If you have 1) a fairly robust chip, 2) a speedy video card, and 3) a lot of music you like on your computer, we have a real treat for you.

The old bell curve applies to programmers just as it does to all other groupings of humans. Way over at the right end of the programmer bell curve (far, far from the people in Redmond) is a tiny sample of humanity that not only programs but programs CREATIVELY.

Creative programming takes several forms: elegance (no wasted lines of code, i.e., no bloatware), brilliance (clever algorithms), bug-freeness.

The most difficult, and rarest, form of code-writing creativity happens at the interface between old and new technologies. For example, page designers who work well on paper often stumble badly when doing web sites. Few artists have been able to transfer their hard-won graphics skills from canvas to screen. Computer music, until recently, has been notable mainly for its aural redundancy.

Lately a young California programmer by the name of Ryan Geiss has surfaced who is making encouraging inroads, opening new paths toward graphic beauty.

We first encountered Mr. Geiss several years ago when his eponymous screensaver appeared. A multi-level, exercise in abstract, graceful fluid motion, Geiss (the screensaver) was a modest but significant leap ahead of the old flying-toaster/clumsy kaleidoscope school of screensaver design.

With his latest work, Ryan Geiss has fulfilled the promise shown in that early project with three remarkable and beautiful enrichments for your computer:

1. MilkDrop is a visualization plug-in for the WinAmp music program (which we have recently written about). Mesmerizing, seductive, entrancing, mind-expanding, soothing, provocative: you get the idea. MilkDrop, with its infinitely shifting shapes and colors, is all those things. The final fillip: it does everything in response to the music.

A hundred years ago the Russian composer Scriabin dreamed of a "light organ" and wasted a lot of time and money futilely trying to create just such a visual instrument. Since then, we've had things like the "Dancing Waters" and the abstract sequence in Fantasia and manually manipulated psychedelic images in the "light shows" of the 1960s.

Now, thanks to Ryan Geiss et al., you can have a stunning light organ of exquisite aural sensitivity right in front of your face.

Other programmers have tried but none have succeeded like this (see also our earlier piece on "eye candy"). The telling sign that Ryan Geiss has thought of everything comes at the end of a piece of music. Older similar programs would just keep on doing their random abstractions. With MilkDrop, when silence returns, your screen fades to black.

2. While MilkDrop presents a wide range of abstract images, Mr. Geiss's latest, Smoke, does just the one that its name indicates. Except this is colorful, slowly shifting smoke like nothing you've ever seen (or inhaled). Also a WinAmp plug-in, Smoke is lovingly responsive to music.

3. Which brings us to Drempels. To enjoy this effort, which Mr. Geiss characterizes as a "mind-altering desktop enhancer and screensaver," you don't need music, you don't need WinAmp. All you need is your Windows desktop, which Drempels will turn into an endlessly distracting work of slowly changing abstract art for you.

The clincher? It's all free.

Go to Geisswerks and we guarantee your retinas (not to mention your work habits) will never be the same again.

(Note: We included no screenshots because non-moving, low-resolution reproductions of what these programs do are unacceptably misleading.)

END

Back to Magellan's Log 45

Magellan's Log front page

Send this page to a friend.