Innovation
RightBrain Software was founded on the principle that software should be an extension of the mind, so easy to use that you forget you're using a computer. The first product we shipped, in 1991, was called TouchType, an intuitive product for kerning and headline typography. On the box's recycled paper wrapper were the bold, simple words: "Software for people who love typography but hate computers."
Fourteen years later, the founder, Glenn Reid, is still innovating. If you haven't seen Apple's revolutionary iPhoto and iMovie software, take a look. Deceptively simple, but powerful and capable beneath the surface. Reid has been issued 6 patents for innovative software design at Apple and has several more pending.
This page has a laundry list of Glenn's innovations over the years, many of which are small things, which he likes to call "mini-breakthroughs". Incremental improvements to well-known work flow, rather than a "new paradigm" which may be rejected by users. Many of these innovative features have become mainstream in today's products.
Patents
Glenn Reid is named as inventor or co-inventor on several patents and has several more pending or applied for. Here are some of them:
Automatic Camera Capture Mode/Single Window for Capture and Editing Integrated Time Line for Editing Disk Space Management for Editing Method and System for Data Sharing between Application Programs A Method for Using a Graphic File as a Template for a User Interface A Method for Displaying Edits During Rendering Operations Icon Label Placement in a Graphical User Interface Layer Graphical User Interface
Open Source
Way back in 1992, RightBrain Software tried the open source idea (to mixed success, but at least it was not a failure). Read about it in a time capsule article from Simson Garfinkel, a writer for NeXTWORLD magazine.
File Formats
While at Adobe Systems in the late 1980's, Glenn Reid was responsible for many influential file formats that helped shape the electronic publishing industry. Reid is still a big proponent of ASCII file formats, and although XML is verbose and crotchety, at least it's ASCII, and Reid uses it begrudgingly.
EPSF (Encapsulated PostScript)
This file format was revolutionary, particularly for the year 1986. It allowed graphics files such as Adobe Illustrator documents to be embedded in larger documents, even before computers could display the PostScript commands contained in them. A convention was provided to attach a display-resolution image that could be shown (and edited as a proxy) in a page layout application such as PageMaker, but at print time, the EPSF file could be embedded in the print stream for high-resolution printing. Glenn Reid authored the official specification of this format at Adobe Systems.
PPD (PostScript Printer Description) Files
These files are machine-parseable representations of printer-specific features of PostScript printers (such as how to invoke particular paper trays, set screen angles, etc.). Glenn Reid designed this file format and published the specification while at Adobe.
PostScript Document Structuring Conventions
While at Adobe, Glenn Reid revised and expanded the important PostScript Document Structuring Conventions, which provided for page independence (so pages could be re-ordered by print spoolers on the fly), lists of fonts used by the document, etc. Many products were built around this specification, authored by Reid.
TouchType
TouchType was a direct-manipulation typesetting tool intended for making strong visual headlines. This product shipped in 1991 and was later bought and marketed (briefly) by Adobe Systems. Here is an old review of TouchType with some screen shots that William Adams has put up on his home page. The user interface controls look a bit clunky by today's standards, but it was a 2-bit grayscale screen and that was state of the art at the time... Here's a slightly more professional review in MacObserver. It's sort of a
Direct Manipulation of Letters
The key to this program was that text was not just a line of letters -- each letter was an object, and you could simply click and drag a letter to move it out of line with the others, or hold down Shift to constraint it to the baseline, or even rotate it to arbitrary angles. Very simple, very direct, very visual. But the text remained editable, and words remained words, no matter how far the letters strayed from their original positions. You could just click with the text cursor and edit away.
EPSF as a File Format
The file format written out (and read in) by TouchType was a valid EPSF file, so it could be included directly in a page layout program without an extra "Save As" step. Extra information used by the application to rebuild its data structures was stored in comment syntax. This embedded file format also allowed other applications to double-click the placed EPSF files to "edit in place".
Visual Kerning
TouchType had six different kerning (letter spacing) features built in. The most powerful was an automatic kerning algorithm that moved the letters along the baseline until they touched, then backed them off by a set amount, providing for uniform letter spacing. The classic "bad example" of letters that need kerning is a word like "AWAY" or "Text". Note that the angled shapes of the letters in AWAY don't tuck into each other, nor does the "Te" combination in "Text" fit nicely. To fix this spacing so it looks good optically is called kerning. The example on the left is typed straight into a Photoshop layer, the example on the right is kerned (manually) by Glenn as an example. This was handled automatically by TouchType.
PasteUp
PasteUp was a ground-up page layout application written in 1991 by Glenn Reid and a couple of contractors who helped out for a half a year or so. It was a lot of work, and it didn't succeed in the marketplace (mostly because it only ran on NeXT computers) but many of the great ideas in it have still not been replicated by main-stream page layout applications. Here's a link to an early review in NeXTWORLD magazine (thanks for the archives, Simson). PasteUp won a Best of Breed award from NeXTWORLD magazine.
Object-Oriented Text Model
The text engine in PasteUp was completely object-oriented. Each word was an object that stored its bytes in a compact format, with a bounding rectangle, and the typesetting algorithms laid out these rectangles, rather than continually recalculating the individual character widths. When text was typed in, a new word object was allocated, and when the user hit Space or Return, the object was ended, compressed, and stored in the paragraph. There were NO SPACE CHARACTERS stored in the body of the document! This was a revolutionary approach, and had many advantages in typesetting algorithms (and a few difficult special cases, such as hyphenated words, which were subclasses of Word objects and were quite complex).
Direct Manipulation
PasteUp had a very strong direct manipulation model, more like Adobe Illustrator than any other page layout program. You could group any objects with any others, rotate, resize, or manipulate any object including text blocks, drag color swatches from the color palette onto bits of text as well as line art. A single click selected a text block (for drag, etc), a double-click entered text editing mode.
Headline type, or "point text", differed from "flowed text" in the same way that Illustrator makes that distinction. Flowed text has a container, and lines wrap to fit the container. Point text goes on forever from a single point unless you hit carriage return yourself. Point text objects had a bounding box in PasteUp, and if you resized the box, it SCALED the point text, which made it very easy and direct to get a bit of point text to exactly the right visual size. Dragging on the bottom handle changed the LEADING of the text. Very innovative; haven't seen it anywhere else.
Innovative Paragraph Attributes
One of the simplest "mini-breakthrough" ideas in PasteUp was to have an additional paragraph attribute beyond Space Before and Space After, which many applications have. The attribute was Space Between Same. This was used whenever multiple paragraphs of the same style followed each other (which is common for bullet lists and numbered items) so that the space "between same" paragraphs could be different from the Space Before the first item or the Space After the last item. This is a GREAT IDEA, in retrospect, and should be adopted by all typesetting applications.
Bullets were also stored as paragraph attributes, rather than actual typed characters, which allowed them to be positioned with the arrow keys, they could be different fonts, different colors, even embedded graphics. This made it very easy to create very nice bullet lists, and the user never had to worry about "negative indents" and hanging paragraphs and stuff like that. You just asked for a bullet on the paragraph style and off you went.
Hanging Quotes
For text set with quotes at the left or right edges, the quotation marks should "hang" outside the edge of the text, for visual balance. This was automatic (though controllable as an option) in PasteUp and also in TouchType (above). Here's an example:
Center on Page
This is such a deliciously simple feature, but still not replicated in any drawing or layout program, for some strange reason. Select an object, or group of objects, and Center them on the paper (vertically or horizontally). Why not?!
Graphical Styles
Save named sets of graphic attributes (line weight, color, etc) as a style and re-use much like paragraph styles. Simply drag-and-drop them onto objects. Still not available in any other product as far as we know.
Also note the built-in support for Drop Shadows.
Page Navigator with Collapsible Page Ranges
A horizontal scrolling list of page thumbnails in a separate window as a quick and easy navigation tool. If you want to drag page 2 to the end of a 100-page document, how do you do it? You can select a range of pages, say from 3-99, and Collapse them (they display as a kind of "accordian" in the navigator and can be expanded easily by double-clicking). Now page 2 is very close to page 100, and the drag is easy!
Linked Graphics Manager
A panel to manage linking versus embedding of graphics placed in the document. This came about 10 years before InDesign's equivalent feature. PasteUp would of course automatically update when the underlying file changed, allowed you to replace missing graphics (preserving the scale/rotate/flip that you might have performed), or import/embed files (for the trip to the service bureau, perhaps).
Automatic Linking of Text Blocks Across Pages
Microsoft Word has this (though it wasn't so good in 1991), and it's obvious, but Quark and InDesign still don't have it. It's not that hard to tell that a text block on a master page item should be automatically hooked up; the "outlet" on one page gets hooked up to the "inlet" on the next page.
Align/Distribute Innovations
Some of the drawing and layout packages are finally getting all the Align/Distribute features that PasteUp had in 1991, but a few are still not there yet. Pictures are needed.
Text run-around, Arbitrary Rotated Text
These are commonplace features now in high-end applications, but were (and are) much easier to use than their counterparts. Other than Adobe Illustrator, there were very few applications in 1991 that supported arbitrary rotation of text to any angle. PasteUp had it.
Automatic Ligatures, Smart Quotes, Etc
As you type, ligatures, en-dashes, smart quotes, are substituted on the fly. A bit like Microsoft Word does now, but about 10 years sooner.
RightBrain Rulers
RightBrain Rulers was a very simple utility application (1992, NeXT computers) that had two floating, resizable windows that could be floated over any window in any application, useful for measuring, aligning, etc. A simple but effective idea.
When Glenn Reid went back to Adobe Systems in 1994 (or 1995 or whenever it was) to work on Adobe Illustrator, one of his innovations there was to add "tabs" to the text engine in Illustrator (not trivial, see below). The RightBrain Rulers idea was re-used and to this day the tab ruler in Illustrator and InDesign "float" above the text rectangles, much like the RightBrain Rulers did. That is not a coincidence: the same guy did both.
Adobe Illustrator
When Glenn Reid went back to work at Adobe Systems in 1995 or thereabouts, Illustrator 5.5 was in progress, a port to the PowerPC chip. Reid volunteered to add features, and some of them were quite innovative. Screen shots below are taken from Adobe Illustrator 10.0, the currently shipping version, and the artwork is copyright Adobe Systems. The features are essentially identical to their counterparts in Illustrator 5.5.
Tab Ruler
Reid added support for tabs to the Illustrator text engine, which was quite a challenge in situations where the text filled arbitrarily-shaped objects, and tab stops could be defined by spline paths that intersected the text, not just standard old tab stops. Since Illustrator text was seldom a "whole page" of text, it seemed that the standard idea of a Ruler at the top of the document window wasn't going to be good enough. The innovative solution was a floating window that looked like a ruler, but could move to the left edge of any block of text, so the tab stops could be edited relative to the text block. The idea is still in Illustrator 10 today, and InDesign 2.0 picked it up as well.
Here was the original Tabs & Indents ruler from PasteUp, circa 1992:
Find/Replace Fonts
This was the first (and only?) extension of the find/replace metaphor to Fonts. This panel located all the fonts in use in a document, and showed them to you in a list, so you could click on them, and "find" the next instance of text set in that font, and optionally replace it (just the font, not the characters, point size, or other attributes) with a different font. Very powerful when you inherit a document that uses fonts you don't have, and you want to change them to something else.
Batch Spelling Checker
Since Illustrator is a graphics package, the text tends to be all over the place, in various text blocks. A traditional Spelling Checker wouldn't work very well, as the user would have to traverse all those text blocks one by one. Also, as anyone who has used a spell checker knows, most of the time is spent TEACHING it specialized words, proper names, etc. The innovation was to "batch" all the misspelled words at once into a scrolling list, which you can just look through to see if there are any words you care about. If there are, you can correct them -- wherever they are in the document -- all at once if you like. If they're all real words but the spell checker just doesn't know about them, you can select multiple words in the list and Add To List so they all get learned at once. Since this can be dangerous, there's also a built-in way to edit the Learned Words list to get rid of words that you accidentally added that really are spelled wrong!
Fractal Design Painter, Dabbler, Detailer
Glenn Reid was Director of Engineering at Fractal Design in 1996, where he brought several innovations to the product line. The only one he's proud of (and remembers) is the "flip book" feature in Dabbler, which let you do short animations in the kids' paint program, and print them out on paper to flip with your thumb. This feature was co-developed with Priscilla Shih, who did most of the work, though Reid had a few of the good ideas.
Apple iMovie
This entire application was an innovation by Glenn Reid, in concert with Steve Jobs, who sketched the idea on a white board in 1998 and basically said "go build this, please." Reid tried a lot of ideas and ran them past a very small group of collaborators including Jobs. In just nine months, with 2 or 3 programmers, a new application category was born. It's fair to say that this product revolutionized non-linear video editing and brought it to the masses.
Cut/Copy/Paste Model for Video
Believe it or not, before iMovie, the model for editing video involved "in" and "out" points and some complicated lingo that few understood. iMovie used the obvious metaphor of selections, cut, copy, and paste. It's easy to grasp, and the model works great for video.
Delete / Trash
Another great innovation in iMovie is the Delete key, which actually deletes video, rather than just taking it out of your movie (well, it puts it in the Trash, and you have to empty the trash, but it gets DELETED . Other video editing apps still don't do this. This innovation is based on the clear truth that most consumer video is crap, and deleting the crap is the primary purpose of iMovie. If you can do that, then maybe you'll think about adding titles and transitions and burning a DVD. And by actually deleting the footage, you free up prodigious disk space on your computer so you can bring in some more. DV video is quite large (3.6 megabytes per second).
Canned Title Effects
The simple idea for titles was to have the user type in a Title and a Subtitle and then choose from a popup menu of canned algorithms that would do cool things with the text. Since the data was slightly structured into these two pieces (title and subtitle) the algorithms could do interesting things, like bring in the title from the left, and the subtitle from the right, and they'd meet in the middle. The user didn't have to do much, and got some very sophisticated choices. This has proven to be a very effective mechanism. Screen shot from iMovie 2, about 1999.
Ken Burns Effect
This is a simple interface to put still images in motion, the way Ken Burns does in his famous documentaries like Civil War and Jazz. We even named the feature after him (with his permission).
The interface is simple, but effective. You just drag the image around and zoom it to get the start and end points you want, then Apply it to your movie. You can go back and revise it after the fact at any time: select the clip and it restores the pan/zoom settings to the panel for you to tweak.
[more iMovie items coming soon]
Apple iPhoto
Glenn Reid was the engineering manager and main architect of iPhoto, though the team was bigger for iPhoto than for iMovie, so lots of the credit goes to the team members as well, and there were a lot more opinions on this app than iMovie, which was created in absolute secrecy.
Books
Probably the biggest innovation Reid brought to iPhoto was the automatic layout and production of hard-bound books. This is a revolution in automated page layout, where all you do is select an album full of photos and choose a theme, and a book is created for you. You can change designs and mess around a little bit, but mostly it's completely automated (which is both good and bad, depending on how much messing around you like to do).
Underneath the hood, the application reads in template files that allow for the orientation of the photos (portrait or landscape) and change the design accordingly, on the fly. For example, a 3-up page with different mixes of portrait and landscape images might look quite different (the user does nothing other than choose what photos go on the page, and it automatically rearranges to the best fit).
The application also generates digital press-ready PDF files with crop marks, bleeds, and downsampled images, borrowing from Reid's expertise in pre-press and page layout from PasteUp and Illustrator. It's just one click to order a finished book.
[more iPhoto items coming soon].
