AjaxProgrammer

I’ve been learning Python and playing with App Engine this week, and both the language and the platform rock. I’ll be posting more on these topics soon but, for now, here’s my ImageEditor ported to App Engine. If you’re a Python guru, I’d love to hear your feedback/suggestions.

Demo (requires a Gmail account): http://pjf-imageeditor.appspot.com/
Source Code: imageeditor_v1.2.zip

By the way, Google authentication isn’t actually necessary for the application to run on their servers, I just put it in to see how the Users API works.

The Good News
I just cleaned up the original ImageEditor code and added some additional updates that were submitted by David Fuller, Olli Jarva, and Simon Jensen. The updated version now supports jpeg, gif and png images, and has additional effects. You can download it here: http://www.ajaxprogrammer.com/?p=9.

The Bad News (well, not really)
Version 2 is now on hold indefinitely due to a new, personal software project that I’ve begun with a few others. I can’t really say much about it at this point, other than that the prospects are exciting. It will be open source, of course.

Today I started coding the interface for ImageEditor v2. In this version, I’ll be leveraging YUI, including the TabView, Button and ImageCropper controls. And, I must say, I’m very excited about the preliminary tabbed interface design. It packs a lot of functionality into a small area, and allows editing tasks to be clearly separated. This version will no doubt be a heavier application than the original, but creating the interface is proving to be much easier. In addition, I have received code contributions from v1 developers which will be bundled into this release, including security updates and image effects (not shown here).

Stay tuned…

A little known “gotcha” of CSS backgrounds is this: if the background (or background-image) declaration contains a url parameter, and that parameter is empty, the browser will attempt to fetch an image regardless, triggering a duplicate request/response cycle for the parent document.

Example:

<style type="text/css">
    #myDiv {
        background: transparent url() 0 0 no-repeat;
        /* IE6 */
        _background: none;
        _filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='', sizingMethod='crop');
    }
</style>
<div id="myDiv">Some content</div>


So, be careful when populating CSS background images dynamically in server-side code. Always check to make sure the url argument exists and, if it is empty, omit the url parameter from the background declaration, or set the background-image declaration to none. If you’re using an AlphaImageLoader for IE6, remove the _filter declaration entirely or set it to an empty string (e.g. _filter: '';).

[NOTE: If you’re viewing this via RSS, go to the actual blog post for the media player demo.]

This past week, I saw an interesting presentation by Ian Rogers on media applications. Ian demoed the new Yahoo! Media Player, which is yet another example of Yahoo’s ass-kickin’ engineering talent. So, without further ado, let me take you on a wild, guitar-shredding journey back to Pete Frueh circa 1992-1993.

Mindless Cackle
Yoshiko’s Massage
The Pinnacle
Jazz Improvisation

FYI: The first three instrumentals are original, written by yours truly. The last one is based on some jazz tune I can’t remember the name of. They were all pulled off of an old, worn-out 4-track cassette recorder, hence the crappy sound quality. And BTW, if you’re wondering, I suck at Guitar Hero.