About 3D Timelines - Part III.

Friday, May 02, 2008

In December 2007, Gary C Martin sent some feature suggestions to me regarding Timeline 2.0, which was still in beta at the time. As I often do, I followed the links in his e-mail signature because I can see what kind of people are using Bee Docs' Timeline. Turns out Gary is a 3D artist and made a very sophisticated Asteroids game using Apple's Quartz Composer technology.

I've always thought that it would be great to be able to hire some customers to help me develop Bee Docs' Timeline and here was a great opportunity. I sent Gary the 3D design concept that I made using Motion and asked if he would be interested in helping me make the feature a reality. Within days he started sending me working prototypes of 3D timelines and we have been collaborating on it ever since.

Doing a mock-up of a 3D timeline was relatively easy, it took about a day. Getting it to work for the huge diversity of timelines that are possible with Bee Docs' Timeline is a much greater challenge. Timelines and events can be different sizes, aspect ratios, fonts, etc... Performance and interaction issues are tricky too. Gary has been doing the Quartz Composer programming and figuring out the calculations for zooming, rotation, movement, and performance while I have been doing the associated Cocoa programming and leading the design.

All of our communications have been via e-mail (Gary lives in Edinburgh, Scotland) and it has been fantastic working with someone who does amazing work and has also been a customer of Bee Docs' Timeline since May 2007.

I look forward to hiring more customers in the future, so if you'd ever be interested in working with me, be sure to let me know what you do! At the moment, I could really use some help with PR...

Labels: 3d, customer, gary martin, quartz composer, timeline