beTech :: Evolve Already

For the designer or pre-production person, one of the top-ranking moments of dread has to be when you need a logo for the client’s Web site and print materials and they send you a 150 pixel JPG (or other bitmap/raster image) file. You, of course, need a vector graphic that will scale nicely between icon size and billboard size without pixelating; and they, of course, have nothing of the sort. This is where a vectorization tool comes in.

Unfortunately, most vectorization tools cost too much, are a pain in the keister to use, and don’t really produce usable results without a lot of finagling. I haven’t tried the Corel product in years, but Adobe Illustrator’s Live Trace leaves much to be desired. It tends to round corners in the strangest of places and make up new colors to fill in the pixelization blend areas. Thankfully, we now have another alternative: Stanford University’s VectorMagic.

VectorMagic is a free online application that takes your randy little raster images and converts them into amazingly accurate vector EPS or SVG file. Comparing it to the Adobe and Corel products is unfair, but we’ll do it anyway. Looking at the images side-by-side, VectorMagic does what we’d expect and want a vectorizer to do: take a big-picture view of our messy, aliased (that stair step, building-block appearance) artwork and churn out something appropriate. The other applications seem to be taking a pixel-by-pixel approach which probably accounts for the additional colors and the unusual corners. It looks as though the big boys (Adobe and Corel) have some catching up to do. Kudos to James Diebel and Jacob Norda, the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research project developers, for their work.

All that’s required to run it is a modern browser, a Flash player, and an image to vectorize. And, while we’ve been talking about logo conversion, you certainly don’t have to restrict your images to graphics. There are already a couple of photos in their examples that look quite stunning as well. Take it for a spin and let us know how it works for you.

In an almost universally acclaimed decision, the University of Virginia will begin out-sourcing its student email to Google and Microsoft later this semester. Along with email, students will be introduced to a whole new suite of document sharing, calendaring, and instant messaging applications in Gmail and Windows Live. And the icing on the cake? Students can now keep their UVa email account for life, and upon leaving the University, their messages and folders will be preserved (current alumni can also take advantage of this opportunity). Sweet!

The announcement is a welcome—if not jarring—departure from the staid, old ways of doing things at UVa. And, though I am loathed to admit it, I was one of those initially jarred by the offering of, not one, but two new email choices. How could we introduce another student option and additional support complexity when the University already had two somewhat disparate choices (Central Mail System and MS Exchange)? I was particularly concerned about the potential incompatibilities of the document applications (i.e., will Google’s spreadsheet work with Microsoft’s spreadsheet?). Yeah, I was thinking with my lizard brain.

In beTech-land, we already recognize that the world is shifting from a centrally-managed, closed-source working/learning environment to a distributed, open-source, API environment. Information is the application and the tool we use to access it is becoming increasingly irrelevant. A recent Scoble post reinforces the obvious…

These new services let you work with people in a whole new way. No more emailing around Word Docs or Spreadsheets or PowerPoints. Instead you pass around a URL, and work there.

Duh. This is what Work 2.0 looks like. The students, if they haven’t already, will quickly master these new applications as readily as Facebook and MySpace. Rather than coddle students with archaic, committee-conceived, and centrally-managed dinosaurs, the University’s primary task is to provide competitive tools to open worlds of information and insight. All the rest can and will be worked out in due time. For now, UVa students have an unprecedented opportunity to show the rest of us how it’s done.

beCamp was such a huge success that we’d like to see if we can get a little of that magic to rub off on some topic-focused mini-conferences. These one-day mini-conferences, let’s call them “weeCamp“, would zoom in on a broad topic of interest to beTechies and others keen on advancing their Web knowledge. As with beCamp, the participants of weeCamp will have pleny of opportunities to teach, learn, and share with their peers. The proposed format for such an event might go something like this.

Of course, since this is only a single day, business-hours event, we’re tossing out some of the mojo that made beCamp work so well. That’s right, no t-shirts, no beer, no jamming with Wendy and the Wii (not to mention Surfzilla!). But we also don’t have to pan-handle for sponsors either. Perhaps it’s a workable tradeoff. Let’s see.

Web Application Security

Marty Peterman and the ITC Security Department have volunteered their support for the first weeCamp event. On October 8, 2007, spend a day with your peers on the topic of Web Application Security. Our “keynote speaker” will be none other than Dan Goldberg—founder of MADJiC Consulting, the technical director of Global Information Assurance Certification (GIAC), and an incident handler for the Internet Storm Center. We’re ecstatic to have Marty and Dan on-board and to have such an engaging, crucial topic to kick-off our first weeCamp.

Before you bring your Web server to its knees with that application, be sure to check out Nick Skriloff’s beTech presentation on Load Testing next Wednesday at 3:00. Nick will walk you through some of the work he’s done to load test and profile J2EE and Ruby on Rails applications. For the J2EE side we will look at using The Grinder and the Mercury Diagnostic Profiler. For the Rails side we will look at using The Grinder and ruby-prof.

Nick Skriloff has been developing software since 1990. He is presently the Director of Quality Assurance for an arm of the Darden Business School called Darden Solutions. He has logged hundreds of hours doing performance testing web applications in production and looks forward to sharing his discoveries.

And don’t forget to join the beTech bunch after work this Thursday for our monthly beerTech happy hour at South Street Brewery. We’ll chat about load testing, Nick, and whatever else comes up.

Sure the iPhone is a slick piece of interface and hardware design. Yeah, I want one real bad. But, sorry, I just can’t justify the initial cost plus the monthly service agreement with AT&T. (the University didn’t want to help me out there either, drat!) Furthermore, even though there was an initial burst of buzz and tools for developing applications suited to the iPhone’s 480×320px screen (e.g., the Aptana iPhone Development Plugin), it just didn’t seem prudent to take the leap as a Web designer/developer yet.

Yesterday’s Apple Special Event announcements changed all that. The entry price for the iPhone was dropped to $399 in time for the holidays—and that was nice. But what’s really got me turning from naughty to nice for Santa’s list is the new iPod Touch. Holy Smokes! For $299 I can have the internet in my pocket! And not some mobile version of the web*—nay!—I’ll have the real McCoy! That’s right. A Wi-Fi-enabled (802.11b/g) mobile web browser (Safari) that actually renders pages as they’re seen on the laptop/desktop, only smaller (until you zoom in!).

And if I’m planning a future with my little iPod Touch buddy, my gosh, I bet the rest of you are considering the same. Holy smokes! There’s an imminent iPhone/iPod Touch critical mass approaching. It’s time to start developing!

What applications are you contemplating or already developing for the iPhone/iPod Touch? What site design changes will you make to better suit this duo? Will affect your approach to the mobile Web?

* BTW: The Office of Web Communications has a great resource for the mobile Web at UVa. It’s worth checking out!

Throw flames on anything and it instantly becomes cool. beCamp probably wouldn’t have been nearly as successful if it weren’t for the gosh-darn flame logo. Face it. If ya want to attract the edgy, hip crowd (that’s us, right?), there’s no easier way than to slap on some flames.

Well, the Mozilla gang took that idea to heart, added some flames to Firefox, and released the Firefox Campus Edition browser this past week. Sure, it’s got a swell bundle of “back-to-school” add-ons:

• FoxyTunes lets you control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more with a click right from your browser.
• StumbleUpon lets you channel surf the Internet to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests.
• Zotero helps you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work - in the web browser itself.

…but let’s be serious. It’s the flames that caught your eye, right?

Coming soon to Photoshop and, one can only hope, the Web. Content-Aware Image Resizing is a remarkable technique for resizing images without losing the important elements of that image. A clever algorithm (20MB PDF), created by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan, analyzes the image and strips out the “seams” with the lowest “energy” as the image is reduced (height, width, or both). The same algorithm adds seams as the image size is increased.

Recognizing the potential, Adobe quickly snatched up the co-inventor of this process. Perhaps we’ll see the fruits of this technology in the next version of Photoshop or Flash. If it gets into Flash, we could realize truly fluid Web design with the images resizing just as easily as the text and layout depending upon the size of the viewport. Can a video version be far behind? Sweet!