saturn return to sender

These days my blog is far geekier — and probably boring — than it’s ever been. I’m sure it’s just a phase. Bear with me?

Anyway, in the past month, I’ve been buried in the production of a reasonably polished business plan and powerpoint* presentation for a class. (I’m kind of proud of the results graphically and for the parts I wrote, and will post a link to the plan pdf if you’re curious, but it has personal information in it so I’ll do it in a private post.)

For the written plan I used InDesign for layout, Photoshop, Illustrator, OmniGraffle, and random other things for graphics, while my team members typically handed me material in Word and Excel. I used Keynote for the “powerpoint” while the team used, well, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.

The workflow went surprisingly well. Keynote in particular “just works,” makes lovely results easy to attain — Quartz was made for presentations — and plays nicely with copy-paste/import/export and PowerPoint.

But one complaint I have is that it can be very difficult to pick the element you want on the Keynote canvas when several objects are layered. This is an issue in every graphics program I’ve used. Photoshop, Illustrator … and come to think of it, 3D programs like SketchUp, too, all use a layers implementation and palette so the typical way to handle this is to lock layers you don’t want and then pick, or strategically pick a group and then un-pick what you don’t want, with probably frequent mis-clicks. Keynote doesn’t have a layers palette (at least not in the version I have).

But Windows Vista will have its Flip 3D alt-tab feature, which I actually think is a pretty cool variation/rip-off of Exposé, and it occurred to me that you could do the same thing to layers in a graphics canvas.

So you’d select the whole overlapping mess of objects, hit a key to temporarily explode the layers a la Exposé or Flip 3D, pick what you want, and the layers would collapse again. In a 3D space, you could similarly explode your model along objects or layers, and maybe shift the camera to a “fit to view” in axonometric projection.

This should be relatively straightforward in Keynote, which already uses the Quartz back-end, but tougher for Adobe, where I’m sure drawing contexts are composited internally.

Anyway. It’s a thought. Flashy and useful, a way to remove a workflow speed bump. Makes me want to work for Apple or Adobe, just temporarily, just to implement the feature. =)

On a related note: dude, my little 3-year-old laptop is such a trooper. I did as much work as I could at home on the dual G5 with lovely 24″ screen, but mostly I had to work in Denver or on the bus, or what-have-you. It was painfully slow at times, and page layout on a 12″ screen just … hurts … but god, I can’t imagine getting the thing done without it. (I’m hoping that if I sing its praises enough, it’ll continue to survive until I can afford a replacement.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 9:40 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.