Code

/ Don

Seadragon and PhotoSynth Demo



 
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. "
 

Photosynth Technology Preview
Download Browser Plug-in
/ Don

Flash File Uploader

Uploader Screenshot

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

/ Don

Save your Changes

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 more

/ Don

“Heat” Map

I was chatting with Zeh Fernando, and thought of a fun concept to create a flash widget to display areas of unrest in the world. The idea was to have users submit links to news articles about death and destruction and link to a node on a world map. This way people could get a better sense of how much of the world is consumed by war.

I should say that the concept is the only thing fun about this. In reality, this “Heat” Map, derived from the urban definition of heat, isn’t really too fun. If I get enough responses I may push through to complete the project. In the meantime, click the link below to launch the map and click around on it to change spots from black (cold) to white (hot). And if you want to see it completed, just let me know.

>> View Heat Map