A bit of background: three years ago we had no asset management for artists. It was a free-for-all on a shared drive. Naturally, this caused complications. When starting a new project three years ago, the artists put their collective feet down until management relented and installed Alienbrain. We have historically been a 99% PC studio. Anyone who used a Mac also worked on a PC as their main.
One of the things we’ve grown to love about Alienbrain is the ability to pass around hyperlinks that go directly to the asset’s location in the client. I can send an email with a few hyperlinks, and the recipient merely needs to open the email and click on the link to see the asset I just checked in - no attachments. It’s actually really nice.
Asset management life had been good.
Now we are starting a new project with a new art director who is in love with Mac. He’s hired a bunch of concept artists, who all use Mac. Herein lies the problem: Alienbrain on a Mac sucks. No hyperlinks for one, which makes sharing completed works for approval difficult. We could use AB’s internal mail system, which solves the linking issue, but there are no indicators on the Mac that you’ve received a new mail, so unless the recipient is actively looking for new mail they’ll never know a message is waiting for them. There are a number of other smaller issues with AB+Mac, but this is the biggest pain.
Anyway, to the point… Does anyone have any experience with Alienbrain and Mac that could help alleviate this issue? Other solutions to our problem are also welcome. 
We’re looking into other versioning systems, so even though our pipeline is currently tied to Alienbrain we would consider a switch to Perforce or something else, as long as it’s Windows/Mac communication didn’t suck like Alienbrain’s does.
Is there any way you can rig Alienbrain to send internal emails w/ hyperlinks to a PC or Mac that would run a script to inspect the email and then send it along to the appropriate recipient using your regular email system?
[QUOTE=Byterunner;11002]A bit of background: three years ago we had no asset management for artists. It was a free-for-all on a shared drive. Naturally, this caused complications. When starting a new project three years ago, the artists put their collective feet down until management relented and installed Alienbrain. We have historically been a 99% PC studio. Anyone who used a Mac also worked on a PC as their main.
One of the things we’ve grown to love about Alienbrain is the ability to pass around hyperlinks that go directly to the asset’s location in the client. I can send an email with a few hyperlinks, and the recipient merely needs to open the email and click on the link to see the asset I just checked in - no attachments. It’s actually really nice.
Asset management life had been good.
Now we are starting a new project with a new art director who is in love with Mac. He’s hired a bunch of concept artists, who all use Mac. Herein lies the problem: Alienbrain on a Mac sucks. No hyperlinks for one, which makes sharing completed works for approval difficult. We could use AB’s internal mail system, which solves the linking issue, but there are no indicators on the Mac that you’ve received a new mail, so unless the recipient is actively looking for new mail they’ll never know a message is waiting for them. There are a number of other smaller issues with AB+Mac, but this is the biggest pain.
Anyway, to the point… Does anyone have any experience with Alienbrain and Mac that could help alleviate this issue? Other solutions to our problem are also welcome.
We’re looking into other versioning systems, so even though our pipeline is currently tied to Alienbrain we would consider a switch to Perforce or something else, as long as it’s Windows/Mac communication didn’t suck like Alienbrain’s does.[/QUOTE]
We ran into similar issues where I work, I ended up learning some xCode and appleScript. This issue with the inbox on a mac not updating IS annoying but you can use apple script to write a script that will basically hit the get mail button for you in the background periodically(every few seconds or whatever). That script can be setup as a startup item on the mac too so you would only need to setup it up that one time, the only issue I see is that I don’t think you could point to a singular script on a network drive for all to use, you would have to setup on each mac. As far as the other issues go if you had more details I might be able to help(or not). But hey you might not want to deal with tweaks and just convince them to go with a different system.
I agree with matt, why don’t you just write a small desktop app that looks into each person’s email system every 10 min, and updates the icon when they have mail. Maybe making it look like the mail app, minus all the email functionality: http://lh5.ggpht.com/_gfktUGS0ov0/Su5SKqL8VXI/AAAAAAAAAcI/gtN6HQAx5sI/iphone-home-screen.png
[QUOTE=mattanimation;11017]We ran into similar issues where I work, I ended up learning some xCode and appleScript. This issue with the inbox on a mac not updating IS annoying but you can use apple script to write a script that will basically hit the get mail button for you in the background periodically(every few seconds or whatever). That script can be setup as a startup item on the mac too so you would only need to setup it up that one time, the only issue I see is that I don’t think you could point to a singular script on a network drive for all to use, you would have to setup on each mac. As far as the other issues go if you had more details I might be able to help(or not). But hey you might not want to deal with tweaks and just convince them to go with a different system.[/QUOTE]
I’d prefer to not switch to another system because we have a large number of tools already in Maya that are integrated with Alienbrain and I don’t want to have to rewrite them (or teach everyone a new system).
The other minor issues all have to do with the AB client on the Mac being far inferior to the PC version. Stuff like poor layout options, no address bar, the client not showing local un-imported files, etc. The big thing is the mail; if I can figure that out we should be fine to deal with the others.
I don’t have any experience with xCode or appleScript, nor do I even have regular access to a Mac to get to playing with it. Looks like I need to put in a hardware request! Any suggestions for where to look to get started in xCode/appleScript?
