Introducing Wideslide: A jQuery slideshow plugin

A few months ago I was in Patzcuaro, Mexico working again on a website for the Hotel Casa de la Real Aduana. The co-owner, Didier Dorval, is a veteran photographer I met when we worked together at Masterfile. He has taken fantastic photos of the hotel and surrounding area, but when we started to put together slideshows for the site, it became clear that the images would have to be recropped to the same size; much to their detriment. Why don’t existing slideshow solutions handle varying aspect ratios?

To solve this problem, I brought in the big guns, Andrey Petrov, to help me design and build a slideshow plugin for jQuery, demonstrated here using some illustrations of my wife.

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Simply include jQuery, the plugin, and create a list of images with the class “wideslide” and you’re off. Want to try it, or try to improve upon it? We open-sourced it.

Download Wideslide on GitHub.

ParkVu Brand Identity Done!

Though I’m primarily an interface design person, from time to time I work on brand identity projects. I recently finished some design work for a very compelling software startup. Though I can’t tell you the nature the software, I can show you the logo I designed.

I really can’t wait for the project to launch because I expect I’ll have a big attachment to it!

I feel stunningly elegant tonight, darling.

I’m pretty excited because some of my work was Boing Boinged today! The blogs and the press have started making more of a fuss lately about this addictive tool and one of the best sites around, Boing Boing, called the design “stunningly elegant”.

Because of the killer visual search technology at Idée, I’ve had the chance to do a interfaces for software that does things never before seen. More recently than the Multicolr Search is TinEye and the TinEye Music iPhone App.

There’s even cooler stuff on the horizon which you will have to wait for. Idée will have provided the stunning and hopefully I will have provided the elegant.

Face Recognition Brought to Life in Picasa Web

I was simultaneously thrilled and creeped out when I logged into Google’s Picasa Web recently and noticed it can recognize and group together faces. Curious, I turned it on and waited about 10 minutes for it to index a thousand or so of my photos. The first page of results was astonishing — about 20 or so faces of Julia were identified as being the same person and grouped together. The next few groups also contained only photos of Julia, including a group of her in her new glasses. In the entire batch there were hundreds of faces, and only a handful of different people grouped together, or that just were not faces at all (A.K.A. false positives).

I had to take the first step of associating my contacts with the faces before it could tell me who was in the photos. That was the big brothery step because it provides Google, and anyone in the future with access to that data, the ability identify my contacts in any photos Google indexes.

It is remarkably accurate and even spotted a space on the gravestone of an ancestor of mine.

It brings up interesting questions about the access to these fingerprints. EXIF data contains exact time, geotags contain exact location, and now these fingerprints can identify people. Will advertisers be able to leverage this data? Will Google allow for public access to these fingerprints? (e.g. who is in this photo) Will Google themselves be enhancing their already massive profiles of their users with this new information?

Now that “when”, “where” and “who” are no longer relevant questions, what’s next? “What”, “why” and “how”?