flickTrick

The flickr Services API is quite amazing. So I made a little application called flickTrick using phpFlickr.
tI is capable of producing either image mosaics on the basis of public photos of a given flickr account, or it it can generate a collage as the one you can see in the header part of this page, by simply adding follow CSS to it.

background-image: url(http://svenbuschbeck.net/flickTrick/collage.php?username=sven%20buschbeck&width=500&height=200&size=square&shuffle=true&maximum=24&alpha=40);

— edit 2009/03/15 —
As creating a collage can take several seconds, I implemented a caching version. It firstly returns the last image stored for the given parameters and then creates a new image. This version can be accessed by using “fast-collage.php” instead of “collage.php”.

» try it (alpha version) »

oidviz

What we do here in the Okkam project, is creating an global infrastructure, allowing to give an unique name to anything. We called it ENS (Entity Name System), inspired by the DNS (Domain Name System). Why? Because having everything named and all occurrences in a document annotated with this name makes data integration as easy as pie. But names in a computer science environment are URIs and those are not human-readable by default. For example http://www.okkam.org/entity/ok923bf64b-3edf-4d0a-baf8-592db9f55689 is my name! – for sure no one is able nor willing to memorize this. As a first approach to this, I created a little PHP script, that can produce an image representing those names, or ENS identifiers or Okkam IDs (in short OID)  as we call them. This resulting image should be much easier to be remembered an recognized.

The upper one represents me and the one below Stefano Bortoli, a friend and colleague of mine. Several dimensions have been used, like color, size, position and line-width. As a next step, besides improving creation speed, patterns and shapes could be introduced and even motion by exchanging the PNG image either with an old-fashioned animated GIF or a Flash animation. Integration is kept as simple as it can be, e.g. by simply inserting <img src=”http://okkam.dit.unitn.it/oidviz/?oid=[put your ID here]“/> into your XHTML page. The PHP script returns a bit stream, as if you would load an existing image directly from a server but instead it is created on-the-fly.

magnet v0

I finished the first prototype implementation of magnet, a generic tool to visualize coherences/similarities between enities of any data set.

» user test & more info »

sign selector

While testing some ideas for a jukebox application for my “media center” computer, I came to a point, where the user should be able to select an interpret or song from a huge list. If he knew the exact name, scrolling through a sorted list should be ok, but still a way to narrow the list by typing some initial letters would be much faster and convinient. This should not be difficult on a thouch screen, but as I also wanted  this application to work on mouse-only devices, as a keyboard was for example too space consuming in my configuration. So I ended up trying to find an interface component, allowing an user to enter a view letters with a pointing device like a mouse or a track ball.

It is basically a pop-out technique, but making use of moving the mouse pointer in two dimensions, than the common linear approach. Operatiing this first prototype version on the left is still a little rough though.

Content and navigation as zoomable UI and masked floating layer

See the Zoomable UI/floating layer navigational approach of my old (unmaintained!) home page (in german).

This version of my homepage features a new navigational concept combining the idea of zoomable interfaces and a masked floating layer. I created this application as experiment while searching for concepts and idea about how to integrate contents and navigational layer.

After informal feed back of user i asked to give it a trail, I had to find, in the end, this RIA will stay more an experiment than a easy to use information portal.

The text and media contained is in german and has not been update ever since, additionally the guest book is deactivated. Therefore give it a trail but do not take the content serious .