Friday, December 5, 2014

The Disruptions Get Disrupted: vA3C Hacker now contends with vA3C Hackette

The vA3C Viewer is meant to disrupt the classic closed-source, pay-for-service online 3D model viewers. And it does so quite nicely. But as I pointed out in my previous post, the code was becoming a bit gnarly, so I disrupted the disruption and started vA3C Hacker. It does ( or will one day ) everything vA3C Viewer does but just in a faster, cheaper smarter way.

Then this is week a funny thing happened. I was looking at the code, and I had the thought: well, I code use this stuff myself on a bunch of my projects but I just need a small subset of the hacker tools. And so this how the disruptor of the disruption itself became disrupted and "VA3C Hackette" was born

vA3C Hacker and Hackette are within a few days of being usable/playble. There are a bunch of fun things. The user interface is built using Markdown - with links that call JavaScript functions that are loaded dynamically and/or with tiny bits of HTML from time to time. Because it's so easy, the interface is very chatty. Think of newspaper columns to the left and right of a wide screen.

And tn since Hackette is just a tiny index.html file that you can drop into anywhere on GitHub, the the viewer is multi-cellular - a network or viewing stations.

And a main thing is that if I can't understand things within a few minutes then that thing has to be replaced by something shorter and simpler.

But the really main thing is that the app can begin to do its own marketing. The app really simplifies the process of doing screen captures is working well. Performances that include the camera tweening from location to location with text to speech voice over have been created. I am happy with the idea that vAeC will really help with bulding its own demos.

The thing I am not happy about is this. I can't seem to balance writing and coding. I look at the work of Jeremy Tammik at on The Building Coder and Kean Walmesley at Through The Interface and see two people who can mix coding and writing and a busy schedule all in the same day. Well, maybe one day when I grow up...

Links

Live: http://va3c.github.io/viewer/va3c-hacker/latest/
Code: https://github.com/va3c/viewer/tree/gh-pages/va3c-hacker
Readme: http://va3c.github.io/viewer/va3c-hacker