A Learning Experience

Hover Zoom for Chrome

lrymarz — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 17:03:46 +0000

Well Google Chrome plugin almost supersedes the need for the Photo Gallery Maker app I made way back when: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nonjdcjchghhkdoolnlbekcfllmednbl. I installed this on my work computer to try it out, and slowly had to start installing it on my other computers when I found it missing.

It looks to me like it scans the page for any tags and show them full size when you hover your mouse over them. It also turns out that it works with the galleries my app makes. Convenient!

HTML5 Video – The Wilderness Downtown

lrymarz — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:56:32 +0000

This is a pretty awesome usage of HTML5: The Wilderness Downtown. I was a little scared to enter my home address, but it’s so the video(s) shown will be personalized.

I’m a little scared that they were able to open 8 new windows without me clicking OK, but it’s still really cool.

Where to Find the Adobe Lightroom SDK Docs

lrymarz — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 04:21:13 +0000

I have a bad history with finding Adobe documentation. I know they have docs, I just can’t seem to enter the correct search terms to find what I need.

I was looking for documentation on how to implement your own web template in Adobe Photoshop lightroom, and it turns out the key term for this is “webengine”.

… I guess that makes sense. At any rate, if you are looking to implement a plugin in Lightroom that generates a customized web gallery, you need the Lightroom SDK Documentation.

Photo Gallery Maker for Picasa

lrymarz — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:33:37 +0000

I was playing around with Picasa the other day and decided to see what it would take to plug my Photo Gallery Maker gallery into Picasa. Turns out it’s relatively easy. I’ll save the “How does this thing work” post for later. For now, I’ve posted an installer and a zip of the templates. I’ve only tested the installer on Windows 64-bit, so if it doesn’t work you can download the .zip and do a manual install.

You’ll need one of these:

PGMForPicasa0.1.exe – The Installer

PGMForPicasa0.1.zip – a zip of the templates

To Install Manually

Unzip the contents of PGMForPicasa0.1.zip to (by default) “C:\Program Files\Google\Picasa\web\templates“. That’s the default install directory. On my Windows 7 PC it’s actually “C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Picasa3\web\templates”

How To Use It

Here’s how to use the templates in Picasa once you’ve got them installed:

Select a folder or album
Go to Folder (or Album)->Export as HTML Page…

It’ll show you a dialog like this:
Choose your image size (I may attempt to force a larger export size in a later version), select a destination, and click export.
Picasa will create an album just like those created by Photo Gallery Maker and you can use it however you like.

Enjoy!

No Longer Maintaining D&D Character Builder

lrymarz — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 03:46:28 +0000

I haven’t made any updates to it in a while and I don’t intend to, so I thought it right to make a note about my plans with my D&D Character Builder.

I’m done maintaining it, at least for now. It is too large a project for me to work on in my spare time.

That being said, the source is available here, released under the GPL version 3. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. I might eventually come back to this project, but since at the moment it’s just sitting there, I thought it proper to make the source officially available.

Photo Gallery Maker 1.2

lrymarz — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:49:10 +0000

After I built my new computer, I went to put a photo gallery together and realized my Photo Gallery app ran at about the same speed as it did on my old PC. I was running all the thumbnailing and image scaling in a single thread, so it was only taking advantage of one core (and I have a simulated EIGHT in my new PC) no matter what. So I fixed it.

Photo Gallery Maker 1.2 has support for multi-core systems. It will run ([number of simulated cores] / 2 + 1) threads for thumbnailing and image scaling. Just about every system available today should see a noted improvement from version 1.1.

There was also some funny stretching going on with the thumbnails on the generated web page. I fixed that too.

Download Photo Gallery Maker 1.2.

For more info, see the 1.1 post or the original announcement.

Moved to WordPress

lrymarz — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 21:06:56 +0000

Up until now my blog was hosted on blogger. Since I pay for web hosting, I thought I’d see about hosting my blog myself. So I started digging into WordPress. I moved my personal blog over to WordPress a while back, and that has gone well.

So today I decided it was about time to move this blog over as well. So welcome to my new blog

If you happen to be thinking of moving from blogger to a personally hosted blog, this guide should prove helpful. It helped me immensely.

P.S. The formatting will be a work in progress for a while. That’s how things went with my other blog. As I poke around in the archives I’ll sort out the CSS for things…

Facebook Photo Browser: SlickPhoto

lrymarz — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 02:44:00 +0000

Ok, so the Facebook folks have cleared up the problems I was having publishing an app I wrote, and I thought I’d do a quick writeup to announce it. It’s a relatively simple app for viewing your friends’ albums. I had one main goal:

View all your friends’ photos without having to load multiple webpages

Facebook is particularly frustrating for me in that every photo is on its own web page. It’s good because they can load new ads for you, but awful for a person who want to take a quick look through an album. So I put together an app I named SlickPhoto:

I wrote this app in Flex, which means it’s a Flash app. Now, it started with a single goal, but I ended up with some features that are worth noting:

Download any Facebook album as a zip file – Good for Facebook stalkers
Slideshows – View any album as a slideshow
Full Screen Mode – Both browsing and slideshows can be viewed in full screen mode.
Link to albums – You can create a link that will load directly into an album you want to view in SlickPhoto. You can email this link to your friends so they can go directly into SlickPhoto to look at your album.

It’s a relatively simple interface, so you can jump right in by going directly to SlickPhoto, or you can view the application profile before you start using it (although there isn’t much there at the moment). Note that SlickPhoto, like all my other Flash-based apps, has a form for submitting bugs so if you run into any problems feel free to contact me that way.

Now, if I could just figure out how to add search tags so people can find it easier through the Facebook search interface….

Facebook App Directory, Possible Frustrations

lrymarz — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:45:00 +0000

So I recently wrote a Facebook app for browsing photos. You can try it here if you’d like. It was mostly an experiment to learn about what it’s like to go through the whole process of getting an app into the Facebook app directory. Well, my app has been “approved”, but I haven’t made a post about it on my blog yet because it still hasn’t actually shown up in the Facebook app directory. It’s been approved for oh, I dunno, two months now?

I browsed the Facebook dev forums and came across a couple threads about this problem. This has been going on for a while. There are posts from the Facebook admins about it being fixed, and replies saying “no, it isn’t”. This has been going on for quite a while (over a year based on one of the threads).

I find it very interesting that such a popular thing has been broken for so long. I’m lucky since I don’t have any monetary interest in getting my app on the directory, but I can imagine this being a serious problem for people who make a living on Facebook apps. Perhaps the higher profile apps get better service and haven’t run into this problem. I dunno.

At any rate, I thought I’d make a post about this to pass the time while I wait for my app to show up in the directory. Once it’s up there, I’ll go over the features and make it official.

MM Ticker Browser 0.2

lrymarz — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:11:00 +0000

A while back, I posted a tool for researching stock tickers. Well, after that post I went back into the code and added some functionality for saving preferences. Also around that time, my daily stock watching drifted into just checking the indexes, and that code was forgotten… until today!

I got a request for the source code to MM Ticker Browser, and since my subversion repository no longer has the old code, I figured I’d make an official post about it. I never got around to testing or using the preferences code much, so it may have a couple bugs. That’s why there’s a bug reporting interface in it :D.

So here’s what I’ve posted:

MM Ticker Browser 0.2 installer
MM Ticker Browser source code (as a web based source view)
or MM Ticker Browser source code (.zip, 1.3 MB)

Remember, this in an Adobe Air app, so you’ll need to get Adobe Air.

… and just in case you have problems with this version, you can always use MM Ticker Browser 0.1.