OpenGL

You never forget your first voyage into the great seas of graphics navigation. Mine was in 1985. I was using MacPaint, my supposed (but entirely fictional) mastery of which helped me land my first design job. I was panning an image using the scroll bars and a coworker, horrified by my behavior, showed me a trick: Hold down the Option key to get what he called "Muffy." While I found it troubling that he'd invented a pet name for something that looked and worked like a hand---did he have a nickname for his actual hand?---I had to admit, I was amazed. It had never occurred to me that such a tool (otherwise unavailable in the software) so much as existed, let alone might save me so much effort.

In creating Photoshop, Adobe "borrowed" the hand tool. But it assigned a different shortcut: the spacebar. Which just so happens to be the biggest key on the keyboard. It's as if Adobe was saying, this tool needs a shortcut more than all the others. And I couldn't agree more. Read more » 

dekePod Episode 006: We're barely three months into dekePod, and suddenly, the whole paradigm shifts. By which I mean, we are once again confronted by an upgrade. Five or six years ago, I would have written an 8-page Preview article for one of the trade magazines. Today, I'm trying something new: a real-time, lightning-fast, video-based demo and product review. Here's the official marketing description: Read more »