People often talk about the 'art of Pixar', with their wonderful ability to breath life into computer animation. Now you can find out, in brain bursting detail, the technical innovations of Pixar - in their online animation rendering library.

Labels: Animation, Tech

Thanks to researchers who recently presented at SIGGRAPH, we may soon have intelligent image resizing in Photoshop to help fit photos into any size and scale area. The technology looks at an image and tries to work out where the important parts are - so that when you re-size the image, it knows which parts can be reduce or expanded with minimal impact to what the image is trying to convey. Very clever indeed. The movie below gives some great examples of this.

And why might this soon be in Photoshop? Well Adobe has hired one of the co-creators to join their team so expect cool stuff like this in the future. Perhaps they'll even release some kind of image server that lets you define important image areas and then vend right-sized thumbnails or reduced images on the fly without having to go through the manual slog of intelligently cropping it yourself. That would be pretty cool. [From Wired]

Labels: Design, graphic design, Innovations, Tech, Visualization

You can now see a full list of labels (tags) for this site here. If this code looks to be stable it will get rolled out across the whole site, but thought you might like to check it out sooner rather than later.

The solution came from this Blogger board if you want to try it yourself (I'll leave the fixes to the PHP brackets as an exercise for the reader).

Labels: Google, Helpful App, Tech

Bit of a plug here - I've been using DreamHost for my web hosting for a while now and I have to say they're awesome! Cheap, responsive and with a good uptime - a perfect fit for my non-critical domains. The best part of hosting with them is you can host unlimited domains under the same account, so for just over a hundred bucks a year and I can host this domain and all my many others at no extra cost. Amazingly this cost is only slightly more than I was paying to host my old MattHobbs.co.uk domain back in the U of K. Crazy.

So go check them out and sign up with the hosting discount code BEST1 to get a discount on the price of the Yearly Level 1 service. Plus then I get a kick back as well and can buy you beers (or orange juices in Matt's case).

Labels: Recommendation, Tech