[ lofo’s weblog ]

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?

I’m a civil engineer by education but somewhere in the recesses of my being lies an “artist” waiting to be let out. I’ve been a doodler all my life sketching stuff here and there. Recently perusing through some of my notes from college I found where my mind would wander off drawing arrows, boxes, landscapes, miniature characters, tiny text, etc. I never took art classes but found myself in a drafting class in highschool.

There is something appealing about web development for me because while it is precise, the code languages, pixels, data, computers talking to each other… it is also very artistic and there are numerous ways to display, arrange, format, manipulate, and present your data, message, or service. I like the idea of taking some form of content and being able to arrange and present it to millions of people in a unique way.

As with doodling so has gone my efforts at web development over the years. I learned a little html several years ago and created some designs over that period of time that never made it from my computer to the Internet. In the past year I’ve started taking my interest in web development a bit more seriously and stepped it up from a doodling obsession to more of a growing hobby. I started reading about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and began implementing it with my knowledge of html. Then in the last month or so have begun to understand the importance of a certain format and syntax for coding with html and taught myself xhtml.

In the past several months I’ve been trying my hand at real web development. Recently I’ve even acquired a few clients. One of my clients is a photographer. I’ve put in some good hours working on the site and I am feeling accomplished thus far. I’ve taught myself alot in the past few months. I’ve even picked up another client! As soon as these sites are published I’ll post the links to them here on LOFO and let you check them out for yourself. Until then its back to designing for me…

If you are interested in trying your hand at designing web pages here is a list of some of the resources I’ve been using:

• in easy steps tutorial books - purchased at Barnes & Noble books for $9.95 ea.
  • Creating Web Pages
  • CSS
  • PHP 5
• The CSS Anthology, author: Rachel Andrew, published by SitePoint
• The W3Schools.com website - learn html, xhtml, css, php, and more… for Free! Also, test your knowledge by taking quizzes, tests, and using the online code editor.