comic | episodes & e-books | store | about
< previous post | next post > | all news from Oct. 2011 News archive | News search | RSS
 
  The secret innards of my ChromeDeckOct 28, 2011 9:05 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I'm slowly (more so than others would probably be) cluing in to some things about this ink wash business; for instance, the white ink I've been trying to use as a corrective is not, unlike the black ink, waterproof, so even if it seems dry, trying to go over it with a wash will pull it up, and then you've got a muddle; I had a big problem with that yesterday (particularly around Selenis' throat area, on the previous page I mean), so I tried some small-scale but deliberate tests of it today, giving it even more time to dry, and it still muddled right up when wet again. So that's good to know, even if it puts the final kibosh on my fantasy of being able to correct my mistakes =p; although it can work well in non-wash areas--for instance, I repainted an entire head over it in straight black ink (and then some more white on that for hair highlights) on page 146, which I think has been one of my most successful so far in this tricky medium--probably largely because for that page, I carefully planned the shadows out in pencil first, rather than trying to make them up with brushy strokes as I went along in ink, and also because I let the lighting and shadow get semi-abstract and more expressive, which I should probably do more often.
 
~~~~~~
 
Anyway forget that junk, it isn't what I want to talk about today! Nay! I'm talkin' 'bout TweetDeck for Chrome, aka "ChromeDeck", a very handy and free way to stay on top of Twitter, if that's what you think is a good life decision. There's also a standalone TweetDeck desktop application (and TD for other environments, like Android), but as an Adobe AIR app it is actually more resource intensive than just running Chrome purely for TweetDeck (my main browser is Firefox) on my Windows XP PC; also, the desktop version has some annoying sorta ad-like Twitter feeds you can't really turn off, bleh. Apparently there's a general web-based version in the works, which could be nifty.
 
Anyway, in the Chrome version, you can set up Twitter feeds running in columns across the page; on my 1080p display, I can fit about five and a half. This is proving quite handy for running my live interactive Twitter text adventure, #cmdprompt (plug plug! :D)! Here's the left side of my setup, for instance: my main Twitter feed--or actually the combined feeds from my five (>_>) Twitter accounts in column 1, a real-time search for anything with the #cmdprompt hash tag in it in column 2, so I can always see what commands people are sending me for executing in my text adventure (:D), and any tweets mentioning me in column 3, so I can catch other replies and public messages and so forth from people, as I am apparently obsessed with myself:
 
Image
 
The other two columns I have currently are 4) a combo feed of posts by all five of my Twitter accounts (they're for five of my webcomics, you know) so I can double-check what I've been posting lately (I have a bad memory :P), and 5) a column showing my Twitter private messages.
 
Come to think of it, something like ChromeDeck is almost a must if you're trying to monitor a hash channel like #cmdprompt, 'cause Twitter's own web-based site (although they own TweetDeck now...but anyway I mean the display you can get at twitter.com) seems not to care too much about whether or not it prints search results in their exact chronological order, and you have to go and pick "All" from the little drop-down menu after searching. Bleh!
 
I think you can also have TweetDeck bring in other network thingies like Facebook and so forth--hm checking now in ChromeDeck it's Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz (which I think is being closed?--that's according to some pop-up message in Gmail), and Foursquare. I haven't tried that! But I'm definitely liking it for Twitter use. I tried out a few other similar programs ranked highly in various articles Googling sent me to, but so far ChromeDeck has been the best for what I've wanted to do.
 
~~~~~
 
Haha felt the urge to reprocess the large subscription preview-mode comics again--even sharper now! Soon they will just be too dangerous to handle.
 
 
 
 
·····
 
 
 
 
 
< previous post | next post > | all news from Oct. 2011 News archive | News search | RSS
 
© Copyright 2024 Ben Chamberlain. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy