaissance now, and put it out in the hands of the teeming millions. May it produce victorious vectors for you. Send us your art, too: The TV Guide cover, the Entertainment Tonight backdrop, the Stones tickets, and the White House webpage borders...whatever you have, we get a kick out of it.

Let’s say you ‘borrowed’ this thing from your buddy, Fred. Hey, it’s true, it’s true: you cannot for the life of you buy every little thing you are interested in and would like to check out... no prob.
BUT, the old tag line here for the skulls and crossbones applies again:
“If you use it more than once-a-week, or you do a real project with it, then HEY, invest in your tools! and let those that make your tools have a chance to make ‘em better...”
Yeah I know, you won a guilt trip to Hawaii, but that bit of ethicsware had to be uttered, since we have a disgusting multiple of REAL versus “well-kinda-hm-I-was-meaning-to-get-my-own-will-send-you-my-money-soon” dollars. So, fess up. And realize that we have ALWAYS made it worthwhile to be a registered real user. When Bryce came out it was $79 for KPToids. Before Convolver came out in January 95, we had sent it early as xmas gifts for $79 to KPTeamster. Do the right thing ; )

It may get worse yet ; )

My best to all the users out there, many many will have this is as one more tool from me, but a lot of new faces that were truly married to vectors only, will join in now. (They might want to check out the other KPT bits a bit...)

Find us online, come see us at the shows, check out some of the seminars we do at the big conventions, sneak into the parties we have there. Find me after some keynote and make me draw you a Schnuffi...
Thanks one more time to Sree for a great set of serious toys and a lovely human as its origin;
to Phil for almost cloning me and the entire rest of my team at HSC for many contributions on all levels...

Voluptuous vectors to you all… Life’s ducky,

Kai