Welcome Back, Old Fruit

The Apricot brand for computers goes back a long way - I was there, unfortunately. Remarkably, it consistently managed to misread the market at just about every turn - from choosing a daft name that was so obviously modelled on Apple's, to the decision to offer only MS-DOS rather than PC-DOS with its PC line ("good enough" we were told at the time), to the hopelessly premature voice-controlled portable system (I'll never forget the sight of Apricot managers shouting, red-faced, into the weird microphone in a desperate attempt to get it to recognise something - anything). And don't even ask about the dancing girls at the launches of their business machines....

Well, Apricot is back with a bang:

Apricot has pulled the plug on its Linux-based netbook, choosing instead to offer the pint-sized Picobook Pro only with Windows XP.

...


"Apricot will not be selling with Linux variants," a company missive revealed, which suggests it's not merely dropping SuSE for Ubuntu or another netbook-friendly distro.

"Apricot has made this decision to ensure customers have a smooth installation of their operating system," the company told Register Hardware.

"The Linux version proved too complicated with initial testers, who would opt to purchase and install XP any way.

"Apricot believes that this will be a more attractive product offering for their target customers, because as soon as it is switched on, it is ready for use."

Strange, then, that Asus has managed to make GNU/Linux ultraportables that are not only "ready for use" as soon as you switch them on, but extremely easy to use, too; and strange that Asus is so successful with these models. Just a coincidence, presumably.

She Gave Me of the Apricot, and I Did Eat

I've written about Blender's Apricot before; now there are some demos to explore.

A Peach of an Apricot

I wrote previously about the open source film "Elephants Dream", produced the Blender Foundation. Recently it's been working on Peach:

As a follow-up to the successful project Orange’s “Elephants Dream”, the Blender Foundation will initiate another open movie project. Again a small team of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community will be invited to come together to work in Amsterdam from October 2007 until April 2008 on completing a short 3D animation movie. The team members will get a great studio facility and housing in Amsterdam, all travel costs reimbursed, and a fee sufficient to cover all expenses during the period.

But this time, it's going even further:

After Orange and Peach Blender Institute continues with a new open project: Apricot. This time it isn’t a movie but a 3D game!Starting february 1st 2008, a small team of again the best 3D artist and developers will develop a game jointly with the on-line community. The main characters in the game are based on the short 3D animation open movie Peach.

Once again, Blender will lie at the heart of the project, and the intention is to do much more than produce an open game:

The team will work on a cross platform game (at least Linux, Windows, OS X), using Blender for modeling and animation, Crystal Space as 3D engine and delivery platform, and Python for some magic scripting to glue things together. It is not only the purpose to make a compelling 3D game experience, but especially to improve and validate the open source 3D game creation pipeline, with industry-standard conditions.

The last point is important: what open source needs is not a good game, nice as that would be, but a framework for producing hundreds of them. It's great to see Blender and the open source 3D engine Crystal Space stepping up to that challenge.

Going on a Blender

Blender has always been one of my favourite open source projects, not least for the inspirational way money was raised by the common folk to make proprietary code open. Similarly, the open film "Elephant's Dream" was a good example of innovative thinking.

Now they're at it again:

As a follow-up to the successful project Orange's "Elephants Dream", the Blender Foundation will initiate another open movie project. Again a couple of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community will be invited to come together to work in Amsterdam on completing a short 3D animation movie.

...

As a second open project, the Blender Foundation and Crystal Space community are going to cooperate on organizing an Open Game. This will become possible thanks to the support by the NLGD Conference, the "Nederlandse Game Dagen", the annual conference for the Netherlands game industry.

This project will have as a main target to validate open source for creating professional quality 3d games, with Blender being used as creation and protyping tool and Crystal Space as engine and delivery platform.

All important stuff, because it's taking open source into new areas.