18th Jan 2006

Finder plugin for simple image resizing

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:

14th Jan 2006

Installing RMagic for Ruby on Rails on OSX Tiger

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.

12th Dec 2005

Desktop Backgrounds and Icons

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/

10th Dec 2005

Great CSS/Javascript Image Resize Script

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.

2nd Dec 2005

Riya - Facial/Text Recognition meta-photo software

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.

4th Oct 2005

Finally, a half descent native theme for Windows

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