It’s hard to imagine that I released the Lightbox2 script almost 5 years ago! The script still gets a fair bit of use. I spent an evening giving the demo page a fresh coat of paint. Use the slider on the right to see the new design.
I didn’t add any new features to Lightbox but I did do some tinkering behind the scenes:
Ever wanted to grab the dominant color or color palette from an image? Probably not. But now you can! Take a look at the Color Thief Demo Page to see it in action.
This script could be useful for sites that sort and search by color. But you should probably save your user’s computer some work and handle the color processing on the server. A couple of color search site examples:
With this script you can build a UI that adapts to the colors of an image. For example, you could add color accents to the UI by changing the font or border color depending on what image is currently being displayed in your portfolio. To get a bit fancier you could darken the dominant color and use it as a background color or invert the dominant color and use it as the text color. Fancy indeed!
A recent example of a color adapting UI is seen on Google Chrome’s new home tab. The dominant color of the favicon is used as the bottom border color on the screenshot:
Include jquery, quantize.js, and color-thief.js on your page. Using the script is as simple as this:
myImage = $('#myImage');
dominantColor = getDominantColor(myImage);
paletteArray = createPalette(myImage, 10); // 2nd argument sets # of colors in palette
Grab the code and read more on usage on Github. Dig through the code as well.
In the short term I’m not planning on doing any more work on the script. But if you’d like to make improvements or just clean up the code, please go for it!
The soon to be retired, MobileMe service from Apple, has a beautiful login page with wispy particles floating about. There is a lot to love on this page and an unbelievable attention to detail.
Inspired by the login page and a wanting to tinker with canvas and particles I set out to recreate the wispy particle effect. You can see the progress I made at the following page: mobileme-particles
I’m happy with how it turned out but there are a few things that could be improved. For one, the movement in the original is less rigid with more twists and turns. Is a flocking algorithm being used? Also, the mouse interaction with the particles in the original is livelier and has a nice bounce back effect when the mouse moves away from the particles.
If you’d like to look at or use the code you can grab it on GitHub.
There are quite a few places on the web to learn about simple particle systems. If you want to go a little further and add forces, I found the following two posts useful:
I recently learned that the gas pump icon near your car’s fuel gauge has an arrow indicating which side the gas tank is on.
I’m not sure if this is meant to tap our unconscious or to provide a script to small kids on exactly what to say to pester their parents.
Which menu option is currently selected, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’? I’m not sure either. I sometimes get the same feeling when an OSX dialog pops up.
Notice the use of one, two, and three bottles over the fuel grades. They are subtly implying that ‘clean supreme’ is three times as good as ‘clean regular’. Three times is more impressive than the 7% better octane rating ‘clean supreme’ has over ‘clean regular’.
I found this bar chart in an old issue of The Economist. A quick scan of this graph would give you an impression that foreclosures are skyrocketing. Look at the date ranges on the x-axis to see the absurdity.
These videos are a couple years old but worth rewatching. Ira discusses the building blocks of storytelling with broadcast in mind (tv and video), but most of what he talks about isn’t tied to any medium. I’ve included some notes I jotted down below each video.
Building blocks of stories in broadcast :
Raise lots of questions. Use them as bait. It is implied that questions you raised will be answered.
You thought a story was going to be good, but the feeling you had about it isn’t in the footage. Be super-ambitious, kill your medicore work.
You have good taste but for the first couple years the stuff you’re making isn’t so good. You recognize this. Do a huge volume of work to close the gap between the quality of your work and your ambition.
What’s interesting isn’t just a person’s take on things, but their interaction with others. Interaction creates drama.