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I'm really flattered you like the results. I'll be honest that when I first started the project (and continue to work on it) that I was conflicted. I truly lo

by Liuser 10y ago

I'm really flattered you like the results. I'll be honest that when I first started the project (and continue to work on it) that I was conflicted. I truly love his work. I spent hours and my weekends analyzing his artwork. I'm still studying his usage of colors because there's still work to be done there. With the discovery of legal threats and actions against Scott Blake I was disheartened because I don't believe he would like me working on this project. Here's an artist I admire and here I am doing something I love that he may not like. Difficult to come to terms with. Like everyone on HackerNews we're driven to create and solve problems. Curiosity and challenge got the best of me and I pushed forward. I still plan on releasing a Windows version and eventually making the source code public once I cleanup some things. I'm not making a killing on the app either. It's been out for a month and it's averaging me a dollar a day (with initial publicizing it on /r/macapps and other subreddits). Helps fuel the coffee that goes into these after hours side projects. Since I'm charging for the app, I plan on donating a portion of the proceeds to the MoMA as well (after all, they're the source of inspiration and I hope this helps give back to other artists).

eigenvalue 10y ago
If you made an iOS version, I'd buy it for up to $5.00. I suspect it would be popular.
- Liuser 10y ago
  Thank you -- I'm going to revisit this suggestion as it's been brought up by friends as well. I actually implemented a mobile web version at first with the up-sell of buying high res images. I wasn't happy with the images it was producing though because I forced 1 setting for all images being converted for the sake of ease-of-use for the user. But this was a mistake. Not all photos are the same: Some photos looked better with smaller/larger cells, as a diamond grid, with different color settings, etc. Server costs and complexity grew too: (nginx, nodejs, rabbitmq). The algorithm is CPU intensive and not fast enough to my liking yet. So I released the macOS version and put the computational cost on the end user and avoiding the need to support servers. Sounds like I should make a native mobile version with the option to tweak parameters.
  - eigenvalue 9y ago
    Or just pre-compute low-res previews using a variety of settings and have the user highlight ones that look pleasing. Over time, you can collect this data and find heuristics (i.e., machine learning) for automatically choosing the most pleasing settings for a given image.

by Liuser 10y ago

eigenvalue 10y ago

If you made an iOS version, I'd buy it for up to $5.00. I suspect it would be popular.

Liuser 10y ago
Thank you -- I'm going to revisit this suggestion as it's been brought up by friends as well. I actually implemented a mobile web version at first with the up-sell of buying high res images. I wasn't happy with the images it was producing though because I forced 1 setting for all images being converted for the sake of ease-of-use for the user. But this was a mistake. Not all photos are the same: Some photos looked better with smaller/larger cells, as a diamond grid, with different color settings, etc. Server costs and complexity grew too: (nginx, nodejs, rabbitmq). The algorithm is CPU intensive and not fast enough to my liking yet. So I released the macOS version and put the computational cost on the end user and avoiding the need to support servers. Sounds like I should make a native mobile version with the option to tweak parameters.
- eigenvalue 9y ago
  Or just pre-compute low-res previews using a variety of settings and have the user highlight ones that look pleasing. Over time, you can collect this data and find heuristics (i.e., machine learning) for automatically choosing the most pleasing settings for a given image.