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!
Microsoft layed down the gauntlet at this week’s Mix 07 Conference with a Flash/Flex and Ajax competitor called Silverlight. This time around, the post-Gates Microsoft may have nailed it. Of course, the Microsoft faithful will love it—Silverlight provides a modern, well-designed presentation layer to leverage their .Net work.
But what’s captured the attention of the larger developer community is that Silverlight applications will work on IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari (yup, on a Mac) AND support non-MS languages. Furthermore, these apps will be delivered to the browser in Microsoft’s XAML markup language which means information within will be more accessible and findable by default than with compiled Flash/Flex apps.
What the heck is going on here? Silverlight just may be the first significant salvo from the more open, Ray Ozzie-powered Microsoft 2.0.
Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.
Next Wednesday, December 6th, Michael Pritchard and David Moody will introduce the Adobe Flex Framework and then use it to build an engaging web application in front of your very eyes. The Flex 2 software is a rich Internet application framework based on Adobe Flash that enables you to productively create beautiful, scalable applications that works across most platforms. It includes an Eclipse-based development tool, an extensive visual component library, and high-performance data services to get up and started quickly.
Michael Pritchard is the CEO of WillowTree Interactive and has been building Flex applications since the original beta release in late 2005. David Moody is the Health Sciences Library Webmaster (and is also leading the exciting new beTech Web Development Server initiative—more on that soon). David was also an early adopter of ColdFusion and Macromedia products and has taught Web development at ITC for over 6 years.
I’ve been a cautious fan of MacromediaAdobe Flash paper since it first came bundled with Contribute 2. There are a variety of applications where a PDF simply isn’t the best solution for content delivery, but it’s all you have to work with. Flashpaper does a nice job of bringing PDFs to the web in a Flash SWF container that can be embedded in a page, and offers some useful functions on the built-in toolbar.
I used the Flashpaper component from driverjase to create a wrapper for the flashpaper document. The component exposes over a dozen options in the API that can be used to customize the toolbar, scrollbars, and view settings.
At the Adobe MAX 2006 Conference in Las Vegas last week everyone was going hog wild about the new Flex Application Framework and IDE for building the next generation of Flash based web applications. Something that I got pumped about was the fact that you can push data from the server to the client. Also, some other cool items to mention are:
It runs on a J2EE environment, and the IDE runs on Eclipse. The Java folks are hyped about it.
Adobe User Group Meeting
I’ll be giving away a Linda.com Flex Essentials Training DVD and share more about the conference at tomorrow’s Adobe User Group Meeting. Everyone is invited:
The previously reported Java DB and Apache Derby database management systems aren’t the only client-side data storage tools in town. Brad Neuberg put together an Ajax tool last October to save persistent data in a hidden Flash applet. His tool, AJAX MAssive Storage System (AMASS), worked even if the user left the web site or closed the browser. Information was later recalled on demand by the web application that saved it. It was pretty cool in its own right. But Brad had to take it a step further.
The lastest from Brad is dojo.storage which allows more storage options and the convenience of the Dojo library. Why would you want such a thing? Let’s hear it from Brad:
What could you build if you had these tools? How about a truly collaborative, web-based word processor with client-side storage for your private documents, as well as offline access? Maybe an Ajax RSS aggregator with client-side caching of the feeds you read and offline access? An offline, web-based book reader using data from the Internet Archive’s Open Library would be cool.
Microsoft’s latest Internet Explorer ActiveX update is responsible for hosing up many a Flash and Quicktime applet viewed in MSIE. These and other ActiveX controlled applications now require a couple extra clicks to activate and run on every visit (which can be especially aggravating when they’re used for navigation). Microsoft was compelled to roll out the update following court losses in a patent infringement case brought on by Eolas Technologies.
The ActiveX changes affect only MSIE on Windows; Firefox and Opera are not affected. Web developers can circumvent the problems altogether with a bit of code rewriting compliments of Microsoft. If you’d like to spare yourself the new ActiveX popup warnings when visiting other sites, MS has also prepared some compatibility patches for end users.
Next Wednesday, December 6th, Michael Pritchard and David Moody will introduce the 
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