∞: the voice of

I love to gloat. A lot. This post is ALL about gloating; so, if you don’t like this kind of thing, you’re kindly advised to stop reading now.

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Okay. Let’s talk about the best icon I’ve drawn so far: the SONDABOT™.

One of the rules of the Labs is “never twice”: if a problem arises more than once, and the solution can be automated, it must be. Since I was asking the same questions over and over again to those who called me for troubleshootin’, I decided to distribute an app that found out what was happening for me. Thus, the SONDABOT was born.

For a number of reasons, I wanted to imbue a little personality into the program. The idea of a little robot poking his head around your system looking for trouble immediately caught me. And creeped me out. I wanted to express this in the icon, and believe me, I’m very happy with how it turned out, especially given that I have very little experience drawing objects more complex than three ovals in a box.

The oval-ish fixed-expression floating sphere was, I admit, heavily influenced by Marvin, the Paranoid Android from the HHGTTG movie. I then proceeded to make it as creepy, functional and aseptic as possible. It’s made for people to look at it and wonder: what is it looking at? How the heck does it manage to float? What is it really thinking behind that emotionless mask? WHAT THE HECK IS THAT BLUE LIGHT GLOWIN’ FROM WITHIN?

And yet, the first thing it says, once launched, is just a friendly “Hi!”. It has no ill will. It seems. For now.

God, I love how this thing turned out

(There’s a small Easter Egg in the largest version — the Labs logo as its mouth. My Easter Eggs usually involve placing the Labs motto or logo in nonobvious places, and there are already quite a few in the wild :D.)

YOU’RE MY HERO, ENGY.

It’s now available at the Afloat page on ∞labs.net. HAPPINESS THROUGHOUT THE LAND!

New in this release? AppleScript. See the release notes for more.

Out of my window.

A spray of white over Milanese Gray™.

The Labs windows are letting out smoke again. Things are boiling in our patented Software Distillery waiting for the correct level of bug dilution before being bottled for your pleasure (although you can taste the sweet raw draught at the Nightlies page if you love to live dangerously).

Afloat, the Labs wonder child, has learned a new trick: AppleScriptability. Yes! This is a stopgap feature: you can now tie the main Afloat functions to your favorite launcher or hotkey app, allowing you FINALLY to change the shortcuts for the commands. Yay! (Yes, I’m lazy. Why do you ask?)

PlugSuit (that slimy piece of software!) gains an important bugfix and an equally important new feature. The fix is — okay, 64-bit Intel apps, I don’t know how to inject into you, so now I’m leaving you alone. It’s just safer for both of us. The new feature is Carbon support — not in Afloat, mind you: it’s just that third-party extenders can now ask to be injected in Carbon apps (as well as Cocoa apps). At least one such extender seems to be in the works

And now, a picture of a ferret.

The blog is now WordPress-powered. I’ll take a few days turning switches and knobs ’til I like the way it runs. M’kay?

Happy 2009, in the meanwhile.