According to Microsoft (labs.live.com/photosynth), "the Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest - and, we hope, most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next. In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor. "
 

My company, era//404 is working with author Charles Bock to design and develop the exploratory site for his first novel, Beautiful Children (Random House).

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Due to popular demand (and numerous positive remarks from Donline viewers) Mike reformatted the PHP files associated with the Flash File Uploader to increase security, support auto-generated thumbnail caching and enable preview mode (prior to upload).

I was getting tired of upload scripts timing out in Flash and talked with Mike a little about creating an AJAX uploader. Unfortunately, AJAX has a difficult time updating a progress meter while an upload is running and it still cannot prevent browser requests from timing out on some servers. Granted, you still can use AJAX to do this and I’d recommend reading up on a number of online tutorials that offer solutions. However, up until the advent of Flash’s FileReference Object, programmers had to rely on server-side Perl scripts to manage these uploads and as Zeh so eloquently put it, “I love Flash’s upload. It’s so much better than the extremely crap HTML upload.”

>> Flash File Uploader

The following is a neat little script that I found to remind people to save their changes when navigating away from a page (onBeforeUnload was developed originally by Microsoft for Internet Explorer, but then added to the new version of Mozilla Firefox). You’ve probably seen something similar to this when using GMail if you decide to close the window (or refresh or click the back or forward buttons) after starting to compose an email.

I researched this for a new Lyrek script that Mike and the Lyrek Developers are building to enables users to supervise the import of records and decide if they’re to be overwritten, discarded, merged, added as a new record or kicked off to the duplicate manager. It works in IE and FF. Sorry, no Safari support. Read the rest of this entry »