We are in the beginning stages, but we have an industrial-strength workflow system running under the covers along with email notifications. We could totally mark one task as ‘complete’, mark the next task as ‘in-progress’, start putting the assets into position, and put a notification up on the next artists’ dashboard.

Something that I just realized is that these steps could be driven by workflow, or by the Python script. Hmmm. I had been assuming that we needed a user-configurable workflow system all this time.

Do you already have a project tracker, or are you building one? I would be very interested to know what you would like to see in such a tool.

One of the features I’m planning to implement relatively soon is the ability for artists to register their interest in data for a particular shot. For instance, if a lighter is waiting on a camera to be published, the lighter would be able to access an interface (web or inside of Maya) and indicate that they would like to receive notification when a camera or revised animation is available. When an animator or tracker releases the needed asset, the lighter receives an instant message or an email to indicate that their asset is ready. These notifications could even be set up by production coordinators or producers to help speed things along. If there’s anything I personally hate, it’s having to call/IM/email someone just to say “Hey, that animation data is ready!”

Since my pipeline tools are extending to encompass model and texture publishing and eventually even lighting and rendering setups (they already include limited functionality for compositors - and that’ll grow soon as well), it’s possible for the system to report when an artist has picked up a shot to work on, when they complete it and when it has moved on (or is ready to move on) to the next stage.

Reporting this data to a project tracking system is handy.

Do you think this would be useful? Or are pipeline automation and project tracking operating at totally different levels of granularity to be integrated? I’m having trouble coming up with a scenario where this would be useful.

Since you are knee-deep in this aspect of the industry which I am not, any insights would be very helpful.

Cheers,
Cameron

Josh

But doesn’t mobilesafari have hooks into the API to allow you to use corelocation and things like that? I bet if this is truly signaling a change, things of that nature will start to be built into other phones. I know you can’t count on that right now (and it would be silly to develop for something that may happen in the future as I’m sure you’re well aware of) but I think it could actually be game changing.

And again, I’m surprised you’re not already on twitter, haha.

I think the winds are changing there: the iPhone introduced “smartphone” devices to a much broader market and I think we’ll see that the internet as we know it ceases to be the sit-and-type and read and watch YouTube thing that it is today. The internet is a way of communicating information, and information has always been a lot more than newspapers, textbooks and television.

As phones come to know where they are and are able to tie into a variety of realtime data sources, a lot can happen that the vast majority of people aren’t even beginning to see yet. The mobile web won’t greatly resemble the desktop one: and browsers won’t be the best interface for it until they make some changes.

In the meantime, it’s gotta be applications.

It’s one of the same reasons why cell phone games haven’t taken off in America like they have in other countries where people are used to downloading things on their phone, and using their phone for everything. Not to mention their lower end phones are generally much nicer than our lower-end phones.

Even when I had a nice Sony Ericsson, the only thing I ever downloaded on it was GMail, and I barely even used it.

I can see it more taking off in the smartphone market, but like with most products, developing native is always better. Java is such a turd I hate it I hate it I hate it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Winston

I haven’t looked into any other cross-platform development systems yet, mainly because I haven’t seen anything else that seems as promising. If it’s a case of having to separately develop for a variety of different phones, then I’ll just have to wait and do Java midlets for everything until I can devote time and/or budget to doing native applications.

Have you seen anything else that looks good? For obvious reasons, I’m really intending to avoid spending a lot of time cross-developing right now: I’ll do iPhone and *something* else - hopefully that something is more than one platform.