[ lofo’s weblog ]

While I was in college a good friend of mine put me onto a website called webmonkey.com to begin learning about web design and development. I was rather a novice to web design and the site had a lot to offer beginners as well the skilled. I used it often but then it went dormant one day and no more new content appeared one the site and for all practical purposes died but the site it’s content remained online. Sometimes I’d find it popping up in search results when I’d google for a tutorial or look for code but as time marched on the tutorials became more and more outdated as new web standards became commonplace and Web 2.0 revamped much of how the web is structured. The webmonkey was all but dead… hanging on by a thread of existence… motionless floating in the space of the internet.

Then today I picked up the latest issue of Wired magazine only to find an advertisement stating that the webmonkey is back! It appears that the site which was once driven by webdevelopers who may have been paid for their contributions is now seemingly an open-source site where you, the reader-user and designer-developer, can post your own articles, tips and tricks about designing and developing for the web. The ad says the newly remodeled site has tutorials, beginner’s guides, cheat sheets, daily news, tips and tricks for designers and developers.

So… if you’ve been feeling lost without your webmonkey or you’ve never been introduced… you’re in luck because he is indeed alive and back with his trusty orange wrench ready to wreak havoc, um I mean… teach you a thing or two about designing and developing your own content for the web and this time around allowing you to share your webmonkeying expertise with the rest of us!

A friend of mine recently emailed me a link to the youtube video below with “‘Windows Vista Paint - ‘The Photoshop Killer’” in the subject line.

I was honestly very intrigued and thought “Could Microsoft have really improved Paint that much!?”. Well, you’ll have to watch the video to see for yourself.

[youtube v/Hxx2KcPWWZg]

Later that same day I received an RSS feed from Guardian Unlimited about a new technology two Israeli computer scientists developed that pretty much puts Microsoft Paint to shame and could very well be the real “Photoshop Killer”. The following video displays this technology that Dr. Shai Avidan and Dr. Ariel Shamir have written about in their research paper entitled Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing.

[youtube v/qadw0BRKeMk]

Now that you’ve been fascinated beyond all belief that something like this even exists, why not try it for yourself? TechCrunch has reported of an online working demo created by Patrick Swieskowski in which you can try resizing your own images using the very same Seam Carving technology as shown in the video above.

It seems that this new way of editing images is already causing quite a debate regarding the authenticity of images seen by viewers online in places such as news reporting sites. The majority of images used online today are edited in some fashion. Crop here, remove the red-eye there, change the contrast of the whole image, and so on. However, will this technology go too far in infringing on the truthfulness of the images we see reported to us online? Where do you think the line will be carved for the use of this incredibly unique new technology?