kosada incorporated
The Vital Information:
Kosada is a small, owner-operated company founded in Columbus and now based in Athens, Ohio. We build TWiki, Drupal, Wordpress, and other websites with custom features and functions, which we can design, build, and/or host for you, with special attention to accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO). We also develop custom plugins for various software platforms, especially Quartz Composer. And the cherry on top – we also do digital audiovisual media design and processing, like web-optimized graphics, video, and audio with appropriate compression and format-wonkery. So take a look around, and then contact us for a free quote for your project.
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The News:
Chris was with Kosada since the beginning, having first worked with Steve in 1998 to develop a custom operating system. After a brief fling with DeVry, he spent 2 years doing missionary work in Utah. He returned in February 2007, bringing (back) his experience with C, C++, PHP, various Unix hackeries, and many other development tools. From 2007 until 2010 he contributed to popular programs such as Firefox and Thunderbird to better mold them to the needs of individual clients. He's also been on the front lines of some of our exciting work with Quartz Composer. As of Monday, Jan 31st 2010, he is on to greener pastures in Cupertino, where he has been recruited by Apple to work on the official side of Quartz Composer. We'll be watching for you on the Quartz Composer mailing list, buddy.
New for 2010, three new Drupal modules from Kosada!
- Atrium Answers – a question-and-answers feature for Open Atrium, with User Reputations.
- Views Table Highlighter – allows administrators to easily highlight certain Views Table rows based on simple PHP code accessible from the Views UI.
- Feeds Wesabe parser – enables the Feeds module to import data from the Wesabe API, thereby allowing easy automatic importing of transaction data from a multitude of financial institutions.
Enjoy!
KinemeCore 0.5.1 was released today, improving KinemeCore UI extension pack stability, performance, memory usage, and Snow Leopard compatibility, as well as bringing new features.Read more
Kosada's software development team has been working on various low-level media processing software for years, and thus has a lot of experience analyzing low-level software performance characteristics. We've developed hard-realtime signal processing applications, and are fluent with the techniques required to make these applications succeed. We're also experienced at profiling Unix (in particular, Mac OS X and Linux) applications, determining where performance bottlenecks occur, and finding ways to improve performance. Additionally we've worked for years with threaded code and code for loosely-coupled multiprocessor configurations, both for single machines with many processors (including the Cray T3E) and for many-node computational clusters.
Quartz Builder has been updated not once, but twice since its original release in spring of this year! The application that allows you to easily create applications from your Quartz Composer creations now boasts numerous added features and improvements to performance:
QuartzBuilder 1.1 improvements:
- Iterator Accelerator – reduces iterator overhead by 5-15%
- Streamlined event handling
- Launch an app in fullscreen mode on any monitor
- Screen count & dimensions provided to the composition at runtime
- Drag and drop support
- Your generated apps can now fade-in on startup and fade-out on exit
- Automatic updating via Sparkle
QuartzBuilder 1.2 improvements:
- Added User-interactive Composition Parameters
- Further performance improvements
- Improved security
- Better resource location
- Improved support for features in Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6), including gestures
Peter and Niclas have been our contacts at Noise Industries, who commissioned Kosada to develop custom Quartz Composer effects for use with their recent FxFactory release. Our contribution was the ParticleMetrix plugin bundle. Now that the release has been out for a little while, we have a follow-up interview with them:Read more
Kosada's Quartz Composer department, aka Kineme, has come out with another new application: Quartz Builder allows you to easily create applications from your Quartz Composer creations, without having to muck about in Xcode. This nifty piece of software actually bundles together all the plugins and other files you need for others to use the products of your efforts in Quartz Composer, without having the same setup that you used to create them. A great boon to the usefulness and portability of Quartz Composer. Info and download link on the Quartz Builder profile page.
Announcing the release of Kineme's Performance Inspector! Performance Inspector performs a patch-by-patch analysis of the performance of your compositions while they're running, providing you with detailed information on which patches, exactly, are slowing your composition down. Info and download link available on the Kineme Performance Inspector profile page.
Announcing: the release of Kineme 3D! Kineme 3D provides support for 3D models in Quartz Composer including Twisting, Gravity, Scaling, Bend Boxes, and Quantization, as well as blending modes. Specs, download link, etc. can be found on the Kineme3D profile page.
Art-Net is a protocol for sending DMX data over IP networks. Kosada's Quartz Composer arm (codename Kineme) just released a patch to allow the use of Art-Net to send/receive data from/to Quartz Composer. Kineme Art-Net Tools actually involves two distinct patches for interacting with Art-Net devices, one to send and one to receive.
See the full Kineme Art-Net Tools profile for specs, video, download link, etc.
This year, Richie Hawtin's label m–nus celebrates its 10th anniversary with a series of interactive performance events called CONTAKT. Ali Demirel, Hawtin's visualist, uses a combination of Quartz Composer and other software to produce the show's video and also to interact with the audience. Here he talks about his use of Kineme to do this.
A little background: the most unique feature of the CONTAKT events is a lighted cube (pictured left) which contains an RFID scanner. Users who register in advance on the CONTAKT website have RFID chipcards which they can hold up to the cube's reader to interact with it in various ways. Read more
There have been a few changes in our contact info! Don't worry, this doesn't reflect any changes in our services, ownership, or management. The changes are:
- The old fax number has been disconnected. We are now able to receive faxes as well as phone calls at our main number, +1 (888) 8-KOSADA, thanks to a new integrated phone system.
- We have discontinued the 388-9026 number as a tech support line. Tech support can now be reached by dialing the main number and pressing extension 1. Steve can be reached directly by dialing the main number and pressing extension 0.
- Our main office is moving from Westerville, Ohio to Athens, Ohio. Mail sent to the Westerville address will be forwarded to the Athens address for the next several months to avoid any confusion, but you should make sure to send any postal mail directly to the Athens address for quick delivery.
Of course you can still contact us as always via our contact form if you have any questions or concerns.
Kosada's commitment to giving back to the Drupal community included publishing two modules earlier this month stemming from two related customizations for a client this past August: Organic group Titles and Organic group RSVP.
The development of these modules required intensive knowledge of prominent third-party modules for Drupal including Views, Organic groups, and Event. The Views module API changed from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 requiring all module developers to learn new handlers to integrate their modules with Views functionality. Both OG Titles and OG RSVP included a taste of Views 2 joining group node and user tables in relationships, fields, filters, and sorting handlers. With regard to Organic groups and Event, Kosada included internal module hooks to take into account several use cases for a thorough implementation of a group RSVP implementation. Read more
