Summary of work during phase 3 (so far)

Project

Artivity on MacOSX

Going forward from phase 2 our main target has been to release Artivity for the MacOSX platform supporting Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop as two popular creative applications used by artists and designers. We have not abandoned Linux and we certainly have Windows support in the pipeline but given the popularity of MacOSX in the design community, we felt it was the right platform to focus at this stage, to have good chances of the community adopting Artivity. Artivity is now available for MacOSX thanks to a lot of work by Sebastian Faubel and Moritz Eberl. It is built using a range of tools. These have been considered carefully to ensure that we can then compile Artivity for all three platforms. A lot of time has also been spent on packaging Artivity for the MacOSX. While on Linux the distribution and updating of applications is done by maintaining a central repository, applications on the MacOSX are typically distributed through a package file and updating them is done through the application itself. This is now all in place for Artivity and installation of the main application will also install plugins for Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop as well as Google Chrome.
Other important tasks have been integrating Artivity with E-Prints and ORCHID as well as distributing it in the UAL network. Much of the work for these is complete and we will report on these tasks soon.

New website for Artivity

Following feedback received from phase 2, a new Artivity website has been launched. artivity.io is the main avenue for downloading and installing Artivity and it serves as a product website for the software. The original project website on www.ligatus.org.uk/project/artivity will remain active, as well as this blog and the Bitbucket repository which is still the home for our source code. We would welcome feedback about the new website.

Testing for phase 3

We have selected two artists to test Artivity for a period of at least one month. Gino Ballantyne and Peter Gander are working on a range of projects on their computers with Artivity installed. This will be the first time that we will have a large body of Artivity data. Using this data we are hoping to see how easy it will be to run queries in order to build useful narratives about the context within which creative work has been undertaken by the artists.