YawHawHawn

Isn't General MIDI simply the mapping of certain instruments to certain numeric IDs? It doesn't dictate the actual sounds or samples that are used, does it?

Given that, why would it sound worse than any other means of triggering the same instruments?

I like that your go-to for prog rock is "Eye in the Sky." I really can't fault it; my first thought was that technically Yes is more iconic of the genre, but it's probably less-known by younger people; if only for the Bulls oddly using Alan Parsons as their intro.

Now THAT I thought was a strange choice... Alan Parsons Project for a bombastic sports-stadium entrance.

Is... WHAT?

To be fair, if they said "ya" they're probably in Scandanavia...

It's not free. They didn't have a business model for most of their existence.

Google, famously shitty at branding (and that's being kind), paid an obscene $1.6B for YouTube because "Google Video" was a monumental failure. Of course it was: Everyone thought it was just a search engine for video, not something that you would contribute to... any more than an individual "contributed" to Google's search results.

So they rewarded an enterprise that had no business plan.

The thing does seem awesome, except I don't see any mention of:

1. Hardware sprites (except in Wikipedia in regard to one TI chipset)

2. Redefinable character sets

3. Fine scrolling

4. Mixed graphics modes

These are what made the Atari 8-bits so powerful. Did the MSXs have some of those (or similar) features? Given all the other cool things mentioned, it would be odd for them not to.

To be fair, development continued into the mid-2000s.

It was also fun. The "Reveal" icon is a guy who opens his trenchcoat when you roll over it.

Missing the late Peter Warner, designer.

Fun historical note: When Steve Jobs flew the Shake team up to Cupertino, he came to lunch for a meet-&-greet. He sat down and said some things; among them was, "Yeah, you guys built this cross-platform UI that looks the same on every platform... but we have people here who know more about UI than you ever will."

Needless to say, the Shake UI remained intact for the rest of its days.

I think Steve Jobs was always kind of pissed that he couldn't get away with dumbing-down Shake. But when your clients are Peter Jackson's WETA, and ILM, you're not going to be able to put Lord of the Rings and King Kong on your homepage (which Apple loved to do) if you cripple their primary effects tool.

No. Some of the retiming stuff that was added to Shake later was also added to Motion/FCP. But the whole point of Motion was to leverage GPU power to produce swoopy, polished-looking motion graphics with minimal keyframing and rendering. And at that it excels. It was built mostly by the former Effect team from Discreet, after Apple brought the whole team in; right after Shake & team.

I created some commercial-grade (or better) DVD menus with Motion back in the day. Even now if I have to prepare some kind of glossy promo for something, I use Motion.

But for the ultimate quality I always turned to Shake. I knew it wasn't doing anything dumb that would degrade the image.