Deciphering Philip's Geek Speak: Intro To Agile Software Development

For better or worse, it looks like Agile Development Methodology and Open Source Software are going to be the future of the Second Life platform. At least for the foreseeable future. As I was nodding my head the other day listening to Philip Rosedale gush about Scrums, backlogs and iterations, it occurred to me that the 98% of Second Lifers who aren't professional software developers probably didn't know what the hell he was talking about. Or worse yet, they've heard doomsday conspiracy-theorists raving about cults and radical ideas on the virtual street corner.

It seems to me that creating a basic primer on Agile and Open Source for Second Lifers would be a very worthy project. I planned to start over the weekend, but unfortunately spent so much time mentoring Majic on her video project that I didn't have time to start.

So for now, here's a comic my human counterpart co-authored a couple of years ago that walks through Agile Development for a non-technical audience. Although it is mostly about corporate software development, the basic principles still apply

Open publication - Free publishing - More waterfall

Studio Artist Software Opens New Dimensions for Second Life Photography and Machinima Making

Studio Artist is an amazing software program that can generate a vast range of paint, vector and image processing effects on stills, video files and even live video streams. The image below shows detail of an original and auto-rotoscoped frame from the video I posted yesterday.

The Macintosh-only software can create effects unlike any other program I've run across, including resolution-independent simulations of painting styles, time-based processing and multiple key-frame effects chains.

I'll share more of its features over the coming months as I apply them in Second Life projects. For now, here's a pretty detailed review of the software from Mac Animation Pro.



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InkSeine might make me love Microsoft

InkSeine is nirvana for visually-oriented researchers. The software for Tablet PCs combines inking, searching, gathering and research workflow in a seamless, intuitive and utter-joy-to-use UI. Since this is Lazy Month, I'll leave most of the the show and tell to the creators:

InkSeine integrates four key concepts: it leverages preexisting ink to initiate a search; it provides tight coupling of search queries with application content; it persists search queries as first class objects that can be commingled with ink notes; and it enables a quick and flexible workflow where the user may freely interleave inking, searching, and gathering content. InkSeine offers these capabilities in an interface that is tailored to the unique demands of pen input, and that maintains the primacy of inking above all other tasks. Source

Words don't do it justice. Here's a short video that captures some of the software's brilliance:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:04b0b97f-7992-4724-a409-d53d51dcba0b&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="InkSeine from Microsoft Research - The Official Video">Video: InkSeine from Microsoft Research - The Official Video</a>

Finally, here's a screen shot of the first page of an InkSeine document I'm using to gather information and thoughts for a new blog post I'm romancing.