2008-11-19

Online collage creator

...so i was enthusiastic about the new Picasa collage maker, and i thought to myself i could easily re-create it in the web with the help of canvas, when ...darn ...i am late again:) Even without googling i accidentally came across the high quality implementation of Ernest Delgado (demo here, details here).
Good job Ernest, I will keep an eye on you!

Note to self: need more eyes.

2008-11-16

Picasa 3 round the corner

Still beta (you can easily get it from filehippo), but brings around some nice new features. I have been playing around with it a little bit, things i liked most:

* Photo Viewer is a real eye-candy, it replaces your default application for double click, it loads relatively fast, and has some nice user interaction features (try your scroll wheel on the image itself, and on the film band).
* Collage maker - it has a killer interface to create the photo pile of your wish, resize, rotate, move your images one by one.
* Quick filter by starred, uploaded photos, videos, or even photos with faces. It doesn't include yet the face recognition and tagging that is already available in picasaweb.
* Movie maker - it is not really a movie maker, more like a presentation maker, but still, it puts much more control in your hands than before.
* There are some improvements on image import, and web upload, i haven't tried these yet.

One bug i have already came through, that whenever i restart Picasa, it keeps refreshing the thumbnails of the same images i recently added.

2008-11-14

FeedBurner vs. SimplePie

...ok, so for a while i was wondering why my website doesnt show my latest blog entries.
I am using SimplePie to fetch the latest RSS feed from FeedBurner and display the last five items. At the beginning i was suspicious of the cache mechanism, but even if i turn off caching completely, it will not fetch the latest feed. So i dugg myself into the internals of SimplePie and it turned out that when it fetches the feed from FeedBurner, it is presented a redirect to http://feedproxy.feedburner.com which indeed does NOT have the latest version. So the problem is not with SimplePie.
Interestingly this redirect doesnt show up when browsing or wgetting the feed.
As soon as i changed the user agent that SimplePie uses, the problem didnt show up any more.
Just add:
$feed->set_useragent('gecko');//anything but simplepie

Later doing some googling revealed this thread and a few others.