October 29, 2018

Why Sketch will die in 2019

Sketch, Adobe XD, Figma. If you’re a screen designer of any calibre, surely you’ve heard of at least one of these tools. They’re currently the 3 biggest players in the screen design tool arena.

 

Sketch:

  • Pros:

– Features: being the oldest tool means it has a very healthy ecosystem with a plethora of plugins

  • Cons:

– Availability: being a Mac exclusive app means it’s only a matter of time before it’s erased from the market.

– Speed: Sketch is snappy when it comes to opening a file, but viewport stability decreases drastically when navigating around a large project.

– Price: like every other Mac apps, this shit cost money. If you’re a solo creator, this app is currently more expensive than the other 2 combined times infinity.

 

Adobe XD:

  • Pros:

– Adobe Ecosystem: being tied to the biggest creativity toolset on the market is a huge!

– Price: it used to cost money, but it’s free now (undoubted in an effort to accelerate the construction of Sketch’s coffin)

– Availability: Adobe has a bit more advantage over Sketch in term of platform availability, given that it works on both Windows and OS X. A common misconception is that the majority of the design community works on OS X, that’s only true in North America and Europe. If you count globally, you’ll see that most companies operating in the outsourcing sector (India, APAC) still uses Windows as the primary operating system. Some statistics currently put Sketch at over 70% dominance, but if you count the actual product output (which is huge in the outsourcing sector), I’d suspect that number would drop to somewhere around 30%.

  • Cons:

– Adobe Ecosystem: yes, this is both a pro and con for this nifty little app. Being part of a giant company like Adobe certainly has its perk, while we know Adobe has the resources needed to make Adobe a thing, whether or not those resources are allocated correctly is a different story. We all know there’s very little innovation left going on at Adobe, having dominated the market for so long. They’ve also killed off fantastic tools like Freehand and (gasp!) Fireworks!

– Availability consistency: apart from the fact that there’s still no client on Linux (which is not a huge deal, I say this as a designer who uses Linux, I know there’s not that many of us).

 

Figma:

  • Pros:

– Availability: Figma is the champion when it comes to platform availability. This tool is built with WebGL, with desktop wrapper for desktop use (like Slack). That means it works everywhere as long as you have a web browser (currently it’s THE screen designer of choice for designer working in Linux)

– Price: if you’re a solo creator, it’s completely free, there’s no limit on the number of project you can have in your account. They only charge if you want to add more than 2 editors to your project, which is completely reasonable.

October 7, 2018

Houdini 17 Banshee – Sneak Peek

From the description:

Houdini 17 includes a wealth of new features, including a GPU-accelerated multisolver for cloth, hair, soft bodies and grains, a new white water solver, a material-based destruction framework, facial autorigs, fullbody IK, enhanced animation and modeling workflows, UV autoseaming, GLTF I/O, gamedev tools and much more.

You guys hear that, GPU-accelerated cloth engine! Looks like we won’t even need nCloth or Marvelous Designer in the future. I honestly don’t know how they do it, but every new release blows our friggin’ mind, unlike Maxon’s releases, which takes a lot of concentration to spot the changes. Don’t get me wrong I still very much like Cinema4D, releases are still leaps and bounds better than Autodesk’s bug-ridden products, but it kinda hit a R&D block for a few years now.

As far as Autodesk go, well I guess given their huge market share, they might stay relevant for a few more years, but if you want job security, I’d suggest to jump on the Houdini bandwagon as soon as possible. Houdini 16.5 has been going stable on my Deepin Linux box on first try, while Autodesk Maya took a lot more effort to install, and even by some miracles you manage to get it to run, it wouldn’t last long, a simple graphic driver update (which is absolutely necessary) would break your installation easily. Face it, a company with decades operating in the industry and billions of dollar in the bank, still couldn’t get something as simple as that done, then it’s only a matter of time before people move on to better things.

Get Houdini today! (I’m not even getting paid for promoting it, it’s just that the team over at SideFX is just too awesome)

October 1, 2018

Oct 2018: A little update

So it’s been exactly 5 months since I last quit my old job, and I’ve yet to find a new one. Definitely did not think it’d be this tough to find a new job, I was over confident in my skills.
I’ve burned through the last of my unemployment check
My and my wife had burned through half of our savings trying to conceive a child (and bad coin investments).
So far all had been for naught, and we might need another 100 mil for IVF.
My dad still has kidney stones, might need surgery.
My mom’s leg is going bad, might need surgery. (Update: the diagnosis results came back, it is very possible my mom has lung cancer, just like my grandma. I wasn’t ready for this, but I have to)
If I don’t get a job some time this month, I’ll definitely be cutting into the rest of my saving.
I guess this is what you’d call rock bottom.
Is it time to abandon my passion as a graphic artist, and look for something else? Never thought this profession would be so treacherous, you get over 30 and suddenly you’re unwanted trash.
Is it time to abandon Hanoi? This backwater place has such an under developed industry that it appears to be content with operating without any decent graphic artist.
September 17, 2018

Installing multiple WordPress modules for Bitnami WAMP Stacks

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I absolutely love Bitnami due to its sheer simplicity in making the process of setting up a local web stack a complete breeze, especially how adding modules like WordPress, Drupal, Magento etc. is as easy as installing Skype. There’s one thing that bothers me with the module installers though, is that there’s no multi installation option available during the installation process. Well after a bit of digging around, I realize that the option is there, but for some reason it’s not baked into the GUI installer. Instead you’d need to pass the option using the command line interface. That’s not a problem for me but many people who’s not familiar with the CLI may find it a hassle, which it is. But once you get the hang of it, it’s actually the easiest way to add additional installation of a webapp to your development stack (yes, even easier than doing it manually since you don’t have to go through the database creation process).

To install the WordPress module into an alternative location, you need to use the switch –wordpress_instance_name NEW_BLOG where NEW_BLOG is the directory you want to install your copy of WP in.

Specifically, here’s the instruction for each platform:

Windows

shell> ./bitnami-wordpress-VERSION-module-windows-installer.exe --wordpress_instance_name NEW_BLOG_NAME

Linux

Only use sudo if the stack was installed as root.
sudo chmod a+x bitnami-wordpress-VERSION-module-linux-x64-installer.run
sudo ./bitnami-wordpress-VERSION-module-linux-x64-installer.run --wordpress_instance_name NEW_BLOG_NAME

Mac OS X

hdiutil mount bitnami-wordpress-VERSION-module-osx-x86_64-installer.dmg
/Volumes/WordPress\ Module\ VERSION/BitNami\ WordPress\ Module.app/Contents/MacOS/installbuilder.sh --wordpress_instance_name NEW_BLOG_NAME

Once you have the module installed, you will be able to access it through http://localhost/NEW_BLOG_NAME

(if you launch it using the launcher, it will still go to the default address http://localhost/wordpress, you will need to enter the address manually in the URL bar).

Bitnami is a great product and hopefully the company will have enough money to afford a read developer who could put this simple option in the GUI installer soon.

August 27, 2018

Honest Logos: Vietnamese version

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I just came across Viktor Hertz’s Honest Logos and I’m kinda inspired, I’m thinking of doing a similar series focusing on common brands in Vietnam. But I need some ideas, any suggestion?

Off the top of my head, I got:

  • VCB: largest bank with worst customer service
  • Miniso: Chinese stuffs masquerading as Japanese stuffs
  • Mumuso: same as Miniso but masquerading as Korean stuffs instead of JP
  • VTV: Vietnam’s disgrace of a national television network
  • FLC Group: Fuck Life, build Cable cars
  • What else you guys got?
August 23, 2018

A Discord-like color scheme for Slack

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I love Slack as a productivity chat client (except the ridiculous pricing) but there’s one thing I think it could use some improvement, its color scheme. Looking at Slack after coming over from Discord is like looking directly at the sun. Slack does allow you to change the color scheme of the sidebar, but the main part that you look at, you can only change via loading a custom css via their ssb-interop.js file. So here’s how you do it:

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August 19, 2018

Install Unity3D on Deepin Linux 15.6

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Okay this post is nothing but a link, which is this one:

Download Unity 2017.4.9f1 (latest version as of this post (yeah I know, it’s almost 2019 but I guess Unity isn’t big enough to hire a real Linux maintainer)

Seriously, that link should’ve been the first result when you google ‘Unity3D Installer for Linux’, but google thinks you want to read a blog post instead. Typical third rate search engine.

August 19, 2018

Installing Autodesk Mudbox 2018 on Deepin Linux 15.6

Mudbox 2018 running on Deepin Linux 15.6

Following my previous post on how to install Maya 2018 on Linux, today I’m gonna be installing Mudbox 2018. But instead of forcing you to go through all that craps, I’m just going to condense the steps into this simple script. Just run this thing and be done with it. (If you need the installer, you can grab it directly from Autodesk, for some reasons they try to hide the 2018 version from my account, only showing 2017 and older, I had to dig up half the server to hunt down this link) Read More

August 17, 2018

Installing Autodesk Maya 2018 Update 3 on Deepin Linux 15.6

Okay so this is pretty much a journal of how I managed to get Maya to run for the first time on one my my Linux boxes.

As you may have know, Autodesk is one of the major names in the graphic and VFX industry, with their line-up of industry standard softwares like 3DS Max, Maya etc.

Unfortunately, for some reasons they still couldn’t hire a capable engineer who could create a half decent installer package for the Linux platform. Maya is the only software in their lineup that is still currently being maintained for Linux, and even then it’s still using old packaging techniques from 20 years ago, made for RPM-based Linux distros (which made sense at the time since professional Linux distros are mostly RPM-based, Red Hat, CentOS, etc.). But 20 years later, with the rise of Ubuntu and its DEB-based variants, the RPM distros now hold only a fraction of the market share. And yet, for some reason, official Maya installer is still created with RPM in mind. I reckon it’s either they couldn’t afford a capable engineer, or the guy who’s responsible for maintaining Linux installers is too old to learn new technologies (as an old guy working in the tech industry myself, I deeply sympathize).

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