Author: Rick Curran

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Is it Cake?

It’s interesting seeing the speed at which “AI” based generative media has been developing over the last few years, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion etc. OpenAI recently announced “Sora”, their new text-to-video AI model which can generate videos up to one minute long.

The example videos in their showreel video on YouTube are pretty impressive, go take a look if you haven’t done so already:

There’s definitely a bit of an “uncanny valley” quality about some of them though. They made me think of the Netflix series “Is it Cake?” where contestants have to make a cake that looks like a real object with the aim of fooling the judges who have to try and pick the fake cake-based item out of a lineup with three other real versions of the object.

This image shows several tool bags on plinths, one of the tool bags is actually a cake made to look like a real tool bag.

These cake-versions of real objects most-often look incredible and are created using amazing cake-making techniques and edible materials, they really do look like amazing realistic edible sculptures.

In the show the judges are not allowed to go close up to view the objects but can only view them from about 15-20 feet / 4.5-6 metres away. At that distance it is much harder to notice the subtle inconsistencies, e.g. not-so-straight edges or odd surface textures (or smell!) that might give away the illusion. But if they were allowed to go close up then the illusion would likely be much more apparent.

This image shows three people standing next to podiums, the people are judges on the Netflix show "Is it cake?"

It feels a bit like this with a lot of generative AI content too, looking at it broadly – especially on a small device screen – they do look incredible, but if you look closer and carefully you can spot some of the same not-so-straight edges and / or unusual textures (and sometimes extra fingers / legs!) that makes you think, “That’s a cake!“.

Over time though I’m sure it is going to get increasingly more difficult to tell the difference between these and real images / video as the subtle giveaways such as soft / fuzzy edges and extra limbs are reduced. However, even with the current issues it does already present a big challenge when it comes to evaluating the authenticity of the images and videos we see online.

OpenAI does make a clear statement when it comes to the “safety” of their tools and aims to prevent them from being used to create content that is hateful or contains misinformation, but the challenge will be when these types of models become more widely accessible by companies / organisations who don’t hold to these higher standards. It’s certainly going to be a bit of a wild west out there.

(Some of the AI stuff also reminded me of this old “Mr Soft” TV advert for Trebor mints too!).

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Happy 40th Birthday to the Macintosh!

I first used a Macintosh when I went to college in 1989, I had just left school and started an art & design course. The college was a little behind in technology so even though it was 1989 and there were some more modern Macs these machines were a bit older so probably SE’s and SE30’s. Even though they were old these were amazing, I remember using MacPaint to draw with the various tools and then printing it out on the Apple LaserWriter printer. In hindsight it is obviously so low-tech compared to now but it was incredible.

Prior to using the Mac I had used computers at home, as far back as about 1981 we had a Commodore Vic 20 and then a Commodore 64. So I had tried doing things on those, entering programs in from computer magazines and attempting to write BASIC programs myself. I remember thinking at one point that it would be great if there was an easier way to work with computers, nothing specific but just that entering text into programs seemed hard and long-winded. So when I first used a Mac in 1989 it was a bit like a light came on and it all made so much sense that this is how computers should work.

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iPhone view of 2023

Here is my annual “iPhone view” video for 2023, basically I compile all images either taken directly with my iPhone, screenshot or copied onto it in 2023 and then make a video out of it.. This year’s video is 3 minutes and 37 seconds long.

As with last year’s video I played around with GarageBand to make an audio track to go with it, this way I can make the video and audio whatever length I want it and get them to work, I kind of like the way it came out.

There are now 14 years of “iPhone view” videos in my “iPhone view…” playlist.

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Make Something Wonderful

This was released back in April this year (2023) and I’d meant to link to it at the time, but if you haven’t already seen it then do check out “Make Something Wonderful” which is a collection of speeches and writing from Steve Jobs published by the Steve Jobs Archive:

The best way to understand a person is to listen to that person directly. And the best way to understand Steve is to listen to what he said and wrote over the course of his life. His words—in speeches, interviews, and emails—offer a window into how he thought. And he was an exquisite thinker.

Laurene Powell Jobs

There is some really interesting writing and some great photos too. It’s available to view on the website as well as in iBook format via the Apple Book store but it’s definitely best viewed on the website as the reading experience has been really nicely done by the team at Jony Ive’s agency LoveFrom.

Read “Make Something Wonderful” here
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Why having open documents as horizontal tabs in text editors doesn’t make sense

For the last few years I’ve used the Brackets text editor for most of my coding work, I’ve used a few different editors over the years but there are a few features that I specifically like about Brackets. At the top of that list of features is that all open documents are displayed in some kind of “Working files” section a vertical list in the side panel of the main window.

In 2021 Adobe who originally created Brackets as an open source project discontinued their support for it, so as it seemed like the writing was on the wall for Brackets I thought it was time to check out some other text editors to see if there was an alternative that I might switch to sometime in the future.

I tried a few different editors, Nova, BBEdit, Atom, Visual Studio Code, amongst others, and one of the things I noticed about most of them is that when documents were opened they appeared in horizontal tabs above the document window. Atom and Visual Studio Code seem to have plugins / extensions that can possibly modify that behaviour and BBEdit has a “Currently open documents” panel available by default which is the closest I found to what I wanted.

Thankfully the Brackets project had a lot of people who still wanted to use it so it has actually continued as an open source project now separate from Adobe, so my need to find a new editor can thankfully be put on hold for the time being (2024 edit – the Phoenix open source editor project looks to continue in the same vein as Brackets longer term). Out of curiosity today though I took a look at a few editors again just to see if vertical tabs / list for open documents has become more common yet, however things don’t seem to have changed much since I last looked.

It’s surprising as horizontal tabs just make so little sense to me in this context, I realise it’s a common web browser feature to have horizontal tabs but even that has begun to change with Microsoft Edge supporting vertical tabs and the latest Safari on Mac OS adding Tab groups as a vertical list at the side of the browser window.

As an example of why horizontal tabs don’t work well I mocked up what another commonly used app would look like if it showed documents horizontally rather than a list: an Email app. Here’s a comparison to an email app with the standard vertical list of emails with what it would be like with horizontal tabs instead:

This is the normal type of email application UI with a vertical list of emails, it’s easy to scroll down the list of emails and select the one you want to view.
This is what an email application would be like if the emails were shown as horizontal tabs as is common in most text editor applications.

It would obviously be a bit of a nightmare to use an email application like that, but this is exactly what using a text editor without vertical tabs feels like to me when I try to use them!

This is an example of an editor that uses a vertical list of open documents, in this case there are separate Left and Right lists of open documents working in a split window view. This is my most common way of working.