Frequently Asked Questions

Am I a real person?

Yes.

What attracted you to art?

I was a stem victim. Art was looked down at as worthless. In the future I will touch upon this more. The reality set in when I looked around our current society and saw the desperation. Stem used to be a well paying profession, but most professional salaries across the board have greatly declined. When you can't afford anything in the first place and your money becomes worth half what it was overnight, you make sacrifices.

Why don't you share more of your art

I am trying to become a better artist. Much of my art isn't worth sharing

Why do I not host my applications on my website?

Gumroad is a more public area where people can also leave reviews. I don't have a time to setup a more advanced system on my website. In the past I used to host them on larsbarnabee.com myself. When I started my website in 2021 it was new and lacked domain authority trust. I do still get downloads of my apps. Mostly just drawesome 1.

In the past I used rsync to easily deploy my website when I had updates. Ignoring applications that I didn't need to update was fast. I now use Netlify in a weird way, meaning I use the drag and drop feature. It is easy and I don't have to waste a ton of time setting up connections other ways. I have done that too often. I try to keep my digital work lightweight. In the past, I have set up entire continous integration and continous development pipelines. When the CI CD pipeline is working everything is great. When it breaks, I know I am going to loose hours if not the entire day fixing this.

Dealing with websites on a day to day basis I often feel like I never disconnect. That is why I love plain vanilla html, css, and js. I have used so many stacks of technology in my day job that it is ridiculous. I have seen technology become deprecated and still being responsible for it. Even though I didn't break it. The farther you get away from html, css, and js and use abstractions, the more often it appears no one updates that tech. Html, css, and js built the web and are supposed to last forever. I like to consider myself an SEO professional, but that often changes with the state of web browsers. You may have heard of Yoast seo, but often they don't know everything. I don't either.

I am not going to list all the technologies I know. I know too many. If I would list them, you would think I am either trying to collect all the pokemon, or that I am just pushing stuff from my resume. I tend to avoid proprietary technology because I have used them in the work place. I learn that often when economies plummet, I am left scrambling having to pay more for not getting more out of it. Then people question me. Proprietary tech is often built upon from open source tech. While often the given company implements their own way of doing it then you have to read their api.

Why do I not host replies and comments on my webpages and blog?

If you email me, I will place your comment and add a reply to the bottom of the page. Just tell me the specific URL of the page and the comment or reply. Avoiding bad actors and spam is difficult. I have managed larger scale websites and even with tools like disqus we still got spam and flaming comments. Managing these things were nightmares until I was given the word to disable comments. I think websites that run wordpress are subject to this.

Do you still make applications? What about your current applications?

Hey that is two questions. I make stuff when it makes sense. I haven't the need for anything currently so new apps no. Considering I maintain a bunch of applications for free, it can be a large time sink. I often have little time. This is the world of free software. I had thought about making the code open source but all of my apps are free so that should be enough. In the past, I occasionally helped with other free software. Specifically npm packages. But got burned out. I try to add new features to my apps on occasion if I think they can truly help artists. But I have to keep everything in perspective.

Can you add feature x to x application?

Here is the thing. My desktop apps are served as is. Sometimes people recommend that I add AI features or something else along those lines. Or some trendy buzzword. I can see how those things help, but my apps do not connect to the internet. What I have seen AI do so far has been devastating to artists. Understanding bank bailouts in 2008 is key to the future of AI and where we are headed. In the past I have added user requested features to my apps that make sense. And bug fixes for that matter. Although I can't fix every bug. Some bugs are no fixes. Sorry about that.

I don't want to be paid to add features because I don't want to ruin the user experience of the app. I do appreciate any support through my various methods on my support page if you like what I do.

What did you use to make your desktop applications?

My macbook air, visual studio code, command line aka terminal on mac, Electron, html, css, and js. Lots of late nights went into my applications. Before I had to commute, I was able to work a lot more on my applications when my workday was over. Now I am a lot more time limited. I have added some features to drawesome 3 in 2024.

Thumbtastic has a feature similar to PureRef

Ironically I used PureRef in the past but I didn't know about that hidden feature. PureRef can be a good tool. But I just don't use it compared to Thumbtastic which has features I prefer. To each is their own. Artists like their tools and stick to them often.