PicLens is the most spectacular add-on for Firefox I happened to try in a while. It adds a cool and usable “3D wall interface” for navigating pictures from Flickr, Google Images, MySpace, deviantART, Facebook, Yahoo and other sites. You have to try it for understanding how much it can change your browsing experience, but I recorded a video demo that might give you an idea.
Exactly 15 years ago, in January 1993, my most loved piece of software was born: After Effects 1.0, codenamed “Egg”. For celebrating such anniversary I wanted to talk about its origins, but I’ve not yet collected enough material to do it (please if you have any screenshot of version 1.0, write me!). For now let’s commemorate the Egg with an easter egg in After Effects 8.
Christmas was a good time for giving some dollars to the authors of the plugins for WordPress that I use for this blog. With 1384 alternatives in the plugins repository, it might take some time to identify which are the best answers to your needs.
After some months of testing and daily usage, I completed my selection and I filled a list of plugins worthy a contribution.
Adobe launched a gallery of video in HD, which amazingly shows the power of the new Flash Player 9 Update 3, (aka Flash Player 1,0,115 or Moviestar). The footage was encoded in H.264 at 480p, 720p and 1080p, and distributed through the servers of Akamai network.
Incompatible files systems between Windows and Mac has been causing a lot of headaches since long ago. The growing number of people migrating from PC to Mac, or giving up on Vista, made the issue appearing even more evident. It’s emblematic the case of Windows running through Boot Camp: if you boot with Windows you can’t see the Mac partition, if you boot with OSX you can read but not write in the Windows partition.
Finally I tried Seam carving (friendly called “Liquid resize”, “content aware scaling” or “intelligent image resizing”), the currently most buzzed technique for image post-production. It allows you to resize a picture “non uniformly while preserving their features, i.e. avoiding distortion of the important parts“. It fascinates you immediately, it seems magic, but it’s true and it works!
Acer organized a convention in Madrid in order to present its latest products to international press. I collaborated with the team in charge of creating several videos for the event and for subsequent marketing usage. A goal of the project was to transform the client existent communication in a coordinated image in motion. These are a couple of the videos in which I was involved:
I just joined another social network that cached my attention thanks to my guru-colleague Marco Casario. SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations on the web, and basically it’s like YouTube but with slides instead of video. Recently they added also a feature called Slidecast, which allows you to sync slides with an mp3, for example your comment.
I remember a day in late 2004 when I almost cried for the happiness when I discovered a standalone utility for playing Flash Video files (FLV). It saved me a lot of time because it allowed me to playback immediately videos in FLV format, without even opening the Flash editor: it was just a double click on the file name or a drag-and-drop over the utility. That could have been somehow handy for a common user, but for a developer involved in Flash projects with video was super useful: it became immediately one of my most used Flash companions.
Adobe Max Europe is over and some numbers were published by the official blog: 1200 attendees in Barcelona experienced over 200 sessions. They are now invited to leave their feedback and to log in the Max site for finding the presentations uploaded by the speakers. Since some sessions held in Europe link to the files used in Chicago, here you are my presentation + demo files (for the session Advanced Video Encoding).
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