Guy D2 :: Dashboard Widgets

If you are familiar with Brian Eno - either as a musician, a painter, a music producer, a video performer, renaissance artist, or cultural theorist - you should be familiar with Oblique Strategies as well... If his name rings a bell but you've never heard of Oblique Strategies, or you simply want to know more, now would be a good time to brush up on your knowledge.

Using the Oblique Widget

When you mouse over the Widget, a small "i" icon will appear in the lower right corner. Click on this to access the Preference Panel. This allows you to choose any of four Editions of the Strategies with a pull-down menu.
A second pulldown-menu gives you the option to change the time it takes to flip back the cards (more about this Auto-Flipback feature below... Click on the "Done" button to flip the Preference Panel over to the front side. Your preferences will be remembered for the next time, persistent through Dashboard activation, Widget removals or System restarts. Initially - upon first run - the Fourth Edition is set as the default deck to use. This Edition is best for general creative use. The other Editions (1, 2 & 3) are more geared towards musicians and painters. The Auto-Flipback time is initially set to 3 seconds.

Click anywhere on the front face of the Widget (except the i-icon - duh) to flip the card over and invoke a random aphorism of your chosen Edition. Click again to flip the card back to the front, or wait a few seconds to let the card auto-flip itself back to the front.
The time it takes to Auto-Flipback can be set in the preferences (anywhere between 3 and 30 seconds, in six steps), but can be interrupted at any time by simply clicking on the back face.

Since the selection of the aphorisms is completely random (within the limits of the number of cards of any given deck), it can happen that you draw the same card consecutively. This is on purpose. The same thing could (or should) happen with the real-world decks, and it is an essential part of the Strategy's philosophy. Think about it...

It is entirely up to yourself on how you want to use the cards. Initially you might be inclined to think that you should only draw one single card, and react upon the resulting aphorism. However, it is not entirely uncommon to draw several cards in a row, and repeat that until you feel comfortable with the action which needs to be taken. Some aphorisms could possibly not apply to your current situation, or some aphorisms could even invoke the action to draw yet another card. In fact, you can even completely ignore the given Strategy, and simply flip through the cards as a strategy by itself. Why not? It's called Oblique Strategies for a particular reason, right ? Remember, interacting with the cards is a creative act too !

Some Background Information

Edition One

This is the Original Edition of the Oblique Strategies. Published in 1975 as a signed and numbered edition of 500 copies. The original deck contains 113 cards.

Edition Two

Version Two of the Oblique Strategies was published in 1978, in an edition of unknown size (probably 500 or 1000 copies). This deck has 128 cards. Since the Original Edition, 6 aphorisms have been revised, 5 deleted, and 20 newly added.

Edition Three

Version Three was published in 1979, in an edition of unknown size. It was the last iteration of the original deck for which Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt collaborated. Schmidt came to an untimely death in 1980 while on holiday in Spain. This deck contains 122 cards. Since the previous edition, 6 cards have been changed, 13 deleted, and 8 newly added.

Edition Four

Unlike the previous editions of the decks, this 4th version was not commercially available. It was a project undertaken by Peter Norton and his family in conjunction with Brian Eno and published in a limited edition of 4,000 decks, distributed to Peter Norton's close friends and colleagues. This version is more universal in scope than the previous ones.

Since the late seventies I always wanted to have an original deck of the Oblique Strategies. I was an electronic music composer in those days, and I can remember facing the same set of problems, questions and doubts as most musicians, most probably including Brian Eno himself. No doubt the Strategies could have come to the rescue many a times...
But finding - let alone owning such a rare item was out of my realm. Not that the cards were exorbitantly expensive - at least, not in the pre-eBay days, but editions were extremely limited and always sold out even before they hit the market. For instance, the First (and most coveted) Edition (1975) was published in 500 copies, and the subsequent Second Edition (1978) in only 500 or 1000 copies. Edition Three (1979) was published in an unknown quantity, and the famous Edition Four (1996) was simply not for sale... A recently published Edition 5 is available now, in larger quantities, but somehow I lost interest in actually purchasing the decks.

In the eighties I started to use computers, learned to program a little bit, and started doing CG graphics by the end of that era. The Web came in 1995 for me, and since then I attempted several electronic versions of the Oblique Strategies cards; in HyperCard, HTML, Flash, etcetera... Feeble attempts, not worth mentioning.
It was not until the release of Apple's newest operation system in May 2005 - Mac OS 10.4, aka Tiger - that it dawned on me that one of Tiger's most eye-catching new features - Dashboard - would be the ideal platform to develop my own set of Strategy cards. Dashboard Widgets are in fact nothing more than dedicated and specialised mini-web-pages - developed in HTML, CSS and JavaScript - an environment in which I feel very comfortable.

Oblique 1.1

Early on in the initial development phase - which took about five days - I decided that my electronic version of the Strategies should contain all of the original decks and especially the privately commissioned Fourth Edition; the latter being less oriented towards musicians and painters (like Eno) and thus more suitable for general creative purposes.

For Version 1.0 of Oblique I tried to stay as close as possible to the format of the Fourth Edition (with the orange/white faceplate), but decided to abandon that idea for the subsequent version 1.1, in favour of the original black & white cards. Whilst I was working on version 1.1, I was contacted by Pae White - who designed the Fourth Edition, kindly asking me to mention her name in the copyrights (somehow I forgot to do that, mea culpa). Pea wasn't directly objecting to me using the orange/white front, but the black & white format for version 1.1 was already developed, so I decided to stick with that. (Pae White is now mentioned in the new version)
Unlike "regular" Widgets - where the flip-side of the Widget only serves as a preference panel and the front side holds all the functionality - I opted for a different approach, which hopefully supports the philosophy of the Strategies better. The (black) front side of my Oblique Widget only shows the title and edition number, and a small button (the regular "i" icon) to invoke the preferences, and a (white) backside which reveals a random aphorism of a given Edition. In other words, I have one front side and two back sides, which is not exactly compliant to Apple's guidelines for Dashboard development. But hey, ain't rules there to be broken ?