It was really such an honor to get this award for my first foray into games writing, which, as I say in my speech, was really the summing-up of an enormous collective worldbuilding effort. And from the nicest people in the biz too! May sincerity always prevail ❤️

While it took a village to make it weird 😜 I’m so grateful to get the opportunity to speak about the Telefantasy aspects of @blippo.plus + the backstory of my studio & collaborators youtu.be/zmvlXIzO9K8?...

Considering adding a gallery + old clip art browser to MacPaint before release. I know, I know, but there is so much good old 1-bit clip art out there. Like with the added font manager, it would be nice to be able to easily explore and celebrate all of that work. 🤔

Two FMV creators, two methods for crafting non-linear narratives that blur the line between film & games! 📊 @mrsambarlow.bsky.social: spreadsheets & math-driven discovery systems 🔮 @theuniverse.bsky.social: spontaneity & lore-building week by week 📻➡️ podcast.panic.com or wherever you catch pods!

We started playing Minish Cap on the big screen using the Switch 2 with the kids. This may actually be my most favorite Zelda game. Shrinking to explore the tiny world of the Minish as Link never gets old. It's a kind of magical gameplay that is absent from the other games imho. The kids love it.

Recreating some of the original pixel art from MacPaint in Figma so it scales nicely at 2–3x resolution. It didn't feel right remaking this one like I did with the toolbar and brush icons.

Last, but certainly not least, @blippo.plus won this year's Herman Melville Award for Best Writing!

I Am the Ghost Here, my debut story collection, is now in bookstores! It’s also a Gold House Book Club selection.

It's too bad developers who tastefully broke the rules of Mac app icon design are shamed like this in Tahoe AND they can't pull-off the same cute design if they wanted to. 🤷‍♂️

I’d want to try a smallish foldable phone but the hinge is just a loose floppy hinge and the screens are clearly two separate screens that can work together. And the device can fold open flat on a table, or sit in my hands like a little book partially open, or one hand with my thumb up the middle.

The kids with their Snapchats and TikToks will never understand.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is playing Portland! Excited to see my fellow Canadians run amok through Toronto (and time??). 😄 As of this posting a 97% Tomatometer AND Popcornmeter score too?!

You know, sure it's a bit ghost-handy, but I'm happy with how the app icon turned out for v1.

Some final tweaks to the FatBits preview. I think it's feeling pretty good. I should release this soon. 😄

I just said “it’s live, there’s no rewinding” and instantly became the oldest person in the world.

Why does part of me want a full version of the Instacart Super Bowl ad track to listen to? 😆

A great point, and as both an excuse to bump the article and a rider of sorts - as a parent, if we want to share stories with our kids, ones we grew up enjoying, what better way to do that than to cater to them, and not us?

New video is live! "How Well Can I Paint Ethel Cain in the Oldest Art Program (MacPaint)?" youtu.be/895cnrsKWvs

Is Close Encounters of the Third Kind really 8+?? It’s been a long time but my memory of that movie is that it’s borderline horror? 🤔

We have a song in GTA V, one in The Sims 3, one in The Metronomicon, and now 137 songs in @blippo.plus!?! Buy the OST for $5 today only for @bandcamp.com Friday: yacht.bandcamp.com/album/blippo...

Just for fun, I added a way to export all of the frames from a QuickTime VR Object file to a single image. 😅

Having a bit of fun with this QuickTime VR viewer project thing this evening. Still figuring out how hotspots work, but hey this Star Trek Enterprise bridge QTVR file works now. :) There are 21 different panos in this one file!

QuickTime VR 1.0 hotspots are now correctly projected onto the cylindrical surface and visit the correct node. So this file works great! QTVR 1.0 hotspots were stored as images where literal pixel values mapped to the node they navigate to when clicked. So color r: 1, g: 1, b: 1 linked to node 1.

This QuickTime VR object file of a 1994 MacUser Eddy Award came with Apple's QTVR Showcase CD-ROM. It was awarded to Apple's QuickTime VR team "Breakthrough Technology of the Year." Someone at Apple took *so* many photos of it. 360 photos to be exact. How appropriate. 😉

Did you know that there exists a project today that lets you play Bungie's classic Myth II on your latest Mac? Works great in Tahoe. On Apple Silicon. I love this. projectmagma.net

Hmm I forgot to mention that a while back I added selection masking to MacPaint. That is, when there is a selection, it will act as a mask on the document so any drawing you do will only affect the inside of the selection. It feels like a natural extension of what was already in place imho.

Just FYI I won't be releasing MacPaint on TestFlight or the App Store for fairly obvious reasons I guess. Though Apple no longer holds a trademark on "MacPaint", they do forbid apps with "Mac" in their name. So, y'know. I'm excited to set aside some time to make a page to distribute this on anyway.

Added some helpful keyboard commands to the MacPaint pattern editor: rotate, flip horizontally, flip vertically, invert, and move. 🙂

Figured out a way to desaturate the close/minimize/maximize buttons on MacPaint document windows. Their journey to the dark side is now complete! 😈

Working on the Help menu for MacPaint. Anything I'm missing? Should change?

This project is neat.

I removed the white titlebar on MacPaint document windows. What do you think? Felt like the stark white titlebars—especially in Tahoe—killed the vibe a bit?

Various QuickTime VR panorama formats working now + object movies. This has been so fun revisiting all of these old QTVR files. This Monument Valley QTVR specifically triggered some memories. Not because I went there, but because this was one of the sample files Apple shipped and it blew me away. 😄

Good lord this is ridiculous. This morning I thought, hmm, I wonder if I'm careful enough if I could get Claude Code to produce a working QTVR viewer for macOS. Well, there's plenty unimplemented, but a few hours later... I wonder when the last time humans viewed the content of these files. 😄

My two favorite use cases for LLMs when coding: • Understanding arcane programming languages, especially assembly for obsolete architectures. • Understanding and parsing obsolete file formats. This has been tremendously helpful for MacPaint, especially with various font formats!

Found an old bitmap version of Zapf Chancery. 🙂 Dragged it into MacPaint remake's font manager window. Easy peasy. That 9pt apple!

Every time I need to put together a website, I have to read a tome on the state of CSS just to get up to date. Though I definitely feel like we've over-engineered the hell out of the web, I do think this is a genuinely nice addition from 2023: webkit.org/blog/16831/l...

If you have an active text session in the frontmost MacPaint document, you can use the new font viewer to type with—kind of like KeyCaps, remember that? Changing the font in the viewer or the font size also changes it in the document/font menu. A nicer way to use fonts with special characters.

OK a bit more work this morning polishing the QuickTake window. Feels alright having removed the window titlebar. Though... I hate that I have to activate the window to take a picture (floating NSPanel doesn't if I recall?). Hmm. Anywho, could be fun for MacPaint livestreams hahah—yes I'm dreaming.

Playing with MacPaint brush mirrors. 🙂 You know, I think this project is almost ready for 1.0 release. It's feeling pretty solid and I'm out of ideas for improvements that don't radically change the app—fonts were already a stretch. Maybe this weekend. Maybe next. Need to design a website for it.

Blippo+. Now available for  Macintosh.

Since I've been off social media I realize I haven't shared much outside of GitHub about my remake of Hotline I started some years back. It's looking pretty good (imho). Nearly feature complete. Less of faithful remake of the original and more like a modern take. Enjoy: github.com/mierau/hotli...

It's a small thing, but in MacPaint remake if you have some pixels selected in your document, the Export menu item becomes Export Selection. Though MacPaint documents are a static size, this could in theory allow you to export assets from parts of your document. In theory. :)

The Boise font has a potato.

I also added to the font size menu square bullets for native sizes of the currently selected font, but also hollow square bullets for sizes that are a multiple of the font's native sizes. These sizes will be scaled but they'll still look good.

Look how beautiful this is. Music = chef's kiss. Looking forward to this one. Congrats @shauninman.com :D

My MacPaint remake is becoming a bit of a celebration of classic image editing software. I added a simple font manager where you can install YAFF, BDF, Mac bitmap, and Playdate fonts. You can also browse each font's repertoire which is amazing—so many hidden fun characters in these old fonts. 🙂

Spent some time this weekend adding a way to install fonts in my MacPaint remake. Added support for YAFF fonts and I have support for classic Mac fonts (parsing resource forks) in the works. A great way to play with old bitmap fonts. Gotta fix my scaling code that's clipping 1px off the left. 😄

Blippo+ won the Best Writing award at the New York Game Awards! Thank you @nyvgcc.bsky.social for the honor! Our hearts are full after seeing all the incredible work you do. Congratulations to Blippo+ writer @theuniverse.bsky.social and all the Blippians who riffed Planet Blip into being.

One of the surprising features of MacPaint I found was the ability to paste text from the clipboard to the canvas giving you the ability to reposition the text and change the font, size, pattern, and the bounding box to rewrap the text. Pretty impressive. Not a lot of fun to implement. 😄