Posted by Jeffrey on July 31, 2006 – 10:15 am
As I may have mentioned before, along with my job at We-Create, I work early mornings at Greystone Golf Club in the turf crew. It’s very relaxing (well, if you find walking/running +6km behind a mower relaxing) and I have hours to just think and enjoy the environment. I come up with some of my best ideas while cutting grass and watching the sun rise. For example, not even a week ago, I was thinking about my new MacBook Pro and thought “Hey, wouldn’t it be neat if I could darken the background behind the current application, similar to the popular Lightbox JavaScript.” That would make it even easier to pick out the windows associated to my current application.
Not knowing a lot about desktop software I filed it under ‘Rainy Day Projects’ and was excited at it’s possibilities. Then came today. While catching up on Digg, I cam across Doodim, that does exactly what I had in mind! Someone has been reading my Rainy Day file. I guess I should hide it better!
Posted by Jeffrey on July 28, 2006 – 2:29 pm
I’m a published author. Yes it’s true! We’re just assembling the site now at googlemapsbook.com so it’ll be filling with more content in the next week. Look for it in your local bookstores mid August!
Posted by Jeffrey on July 27, 2006 – 6:32 pm
As you may have read, I’ve been playing with Apple’s Aperture software lately and really like it, with the exception of the ‘Web page’ export features. As an experience web developer and designer I was less than enthusiastic about the results I was getting. I looked into creating my own templates but it seems very cumbersome and seemingly not well thought out. I still intend to play with it some more, maybe the templating will improve in the next version, but while I do, I needed a way to get my photos up and on-line quickly with minimal effort and preferably a decent presentation. I whipped up a very quick PHP/ImageMagik/Lighbox script that fit the bill quite nicely. All I have to do now is create a directory and upload images into it and the script handles the rest. For pretty URLS, it also requires an Apache rewrite file. You can see an example here (Minty Photos!).
The script is very simple and I plan on extending it further, adding more features such as reading the EXIF info from the JPEG files to add comments and such. All in all it’s pretty handy and I’ve dubbed it SnappyAlbums and have provided a download link for you to enjoy. I have no intention of ever writing a back-end or administration area for it, the only thing I want to do is use FTP to create folders and upload pictures, the rest, if anything, I’ll do in Aperture or similar image editing software.
Posted by Jeffrey on July 26, 2006 – 8:43 am
Filed under Behaviour, Style
I’ve been using the awesome Lightbox 2 JavaScript by Lokesh Dhakar to build a quick photo viewer but was running into a problem. There are two configuration options:
var fileLoadingImage = "/path/to/loading.gif";
var fileBottomNavCloseImage = "/path/to/closelabel.gif";
that are required to specify the location of the loading and close images respectively. My problem is that I want to use fancy URLS for the links with an ‘unknown’ depth, and I don’t want to reference the path from the web root so that I can install it multiple times, wherever I want, and have it just work. Digging into the code a little further, I make a few modifications to allow you two set the images using CSS only, rather than edits to the JavaScript. If you want to do the same, around line 270 just comment out:
//var objLoadingImage = document.createElement("img");
//objLoadingImage.setAttribute('src', fileLoadingImage);
//objLoadingLink.appendChild(objLoadingImage);
and around line 306 comment out:
//var objBottomNavCloseImage = document.createElement("img");
//objBottomNavCloseImage.setAttribute('src', fileBottomNavCloseImage);
//objBottomNavCloseLink.appendChild(objBottomNavCloseImage);
then in the CSS file add:
#bottomNavClose {
display:block;
background: url(i/closelabel.gif) no-repeat;
width:66px;
height:22px;
}
loadingLink {
display:block;
background: url(i/loading.gif) no-repeat;
width:32px;
height:32px;
}
Make sure the url()s are relative to your stylesheet. In my case all the images are located in an ‘i’ directory along with the style sheet.
Now the images are specified with the CSS and you need not edit the JavaScript. I’m sure this will be done in an upcoming version as the Next and Previous buttons are already set up this way.
Posted by Jeffrey on July 6, 2006 – 7:49 pm
Last year I purchased my first digital camera, a Nikon D50. Until then, I’d been using a Nikon F80 which was great, but I had to continually pay for developing so I did little experimenting and was never really able to get the most out of the camera. Now with digital, I leave it on rapid fire and am continually emptying my 1GB memory card.
But now I have the problems of sorting and organizing my many, many photos. I had been using iPhoto, the iLife application that came on my MacBook Pro. It has a lot of nice features and let me makes slideshows and such, but it lacked in many areas as well so I decided to make a switch to Aperture. I must admit I love it. Stacking photos is awesome and there are so many different way to organize things. I also like the dark UI, feels more professional and slick. I’m really hoping Mac OS X Leopard may incorporate the darker interface.
But the real reason I’m writing this little post is that I was frustrated after importing my iPhoto library into Aperture and I thought I’d share a little trick with you. After importing from iPhoto, I began assembling images and stacking them in groups, rearranging and sorting - generally having lost of fun. After a while, I noticed that a lot of my iPhoto photos were already stacked up with two copies of the same image, one with the keyword ‘iPhoto Original’ and the other with ‘iPhoto Edited’. It seems that iPhoto duplicated the images when I made simple changes (or I think when I just played and didn’t really change anything). My problem was then how to delete all these ‘iPhoto Edited’ images so my spiffy new projects weren’t cluttered with double images. After much frustration trying Albums, the lights table and a bunch of other searches I came across a simple solution as illustrated in the photo below.
To remove photos by keyword - without breaking all your stacks of images - click the little magnifying glass next to the library and filter by keyword. Then check the ‘Ignore stack groupings’ option. Now all the photos will be only the ones tagged as ‘iPhoto Edited’, not their related stack. From there, just select all and delete. There are a few other places where you can do similar filtering but this was the only place I could find the ‘Ignore stack groupings’ option.
Anyways, just thought I’d share.
