Brian Kane, designer, Emergency Broadcast Network co-founder, and Vujak co-creator (the first video sampler), has a brain full of wacky ideas. The latest: a study for a sculpture in stone that immortalizes what Apple officially calls the “Spinning Wait Cursor,” and what we call the pinwheel, or “(*&$*(&*(&!” (Well, depending on how zenlike you get.)

Need to calm yourself in the face of your computer grinding to a halt in CS4? Sit and contemplate (Brian plans a bench at some point.) Consider the nature of time, and the wisdom that can come from not doing, but waiting.

And then waiting some more.

And yes, the pinwheel has its own, copious Wikipedia entry.

From Brian’s own blog, slashboing

Okay, having gotten my rant about Apple’s extreme level of secrecy out of the way (I’m standing by that), we can at least talk about what Apple is saying about QuickTime X, cutting through the marketing as best as possible.

We’ve known for some time that QuickTime X would be a ground-up rewrite – one badly needed. That could have some implications for compatibility, though, which is something to watch. The details are sketchy at this point, but here’s what’s possible to say:

• X is more integrated with Core technologies. Apple promises that QuickTime X will build on Core Audio, Core Video, and Core Animation. Some of that is to say that the long-in-the-tooth player application itself will work with those technologies more than the underlying QuickTime framework.
• There’s a new player. It’s about time: QuickTime Player gets an update. The nicest feature here is the slick trimming interface Apple has added. A lot of us use QT Player for quick edits and other tasks, so this is definitely welcome.
• There’s no more “Pro.” Finally, you don’t have to spend thirty bucks just to make QuickTime Player a useful tool. In fact, you’ll get all of Snow Leopard for that price (if you already have Leopard).
• Playback is more efficient. Here’s the part that could be most useful to live visual apps. Playback is now more “optimized” and makes use of the GPU for scaling, display, and hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding. Decoding, interestingly, uses the NVIDIA 9400M integrated chip. Most live visual apps already use the GPU for scaling and display, but under-the-hood performance tweaks and decoding features should be good news.
• HTTP video streaming. You can now stream video live over HTTP, which means you can use a standard Web server like Apache instead of a specialized video server, and you don’t have to open special ports on your firewall.
• ColorSync for maintaining color profiles on the computer and on mobile devices (well, provided those devices are also made by Apple).
• Built-in screen recording: You can now create quick screencasts using QuickTime player – groovy. (The Mac is, unquestionably, the easiest platform out there when it comes to making screencasts. Ask any tech journalist or educator.)
• Quick capture: Capture is improved in QT Player for quick recording – always a handy thing to have.
• Performance improvements. QuickTime X promises to take advantage of Grand Central Dispatch, the new Apple threading technology, and 64-bit computing for better performance.

Ah, those crazy Linux-using, Deviant Art artists. Someone has created an anaglyph theme for the GNOME (Linux) desktop. Don some red and blue-tinted glasses, and watch your desktop pop out of your screen. After all, it’s not as though all this Vista Aero glass and drop shadow and flying windows and such makes it really look 3D. (This should make animated transitions look … interesting.)

Useless? Of course. But then, as always I see a deeper theme: I think the standard desktop UI is not long for this world. Skins have been around forever, but computer vendors and OS makers had long kept their own stamp on the way we use our computers. That was before the Web, before Flash, AIR, Silverlight, JavaFX, new JavaScript frameworks, running everything in Firefox and WebKit, mobile devices, Linux on netbooks — you get the picture.

Anaglyph Theme by ~11e097 [GPL, for any *nix running GNOME]

So, impractical as this may be, it may be closer to the future than everything else. That’s worth considering as the PC press obsess over subtle changes to UI in Windows 7. Desktop widgets remain important, but increasingly UI design is unique, specific to the application — and sometimes, if you so desire, downright bizarre.

And with those changes, I imagine the line between “motion graphics” and “user interface” will continue to blur. That could wind up being more revolutionary in the long haul than it seems now, as it would mean the design for Web finally becomes less like print — and not just in silly Flash sites that you have to sit through to get through content, but in a way that’s integrated with functionality. I expect that the fact that efforts so far have been so poor only illustrates that it’s early in the game.

I may have to eat my words — here’s something I didn’t imagine being possible any time soon. It’s extremely processor-intensive computer vision, happening in a video stream, all with JavaScript worker threads. That is, this is possible because the next version of Firefox, version 3.1, allows for multiple threads processing the video instead of trying to do everything in succession. HTML5 + Firefox 3.1 + some not-terribly-backwards-compatible code = basic vision. It looks like it’s pretty simple frame differencing with a threshold, then a bounding area drawn around the spot that changes.

Video: Christopher Blizzard SoCal Linux Expo Javascript Motion Tracking, by AndroidAppFactory
Mozilla demos impressive Firefox 3.1 features at SCALE [Arts Technica]

And yep, that’s Linux running on a Mac, but you probably didn’t notice that — which is the whole point.

So, that’s it. No more desktop development. JavaScript is the future, and you’ll never need another language. Everything will happen in the browser. Nothing will happen in the browser, and everything will happen in servers. Not real servers - the cloud. In fact, nothing will happen in the cloud. That cloud will just virtualize another cloud. That cloud will be owned by Google. You won’t even have a computer, you’ll just have Firefox. Nothing will happen anywhere: you’ll just sit and think about Google and Firefox. Or a cloud will think about it for you.

The typical user likely has no idea that Flash is even supported in QuickTime. But VJ apps like ArKaos VJ and other applications (like Max/MSP/Jitter patches that use this support) rely on QuickTime to support Flash. Unfortunately, as of Leopard — or any Mac updated to QuickTime 7.3.1 — that support is gone, and will most likely never return.

What’s the reason? Security:

Multiple vulnerabilities exist in QuickTime’s Flash media handler, the most serious of which may lead to arbitrary code execution. With this update, the Flash media handler in QuickTime is disabled except for a limited number of existing QuickTime movies that are known to be safe. Credit to Tom Ferris of Adobe Secure Software Engineering Team (ASSET), Mike Price of McAfee Avert Labs, and security researchers Lionel d’Hauenens & Brian Mariani of Syseclabs for reporting this issue.

About the security content of QuickTime 7.3.1 (thanks to n0s10pm for the tip!)

In case this isn’t clear, this impacts only embedded Flash files within QuickTime, not Flash itself. But because some apps use QuickTime as a way of hooking in support for Flash animations, that’s a big deal — at least for someone. Windows users are impacted, too; this covers both platforms, though at least Windows users have the option of using Flash integration features available only on that OS.

Now, admittedly, the small niche pushing the limits of QuickTime and digital visuals is dwarfed by the potentially-enormous crowd who could be impacted by this vulnerability. But there’s clearly a philosophical problem here we’ve seen before: instead of fixing the vulnerability and providing a replacement, the entire idea is axed. Necessary? Perhaps, but I would love to see Adobe address ways of more easily integrating Flash technology with other applications. As the Flash/Flex platform grows, the potential here could be wide enough to justify the effort, especially as applications (not just VJ apps) add rich client features.

And in the meantime, if you use a tool that uses this support, you may want to hunt down an old installer or hold off upgrading. (Reverting to older versions is, unfortunately, really hard — you have to completely uninstall QuickTime, and you’ll only have luck if you’re on Tiger or earlier as far as I know.)