Here’s an interesting website that concerns itself with LEGO robots, mosaics and diagrams made of Flickr photos and other “krazy” stuff:
http://krazydad.com/blog/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/krazydad/sets/140323/
A very comprehensive overview of the Cocoa text system and how to customize it:
http://hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.html
I have had to figure out a lot of this myself when developing JobTimer X (an in-house time keeping tool for Buttgereit und Heidenreich) and Kaleidotype. But this is also the fun in programming – bending the system to your needs.
Something I have always dreamt of inventing. Just imagine a table like this, used in the same manner as the writing tables of the monks who copied the Bible. Especially intriguing is the ability to use several fingers and both hands at the same time, which makes for a much natural interaction but also requires new interface paradigms.
After about 600 shot images I noticed a couple of things that I had been handling wrongly in my photo workflow until now. The following is a detailed description of my solution to these problems, including code excerpts. I hope that this will be useful to some of my readers, be it for photo editing or other areas.
Today I have two photographic topics again. OpenRAW is an initiative that lobbies for open documentation of so-called RAW file formats for digital photos. In a nutshell, RAW is different from other formats such as JPEG or TIFF which represent fully “developed” pictures, so to speak, and which can be processed only minimally after taking the picture. RAW files, on the other hand, merely store the “raw” image information seen by the camera sensor and allow for post-processing modification of all parameters which can be changed in the camera (and sometimes even more than those). For instance, this lets you change the so-called color temperature of the lighting without sacrificing image quality. Also, RAW files offer a higher dynamic range, that is, more tonal values, which equates to more headroom for brightness and contrast changes. Two examples (the left half of each image is uncorrected, the right half corrected):
This is why I now shoot exclusively in RAW. The problem with RAW is that there is no standard as with JPEG or TIFF. Every camera manufacturer has their own, sometimes partially secret format, which may even differ across camera models. In a sense, photographers lose their power over and ownership in their pictures since they are dependent on software from specific vendors in order to view and edit their images. In the long term, looking at several decades, this is a dangerous dependency and limitation. Classic negatives, slides and paper prints do have their advantages …
The following story made me think, completely transcending all those technical discussions we may have. Bill Biggart was a photo journalist who stepped into the events around the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. When the second tower crumbled, he lost his life in the rubble, but his camera was found and his last pictures survived. More about this on the good but sometimes shocking website digitaljournalist.org.
Although I try to keep the daily flood of information coming at me in check by avoiding to subscribe to podcasts, there are some that do interest me. One of them is CocoaRadio, which features occasional interviews with Mac programmers. In the episode from August 1, 2005, Fraser Speirs made a couple of statements that express my own motivation to work with Mac OS X and to develop software for it quite well:
OS X is a platform where people tend to craft their own tools.
His desire is to create tools for other people with a focus on user interaction and interface design – basically to make people happy. If more programmers would make this a top priority, “ordinary” computer users would be spared much stress …
Here are some links that I especially noticed today: Two very useful sources for Cocoa programmers having technical questions, cocoabuilder.com and cocoadev.com; and 43folders.com, a website on productivity, time management and much more.
Who or what in the world is Dumbarton? Well, in the real world it is the name of a bridge in the San Francisco area. In the computer world, it is a “bridge” between two programming languages: Objective-C, used by Apple, and C#, used by Microsoft. In the words of Allan Hsu, one of the creators of Dumbarton:
We call the ObjC<->C# bridging framework Dumbarton, named after the bridge that spans the San Francisco Bay between Fremont and Menlo Park. Our reasoning: both bridges are somewhat unpleasant to cross, but they get you where you want to go.
Why is this of interest to me? Well, I’m thinking about the right way to port Kaleidotype over to Windows, and this sounds like a great way to have a platform-independent back-end in C# (actually, Mono, a platform-independent implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework) without sacrificing the great user-interface capabilities of Apple’s Cocoa frameworks written in Objective-C, at least for the Mac version. However, I’m not sure Dumbarton will be available to me in time, so I’ll probably have to do a complete port in C#/.NET.