stressfree - graphics

Finder plugin for simple image resizing

David — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 21:50:44 +0000

QuickImageCM is a little plugin from Pixture Studio is very handy for resizing images without having to launch a bulky image editor. It installs itself as a context menu item yet it provides a lot of functionality for quickly viewing, converting or resizing images:

osx
graphics

Installing RMagic for Ruby on Rails on OSX Tiger

David — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 23:53:49 +0000

Installing RMagic for Ruby on OSX can be a little tricky especially considering running 'gem install RMagic' usually results in a bunch of error messages. There is a couple of ways to get this installed without too much fuss. One way is to follow the how-to on the RMagic site.

This how-to is a little long and requires installation of many Darwin ports. Fortunately however there is a self contained installer for OSX available called Locomotive. It bundles Ruby, Rails, RMagic and a bunch of other tools into an easy installer.

If you are like me and like the ability to track and update your packages you may prefer using Fink.

After installing Fink (and probably FinkCommander) compile and install imagemagick-nox and imagemagick-nox-dev plus all their dependencies from source (to get the latest versions). Choosing the -nox packages gets around a few RMagic compile errors related to X image functions tied into Xorg.

Once imagemagick-nox is compiled and installed download the source tar for RMagick.
Uncompress the source to a location, change into that directory and run:

LDFLAGS=-L/sw/lib ./configure (enter)
[where /sw/lib is the path to your fink library directory]

make (enter)

make install (enter)

If everything goes to plan you should have a working Ruby/RMagic implementation ready to use in your Rails' applications.

Desktop Backgrounds and Icons

David — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 19:09:37 +0000

Some of my favourite places to get desktop backgrounds and icons for Mac/Windows/Linux:

http://www.joejoe.biz/joejoe/walls/
http://interfacelift.com/icons-mac/
http://desktop.dvdesign.com/

Great CSS/Javascript Image Resize Script

David — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 21:08:38 +0000

A blog post from AgilePartners describes how upcoming web applications like Fluxiom achieve the dynamic image resizing effects illustrated in their promotional material. It turns out to be very simple (Javascript modifies the CSS image size property) yet the effect is really cool. True 'image resizing' is not employed, large images are downloaded to the browser and then it is left up to the browser's own display engine to perform the dynamic resizing. In a high bandwidth environment this does not matter but for people stuck in 56k modem land it is just one more nail in the coffin for their enjoyable Internet experience. There is almost a need now for web developers to be able to distinguish between low and high bandwidth users in the same way browser or Javascript detection is employed.

Riya - Facial/Text Recognition meta-photo software

David — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 22:53:52 +0000

Riya seems to be a pretty promising set of technologies, although whether or not it pans out to be a successful product is another story. At the core of Riya is a set of facial and text recognition algorithms that can intelligently identify people or keywords within photographs. Consequently as photos are added to the gallery rich meta-data can be passively pulled from the photos without any user interaction. In instances where a person or text cannot be identified it is possible to manually add this meta-data or have others supply further tags to your photographs to identify people in crowds or foreign words.

A screenshot of Riya at work (click to enlarge)

The CEO of Riya was recently involved in a podcast discussion with Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls and a group of others. The discussion was very interesting, albeit a little slow at times and marred by a technical fault at the very end. One thing that would really benefit the technology/product is an open API to allow other developers to tie their products or services into it similar to Google Maps. Unfortunately it sounds like work is still frantically underway to get a gallery product together without any thought of an API or other applications. This strategy is probably angling for a buyout from Google or Microsoft now that Yahoo has started the ball rolling by their purchase of Flickr recently. Still a pretty interesting development and amazingly powerful if tied together with something like Google Maps for an unbelievably rich amount of meta-data.

Finally, a half descent native theme for Windows

David — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 11:17:05 +0000

Microsoft released this theme a while ago with Media Center but its only now come to my attention that they have released a native version for Windows XP. It is definitely a lot nicer than the default, jumbo sized button themes in Windows XP and less hassle to setup than WindowBlinds.

Download the Media Center (Royale) Theme for Windows XP