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Stories & Games by the Alexander Family
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The Reawakening of Professor Tingleteeth.

carriealexander June 11, 2014 App Development, Family Business, Good Stories, Stuff We're Working On 2 Comments

Jon often reminds me that one of the goals of our company is that we tell stories that we need to hear.  He wrote a  series of short stories about “Kamikaze Cat”  and “Careful Kitten”  a few years ago,  just to help me realize the futility of my overprotective instincts when our girls were babies and I was constantly sure that they would die any minute.  In the stories, Careful Kitten (who was always afraid, and so did everything cautiously) usually ended up homeless or in the hospital.  I got the point.

Several years ago, I made up a story (or rather a character)  that I and my adorable patient (I was a nurse) needed to hear.  I will call my fourth grade patient James.  

James needed a nurse to go with him to school, and part of my job was to go to his house in the morning and help him get ready for the bus.  Every SINGLE day, this is what I said:

“James, it’s time to do your exercises”.  “James, please put on your clothes.”  “James, why don’t you have your shoes on?”  “James, it’s time to brush your teeth”  “James, the care plan says that you’re supposed to put some vaseline on your lips at 8am and 3pm, so we really need to do that now. ”  “James, it’s time for your albuterol” “Now it’s time for CPT”   “James, can you please give me a finger to put the pulse ox on?” ” James I need to listen to your lungs.”

I mean, really.  James and I were worn out.  He was tired of hearing me tell him what to do, and I was tired of telling him.  And then we met Professor Tingleteeth.

I can’t remember exactly how it happened, but one day I realized that James’ toothbrush was actually a very small person who just happened to stand with his arms very stiffly down to his sides, and whose hair, which was white, persisted in standing straight out the back of his head, no matter what he did to try to flatten it down.  He was about 7 inches tall, and he lived in the medicine cabinet.  He was often mistaken for a toothbrush, which made him very angry.  He was actually a professor of Philosophy at the community college, and he was just renting the space in the cabinet until he could afford a place of his own. I quickly learned that the Professor, despite his size, absolutely loved being in charge.  He relished the opportunity to tell James what to do.  And so I let him.  It was wonderful for all of us.  I was no longer responsible for making James’ life miserable, and James thought it was amusing and interesting to be taking orders from a tiny person who looked like his toothbrush.

The Professor eventually introduced me and James to 5 of his business associates (I would call them his friends, but I am not sure that he would agree.  He was usually too disgruntled about being mistaken for a toothbrush to be very friendly with anyone.)  The five “business associates” were Harold, Elaine, Jerome, Nancy and Martha. They were invisible, and they lived on my shoulder, which meant that they could go with us to school.  The Professor had to be at the college all day, so was of course only there to help in the morning.  The five associates were reluctant to be in charge of James, so they really served as friendly advisors, (we called them ‘The Committee’) whom I would consult if a question arose throughout the day.  Harold, who almost always fell asleep right after breakfast, was rarely much help, but was still nice to have around.  When he was awake, he was full of hilarious stories from his Navy days.

I had forgotten about Professor Tingleteeth.  One day, a few weeks ago,  I was reading an article about this couple in California who is making interactive Ipad stories, and it mentioned that one of their characters is  a “quirky”  little person called “Mr.  Cupcake”.  It was as if the word “quirky”  was the alarm on a bedside clock in my mind.  When that alarm went off, Professor Tingleteeth sat up (very stiffly, of course) in bed.

Now that he’s back, I’ve spent some time imagining how the Professor would react to some of my current daily perplexities.  James is all grown up now.  But what would the Professor think about Kalley’s system of vigilante justice, or Corbett’s inexplicable fear of animatronic dinosaurs?

professor

Last week was the end of school, and both of my girls were SO sad to leave their teachers for the summer.  This inspires a story in my mind where a mom has to be somewhere in the morning, so Professor Tingleteeth is the one at home, getting the kids ready for the last day of school.  It cracks me up to think about what words of wisdom a tiny disgruntled Philosophy Professor might expound to two tearful little girls as he pats their heads and sends them off to the bus.  

I think I may need to hear that story, too.  

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The Joy Of Not Having To Explain

carriealexander April 8, 2014 App Development, Family Business, Kalley's Machine 3 Comments

I was desperately trying to get my kids out the door of a friend’s house the other day. We were all having so much fun, but  I had to get home to attempt some “social marketing.” Just as we were about to leave, I took out my phone and my friend asked if she and her kids could see Kalley’s Machine, our family’s first interactive story. Well, Ok, I guess.

Watching people react to Kalley’s Machine, for me, is very similar to watching them look at our family photo in the church directory a few years ago.  When the church decided to do a photo directory, Jon happened to be in his “wads of cash”  phase, where he held up money in every SINGLE picture that anyone took of him.  Normally, he just posed with whatever cash he had in his pockets. Picture a white guy trying to look gangsta by holding up two dollars, while posing with a bride and groom. It was like that. All the time. But given the opportunity of an Olan Mills church photo shoot, he stopped at the bank to get ninety singles and a ten to wrap around them (because it was ‘all about the Hamiltons’). The bewildered lady taking our picture had to ask him several times to move the cash out of the baby’s face.

Later, when the church directory was published, there was quite a range of reactions to the “A” section:  awkward silence, concern (“Um, Carrie, why is Jon is holding up money in your church picture?”), mild amusement, and occasionally, delight.  We really just did it to make something mundane a little more colorful. But it also had the interesting side effect of tuning us in to kindred spirits who shared our opinion that church directory photos are a wonderfully unexplored medium for self-expression.

We’ve been trying to rethink our priorities as a family the last few years. And in light of those priorities, we’re experimenting with our lifestyle to see if we can shape it more instead of letting it shape us. RocketWagon is part of that experiment. We want to make meaningful stuff and spend more time together. We want our kids to learn some real-world artistic and business skills by being involved, even at their young ages.

However, experiments fail. We may find out sometime in the near future that we have spent an exorbitant amount of time, not on a financially viable business, but on a hobby.  We love the idea of paying the bills by selling something that we have made together, but we may end up rudely awakened from that dream.  Sometimes we wonder if the reason we don’t see many other people doing this is that it simply doesn’t work. Sometimes we wonder what on earth we are doing. And it’s a little scary.

That’s why it was so refreshing the other day when I pulled out my phone, showed it to my friend, and didn’t even have to explain.  She got it.  Her face lit up.  I didn’t have to tell her why this little interactive story is part of a bigger dream. She understood because she has a similar dreams.  We may be crazy.  But it’s good to know that we are not alone.

It makes me wonder what her church directory picture looks like.

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Text Blocks Are Way Faster As 'Anti-Alias For Readability' In Air for iOS

Jon Alexander October 25, 2013 App Development No Comments

Ok.  So this was my situation.  I wanted to use Greensock’s Throwprops plugin on a big block of text on a static page to make it scroll.  I got it working fine on the desktop.  Export to the iPad and BAM 1fps! And that’s with the text just sitting there.

Then I tried caching it as a bitmap.  It wouldn’t even display on the screen (presumably because the bitmap was too large).

Then I broke apart all the text (since Adobe Scout Heat Map shows text renders terribly slow on Air for iOS). That was just as slow as rendering the big text block.

Then, grasping at straws, I changed the text aliasing to ‘Anti-alias for Readability’. Wow. I’m up to 45fps! This was a shock since ‘Anti-alias for Animation’ was pretty much the standard go-to text render setting since the 1900’s. I had assumed that this legacy setting would be faster in any scenario. Wrong!

So, then I take my big long text block (which I have inside a movieclip) and break it up by paragraph and I get 60fps! I broke it up thinking that perhaps text is rendered by block (which seems to be the case) so that off-screen blocks don’t need to get rendered. That seems to have worked. With Throwprops working on it, I get >55fps.  I can live with that.

Conclusion: If you have to have text blocks in Air for iOS, ‘Anti-alias for Readability’ is way faster than ‘Anti-alias for Animation’ which is just about unusable.

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