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earthlingsoft
I won’t get into the why of its existence right now and I am fairly sure I have discovered yet another sweet spot of global indifference. But here it is: Symmetries.
It’s another wonderful earthlingsoft application, it lives in the intersection of mathematics and graphics, it seems likely that many won’t see what it’s good for - yet it creates wonderfully symmetric paths and even has a bit of entertainment up its sleeves.
It was an interesting journey getting here. As usual the main idea was sheer silliness and the essential implementation was quite easy. Then things got out of control and I wanted them to be a little nice as well. Which expanded the project from a Saturday afternoon to a few more of those. As a consequence may have opinions to share on topics like paths, mouse tracking, Objective-C garbage collection, Core Animation, mouse cursors, file promise drags and a venture into software fascism at some point in the future.
To make things a little more challenging I also found a handful of great testers whose sharp eyes were quick to spot weaknesses. Special hat tip to Tom and Nicholas for the extra share of work they brought my way and to Dave for offering advice on the graphics aspects.
Special thanks go to Ronald for making Symmetries speak French and to Henrik for giving the icon the shine it has now.
August 19, 2008, 0:51
Tagged as
earthlingsoft, software, symmetries.
Comment by Dave2: ¶
w00t! It’s a fun toy to play with from time to time, and there’s some things that would be horribly difficult to create manually that’s a breeze in Symmetries. Congratulations!
August 19, 2008, 1:59
Comment by Arthur: ¶
Hello,
Excellent software!
Is there a way to replay animations in slow motion/frame by frame so that patterns can be captured at a precise moment?.
(This may be in the licensed version, which I do not have because of PayPal account confusion - am working on that and as soon as it is sorted out I will buy Symmetries.)
If not, please consider that function… as a professional graphic designer, I see a lot of usages, but needing very exact control of the animated patterns. (I am not very young anymore and my reflexes are a bit too slow to stop the animation at the exact point that I thought WoW!)
There could be a big market for your software in textile printing (if you add “step and repeat” pattern capability for large format output), quilting and embroidery etc.?
Also consider custom colouring of repeating segments within patterns?
Arthur
September 9, 2008, 21:06
Comment by ssp: ¶
@Arthur:
Currently there is no way to replay the animation. I’ll keep the feature in mind, but at this point I can’t make any promises. As the application isn’t really made for this time-based thing, it would create a lot of ‘problems’ in terms of giving it a reasonable user interface.
I am not really sure what you mean by ‘step and repeat’.
I considered general addition of colour to the application but dropped it for the initial release, both because people may want non-trivial colour (gradients) which require a lot of UI work to be nice to set up and because – in my use cases at least – I just copy the pattern over to a vector graphics application and do all the work there anyway.
What exactly do you mean by ‘colouring repeating segments’, by the way. So far I only considered using a coloured stroke and filling it with a gradient. Your idea sounds different, but I can’t visualise what it means.
September 9, 2008, 21:35
Comment by ssp: ¶
@Arthur:
You may find this follow-up post helpful which describes a way to make Symmetries save many of the intermediate states while running an animation. Not quite as convenient as a movie-style controller but perhaps already helpful for your situation.
September 15, 2008, 1:32
