so it’s been a year since i moved to my new house already! moving was such a pain but it’s been nice since everything is done. i probably visited with my family more in just a few months than in the past 10 years combined.

my cats took some time to get used to the new place and divide the territory between them, but they’ve settled in nicely by now with their own favorite areas. there are side windows by my front door which go down to the floor and Scratchy likes to watch the neighborhood from there. when the UPS dude drops something off Scratchy comes to find me and let me know. Storm has found several choice spots for sun bathing and has taken to alternating between office chairs for her bed.

i also have two new pets now. i hatched these crazy chickens from eggs! that’s Squeaky on the left and Dracula on the right. they turn out to be really nice pets and are super tame. i kept them in the laundry room during the winter and in summer they’ve been outside in a coop. i’ve gotten into a nice morning routine of getting up and letting the chickens out of their coop to run around while i make pancakes or eggs and eat outside with them and a book.

i’ve got two offices set up, one with an iMac and one with a PC. i gave away all my desktop computer stuff before moving so it was fun to build a new PC for the new house. i mostly code on my laptop and pick an office based on which one Storm is sleeping in that day. the PC has been great for gaming (lots of VR, DOOM, and Overwatch) and monkeying with cross platform stuff with PaintBot and other experiments.

i still have three boxes left to unpack and a few things left to repair around the house but i’m pretty well settled in now which is nice. :)

there i was just minding my own business when from some forgotten corner of my mind INFINIMEX called out to me once again. so this past weekend instead of writing a novel or sorting my sock drawer like a normal human being would do, i set out to work on some upgrades for it.

i rewrote most of it making it more general so it can splat new content wherever i want and automatically determine what region is available for cutting through based on current contents, patch size, and how many laplacian pyramid blend levels are being used. this got rid of some sneaky seams the old version had and made the code simpler too.

with its new found skills it made sense to go beyond scrolling and take things to the next level with some infinite zoooooom!

the Sketch Club 2.2 update is now out! iPad Pro support, brush upgrades, and lots of other nice improvements. check out the update vid for demos of some of the new stuff. :)

goodbye 2015. now in 2016 year i’m looking forward to NOT moving. what a pain that is!! :P

one of my goals last year was to ship PaintBot… well i didn’t make it. turns out to be quite difficult wrapping up a fun little experiment into a finished product.

i went through a bunch of iterations on the user interface - bouncing a few times between being too simple to get enough control over the output to being too complicated to expect any casual user to bother exploring.

i think it’s pretty close by now though. then again i still have lists of like 100,000 experiments with it i want to try. :) here’s one where PaintBot could only use circles.

i’ve been loving the iPad Pro!

the speakers are fantastic. maybe it’s because with the screen being bigger they are farther apart or perhaps magic from how they distribute sound between the four speakers but you can really hear stereo effects nicely. it sounds amazing in movies and games.

the pencil is great. you unplug the non-pointy end to get a lightning connector you connect to iPad Pro to pair and charge. like other styluses though it is pretty easy to lose. a find my Pencil app like the find my iPhone app would be nice.

iOS handles the palm rejection and it’s pretty much perfect. this is a really great change from other styluses where it was up to each individual app to handle palm rejection and things were never quite perfect.

the pressure response is great. one interesting thing is the scale of pressure values is from 0 to 4 with 1 being “normal” pressure. this is unlike other styluses that always normalized pressure to the 0 to 1 range. i’ve found you have to press crazy hard to get anywhere near 4. the tilt is great too.

it’s taken me longer to get a Sketch Club update out for it than i had hoped. i’ve done a pretty extensive overhaul of the internal brush system. not just to support Pencil and all the iOS changes around coalesced touches, predicted data, precise locations, etc but also for a ton of new features for the 2.2 update and for sharing brushes with PaintBot and some future apps.