While working on some pixel art, I ended up getting incredibly frustrated with my palette, so I decided to make a program to help me choose colours. A few days later, I had a brand new pal: Pal 1.0! You can use Pal to create sexy smooth palettes by drawing a Bezier curve through an HSV colour cylinder. Curves are easy to save and share, and Pal can generate palettes in several different sizes.

Hop on over to the home page to nab your copy of Pal 1.0 for Windows, or download it right away! The Mac and Linux versions of Pal 1.0 are coming soon. Comments, criticisms, and suggestions are always welcome! I will add suggested features and bug reports to this entry as people comment.

Features already in progress for future versions of Pal include:

• Ability to drop curve files on the application


• Improvements to palette weighting


• Palettes of arbitrary size


• Editing multiple curves simultaneously


• Transforming entire curves


• Saving in multiple image formats


• Calculating curves from input images


• Using different colour spaces than HSV


• Command-line options


• Online sharing of curves and palettes

I did a minor update this afternoon to fix a small bug affecting Windows Vista, which caused the program to mistakenly believe that the "Ctrl" key was being held when it started, causing wonky behaviour.

Well, it looks as though New Media isn't working out for me. It took a long, wild, expensive year—a year of really not being challenged enough—for me to realise that I need to make a switch. I've decided that I want to be studying what I should have been studying from the outset of my college career: computer science, in the context of game development and simulation, which will get me a lot closer to what I want to do than a major that focuses principally on the design of interfaces.

Not to say that this'll change things much. It's just that from next quarter on, nothing I submit will have been required by a class, which in some sense should make my work more genuine. For a while I probably won't have time to work on artistic endeavours at all—not that I've been so active on here lately.

At the same time, I will make time in my schedule to practice those subsets of art and design that I enjoy and in which I want to improve, specifically typography, pixel art, digital painting, and 3D modelling.

As an aside, I just noticed that I've recently hit 5000 pageviews. I now feel inexplicably inspired to do or make 5000 of something. Any ideas?

Poor copy bothers me. My inner editor vomits with rage when it sees such frequently made little mistakes as those to be found on this dA news page, describing the Wacom “Bring Your Vision to Life” contest. Cleaning that inner editor-vomit out of my ears is a real pain. Little things such as “one in the same” instead of “one and the same” are just unnecessary, not to mention “mediums” in place of “media”, and, worst of all, “between light vs. dark…” instead of “between light and dark” or just plain “light vs. dark”. News of this sort is viewed by countless members of deviantART; you'd think they'd give it a little bit more polish.

I'm not even going near the Contest Rules. Gah.

</rant>

On the artsy side of things, I've been working on a few typefaces, so expect to see those pop up here soon. There are a couple of titling faces and one comic lettering face, the latter of which is giving me a lot of trouble.

As for programming, I almost have a language on my hands! Prog nears a reference interpreter. Only a few thousand more lines of code before 1.0!

So that's the update. Unusually social, aren't I?

Well, it's been long enough since my last journal entry, so I might as well give the world an update and see what feedback I get. How are all my watchers doing?

Things go well at school, and I'm learning a lot about design and imaging, and I hope it's starting to show in my work! It's so great to be in an art major at a technical school: I've developed something of a reputation as "the art kid who for some reason is a great programmer".

Speaking of programming, my latest project, "Prog", is coming along rather nicely. Prog is a programming language designed to be a happy medium between Perl (which is about getting stuff built quickly, without regard to elegance) and Python (which is about getting stuff built simply and cleanly). The idea for Prog started ages ago, when I started programming, as an idea for a toy language project. The project has has progressed through numerous revisions and reincarnations, taking on countless names including jCode, jasm, LaX, Sylph, and sol.

As I've been working on these projects off and on, I've gained invaluable programming experience. Despite that no functional, non-esoteric, non-highly-domain-specific language has yet come out of these (mis)adventures, they've certainly formed the set of best learning experiences in my programming career. As such, I now have the technical skills to implement just the language I want! Right now, I have a lexer, part of a parser, and a type system in place. All that remains is to finish the parser and get going on the interpreter, and I'll have completed a dream that has been tormenting me for years.

So...thumbs up for Prog?

I'm mad busy this week. The end of the quarter is fast approaching, and I've got all these extrascholastic projects to wrestle!

Oh, yeah, since I noticed an increase in people's adding my antialiasing tutorial to their favourites, I figured I'd do a minor update on it. That ought to be done within the next few days.

Guess that's it.

If you're interested in Prog, you might try the Prog wiki, which, though not as up-to-date as it claims to be, is still a fairly good representation of where the language is heading. And if you haven't seen my antialiasing tutorial, I strongly encourage you to check that out, as well.

Cheers!

I just uploaded a fairly large sampling of the charcoal work that I've been doing for my drawing class, bringing me up to 69 deviations. Somewhere in there I got 4000 pageviews, which probably goes to me. In light of that, for a limited time only I'll be doing random art for whoever asks. If I feel like it, that is, and if I have time.

I ended up failing at NaNoWriMo, but the upshot of that was that I've developed a few story ideas that I found kicking around. Maybe something will come out of those, and maybe not. I've also been writing a fair amount for my Creative Writing class, which has been good practice.

Working on countless top-secret projects, as usual. Maybe the world will end up seeing some of them.

In programming news, I wrote up an evaluator for SKI combinator calculus because I was bored. The interesting thing about the implementation is that it's built around the idea of a synthetic processor. With any luck, I'll be able to make use of RIT's facilities to actually build this thing as a physical processor! Should be interesting.