stuff by antimatter15

For as long as my notes show, ShinyTouch is now 1 month old.

So today, I added VideoCapture support, so it will now work better on Windows.

Auto calibration has been rewritten, and a few other small changes.

A few days ago I started working on auto calibration for shinytouch. Someone worked it a bit brfire and gave some PyGTK code that did fullscreen correctly but I ended up getting too confused (especially with embedding the video and images and threading delays). So now I started from scratch (or moreover continuing with using pygame) and now it is inherently not full screen. The auto calibration works by setting the contents of he window to be one color and taking a snapshot. After that the color is changes again and the snapshot is once again recorded. After gathering a pair, the software compares them pixel by pixel. It takes multiple trials and takes the average.

Then there is a function that makes cool stuff happen. It goes right to left to search for massive groups of consecutively marked hot pixel change areas. Ir searches for a general trapezoidal shape. And takes the lenghs and heights and positions. And right now, typing on my iPhone I wish the spell corrector was as awesome as the google wave contextual system. So in the near future, shinytouch will be as simple as launchingthe app and hitting a calibrate button and the computer does the rest. Maybe it might ask you to touch the screen in a special magic box or click on your finger afterwards but overall, zero setup and almost no calibration. So on another note, shinytouch is now almost a month old idea-wise. In my idea book, the references to it date back to June 28, though it may have originated a few days prior. For shinytouch the beginning window is quite a bit more broad. Anywhere from last year to march. I seem to recall late January experimentation with mirrors. So now, With shinytouch being the more promising (more acessible and radical) I have stalled development on mirrortouch. It’s quite annoying how fast time passes. There is so much that I really want to do but there is nost not enough time.

So yesterday, I worked a little on making a VectorEditor based Ajax Animator. It actually took suprisingly little work. The mostly modular and abstracted design of the Ajax Animator means that only a few files need to be changed. Mainly those in the js/drawing directory. Though there was a bunch of references to Ax.canvas.renderer.removeAll() which needed to be changed.

Another cool feature in that version is the ability to have layers show up concurrently. So you can see things while drawing just as they would be in export.

However, it’s not ready, it’s very very buggy, Lines and Paths aren’t tweenable yet, and it’s missing all those nice features of OnlyPaths that VectorEditor inherently lacks.

But the one really nice feature I think is the multi select. You can easily select a group of things which comprise some sort of shape, and move it all across.

This is again, an old idea of mine, I drew it on a sheet of paper maybe a year ago, but I just remembered it.

A common theme with modern browser is maximizing screen estate (which I don’t actually care about, becasue I have 2 huge monitors). But if I were to have a netbook or some otherwise technically restrained device, I would think that screen estate is important.

My Idea is pretty cool. The idea is that there is only a tab bar on top. It’s as usual, allocated to the tabs, and there is on the side, a new tab button. But for this, the new tab button occupies the entire rest of the space of the tab bar, because space is precious. Sort of like the Mozilla Fennec browser.

forward and backwards navigation is achieved by throwing (not just gentle pushing, throwing, it should be kinetic, if you don’t thow hard enough, it just shows some text saying the equivalent of “throw harder!”).

At least in the way I browse, I don’t enter URLs often unless I’m on about:blank. So there is no URL bar. To find what URL you’re on, or to enter a new one, simply double tap on the current tab. It expands and fills the tab bar with a text box and the other tabs are condensed to icons.

Swiping down shows a drop-down for a tab with options to do things like bookmark or view source.

Thowing a tab down (which is a more violent swipe) removes the tab. Something partly inspired by the Mac OS X dock.

The new tab button could also be a menu, swiping down to reveal a menu of bookmarks to select from.

And the new tab page could be almost like a desktop. with widgets, gadgets and whatever (Google wave? If only I got my dev invite :’(). Well, in my idea, the top portion of the new tab page could be the URL bar and the rest could be whatever other browsers are doing + maybe some widgets/gadgets Dashboard or Plasma style.

http://jsvectoreditor.googlecode.com/

There’s the project page! If you want to try it out, the link is below. It’s only been tested on Firefox 3.0 so far, and please comment if there are any issues.

http://jsvectoreditor.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/index.html