My conclusion was that I needed yet another new icon for the Droid version. Looking at their suggestions, they specifically do not want a cut-off object in the icon, so I went back to the full ‘A.’ They didn’t want subtle gradients and shading so those were gone. To give the icon a unique shape, I made the blue background a smaller square than the rest of the elements, so the femur and calipers stick out from the top and bottom, using transparent areas:

As I’ve said before, a lot has changed since 2004. Icons nowadays are even fancier and the old Anthropomotron icon was barely acceptable even for that time. I decided that I would take another stab at making the Anthropomotron icon.

Apple has written icon design guidelines for iOS apps (and one for Mac icons).They’re a fascinating read for those interested in graphic design. They emphasize a sort of shiny realism: realistic elements but simplified. I’ve also liked the generic Mac app icon, which also has an ‘A,’ with a ruler as the crossbar. One of the things i didn’t like about the old Anthropomotron icon was that it didn’t look definitively like an ‘A.’ It kind of looks like an ‘R.’ For the new icon I decided to add a clearer crossbar, adding a ruler to the picture. I drew the concept and scanned it into Illustrator:

I was happy that my drawing skills have improved since 2003. But, there are a few problems. While the proportions are realistic, the legs of the ‘A’ are very thin. If the entire ‘A’ is visible, the shapes become ambiguously small.

Also, I’m used to the comic art style, which has black outlines defining the shapes. That’s not realistic. I tried to solve these two issues by removing the outlines in Photoshop and zooming in the image so the ruler is along the bottom edge of the image:

I thought this was better, but it’s still missing something. It seemed to lose a lot of its ‘A’-ness in this alignment. A little frustrated, I grudgingly went to bed. After a few minutes of laying there, I bolted out of bed, fired up Photoshop again, and did this:

Tilting everything worked! I saved that, and slept like a baby. The next day I worked towards making the final draft of the icon. I made the blue and yellow match the actual colors in the app. Then I added some textures to the three elements (wood, metal, and actual femur texture), and some gradients and shading for depth. This is the final Anthropomotron icon for iOS:

Next: a step backwards for the Android icon!

On Saturday I borrowed Derek’s car and drove about 10 minutes to the zoo. The city was strangely empty around that time, but the zoo was already pretty packed at 10:30 in the morning. The entrance had a Hollywood-Egypt feel (I guess it taps into Memphis’s Egyptian namesake?). It was impressive enough for me to use the Photosynth panorama app to take a picture though:

By the way, I didn’t think I would be doing any major sightseeing so I didn’t bring my usual camera. All I had was the iPhone which did an OK job, but man would the Canon have been more appropriate! I really underestimated this zoo.

Near the entrance was the Animals of the Night exhibit. The building housed a surprisingly great number of exhibits in lowlight to simulate nighttime for the animals. In the center was a long enclosure for bats, while on the periphery there were more bats (for example, vampire bats), snakes, aardvarks, wombats, bushbabys, lorises, hedgehogs, kiwis, and so on.

{ A keeper feeds a bat that had landed on her cap. }

While I was there two keepers entered the central bat area and gave a demonstration of bat feeding.

I spent a lot of time in that area and I thought it was worth the $15 + $5 admission. The rest of the zoo had some really nice exhibits. I went north towards the pagodas in the distance. (I noticed that many exhibits had architecture reminiscent of the animal’s home territory. For example, the tiger exhibit was bounded by walls in the Khmer style.)

Back to the story, the Chinese section of the zoo featured pandas. In San Diego, the pandas seem to be fairly languid and there is a very structured system to get visitors moving along. In Memphis, the pandas are in an ordinary exhibit and when I was passing by, one of the pandas was very active. It ambled around on the grass, before climbing its treehouse. There, it started urinating, lifting one leg, then the other. Still urinating, the panda did a handstand (!). After that, it got back on all fours and did this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONPq1ui8vv4

I kept walking past the panda enclosure when lights turned on to my left.I looked and saw what can only be described as a panda chill den. The same panda from before entered the den and started chowing down on some bamboo that a keeper had left there. I was mere feet from a panda!

I went all over the zoo before heading back to the hotel. The zoo is actually pretty small and I was out by two that afternoon. Some exhibits were very old (the aquarium is from 1959 and it shows) but overall I was very impressed and I had a great time. The photos I took are below!

Update: Here is the other Youtube movie of my zoo trip!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONeLriXsd90

{ Crossing the Discovery Bridge to St. Louis. }

My poster session was on Thursday and 8AM. I thought the poster room was a little out-of-the-way, but when considering the whole layout of the conference, it was in a good spot (also, last year in Sacramento the poster was in one of the main corridors, which is hard to beat in terms of visibility).

{ My poster and I. }

I had a lot of good responses to my poster. Harris lines seemed to interest a lot of people, but I think it’s too below the radar for most people to critique (besides the small sample sizes of course). The poster next to mine had an example of a cancerous lesion on the cranium that bore a striking resemblance to one I found in the Armatambo collection. I felt bad for leaving my poster so I didn’t get to see many of the others in my section.

{ We also took the trolley to get fried chicken. }

Unlike previous years, there seemed to be a more coordinated attempt to cluster similar topics on certain days. Andean bioarchaeology was done by the end of the first day, and bioarchaeology in general petered out by Saturday. I actually like the schedule this way because there’s less guilt for spending a day away from the conference, for example going to the Memphis Zoo, which was amazing.

One emerging problem I noticed in this year’s SAA was that most sessions were running late. It was annoying to leave the talk of someone I wanted to see for another talk I wanted to see more, only to find that the second room was running later and I could’ve seen both talks! I heard one session was running a full hour late and that’s terrible (good thing I was at the zoo!). I could’ve sworn that things were more on time last year… in fact here is a quote from my blog entry for the 2010 SAAs: “Most panels ran like clockwork.” I hope next year there will be a return to punctuality. The meeting will be in Hawaii, so if anything all talks will end early so important adventuring can take place.

This card got a huge response when I posted it on my Facebook wall. I had around 19 likes (when Anthropomotron only had 5!). Look for it at the SAAs next week!

{ Go straight to Anthropomotron! }

I am very happy to announce that I have completely remade Anthropomotron to be a modern web app. I first made Anthropomotron in 2004 using Apple’s Xcode and Applescript. Anthropomotron has not aged well as Apple basically left Applescript-based apps on the wayside, and oh yeah, the iPhone happened and changed everything. Now small apps with very particular tasks are all the rage and they work anywhere one has a cellphone connection.

{ Old Anthropomotron }

After graduating last May, I decided that Anthropomotron has a place in the modern computing world. It would be so much more useful if it worked on more devices, especially portable ones. Biological anthropology has also changed a little since 2004, with new techniques to estimate stature and body mass based on bone measurements. The problem with this goal is that I needed to learn how to program an app. A student in the anthro department posted on Facebook about JQTouch, a kind of shortcut for using Javascript to make a smartphone app. JQTouch automates a lot of tasks specific to phone apps, such as incorporating swipe motions and animations into the design, so it lowered the programming bar to a level that I could reach with some work. I had to learn Javascript!

I picked up what I needed to know about Javascript by searching the web and reading a few books from the public library. One of the hardest parts of the process is learning what question I need to ask in order to find a solution. For example, I picked up ways of programming menus that change their choices based on other menus, how to selectively hide or show different text instructions, and how to do the appropriate calculation based on what data were entered. It’s taken me from last summer to now to get the new Anthropomotron to a presentable state. On most weekdays I come home from work and spend an hour or two on the project and it grew from there.

{ The new Anthropomotron! }

The new Anthropomotron is geared to work on the mobile web (like your smartphone), but it works fine on computers as well. As long as you don’t use Internet Explorer, anyway (the 15% of you visitors who use IE should switch anyway!).

Soon I will submit Anthropomotron as a self-contained app for the Apple App Store. I have a version that works running on my own iPhone, but I have to get into the details of how the app submission process works. Until then, enjoy web-Anthropomotron!

On 24 Hour Comics Day, I worked off of the four pages and jotted down an outline for the remaining eight as I went along. To do something new, I used some gray markers for shading, which I’ve never done for a comic (I usually shade comics digitally). I used Josh‘s markers before, found that I liked them, and he was kind enough to buy me a set for graduation.

At the end of twelve hours that day, I had put in a valiant effort but had just seven pages. A few months later I found the time while I was in San Diego visiting family to do the remaining pages and the cover. I touched up the already-finished pages but you may see a distinct upgrade in quality in the last half because I spent way more than an hour on each of those pages.

I like this comic because I’ve always wanted to do a more personal story set in a medieval fantasy world. It can’t be all end-of-the-world and rampaging monsters, right? I also enjoyed drawing the two main characters since it’s been a few years and in the previous story it was all done very roughly. Also, like Stuck in an Elevator, this comic has a bit of romance, which is nice.

I could go on and on about Sparring Partner. Give Epic of Karie a read to see how it (doesn’t quite) work out for these characters. Also, put the two stories together and find the hidden subtext that is never stated but it’s right there. No new comics day post next week since I’m all out, but hopefully I can get another five pages of Keeley issue 4 done sooner or later.