Make mine a pina COLLADA

At Animate Me HQ, we've been working on integrating COLLADA into our animation tool. COLLADA is an open-source file format for digital asset exchange. If any of you out there are thinking of tackling the same thing, we suggest you have a look at collada-rt before you start. collada-rt comes with the COLLADA distribution, and reads COLLADA files into data structures. It was seriously useful sample code for decoding the tricky COLLADA file format. Also indispensable were the public forums on collada.org.

I heart Chumby

My Chumby is awesome.  It displays my pictures.  It shows me the temperature outside (currently 100 degrees).  I think it even makes me more efficient, because instead of surfing over to icanhascheezburger, my Chumby keeps me up to date on the LOL cats. Yay Chumby!

Yallow from Hawaii

We're in the beautiful Hawaii. Don't you wish you were here...

Howdy!

As my first post for AnimateMe's blog, I thought I'd point out some resources that have been really helpful to me starting a start-up.  TechCrunch is a blog that talks about what other start-ups are doing, who is getting funded, etc.  I also highly recommend Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston, which is a collection of interviews with people who have started successful start-ups. Starting a start-up is like a crazy roller coaster most of the time, and it's nice to know that people who ended up building great companies felt the same way at the beginning. So, think of this book like a support group you pay less than $20 to join. Finally, talking to other people about our ideas has been tremendously helpful. I've noticed a tendency among other people starting a start-up to try to keep their ideas under wraps. That's understandable in that it provides some level of protection against competition, but what can I say? The feedback and support we've gotten from talking to other people about what we're up to has been extremely valuable.

Floating point precision

    After banging my head on the wall for some time, I just realized the little twitching annoyance in our timeline was caused by miniscule floating point adjustments to the timeline extends we do at every frame. When the desired timeline position is almost the same as the current one, we make very small (similar to machine epsilon) which can sometimes cause one pixel jumps on the screen.

   Now we know we need to watch these issues more closely.

First company blog

   Yaaay, we finally have our company blog up and running. The only thing left is to hook it up with the rest of our awesome web page.