Friday, January 1, 2010

Photobomb - I want to make the fun things fun

This morning while doing my normal blog skimming over my morning coffee, I ran across a link for the year's 10 best photo bombs. In the meantime, my son and daughter have been playing with their new Karmic equipped Dell mini 10v's including Cheese, and the pics from our recent vacation. Meanwhile, I've been eyeing PIL, wondering if the solution to our "we need a combination image viewer/very lightweight image editor" problem might be found there. All of this combined in mind into an app that I wanted to write.

This seemed like a great opportunity to make a fun app. Quickly was born for this. And thus, in an hour or two of hacking around while also hanging out with my family, Photobomb was born. the idea is that you load up an image, choose one or more photo bombs to add to it, and then you can save off the photo. It took a bit of learning to figure out how to set up masks and paste and such with PIL. But after that hurdle, I now have code that finds photo-bombs and adds them to the toolbar. So far I have one photobomb in place (the famous squirrel).

So was it fun and easy? I think PIL is a well designed API for the most part, but it was quite hard to find documentation on properly using masks.

In terms of PyGtk, notice that the Open dialog lacks filters and such. This is because code for adding filters and such is repetitive and *not easy and fun*.

See the documentation here. It's not particularly hard, but it is not fun either. As such, I think I may add some quidget.prompt calls, like quidgets.prompts.open_image(some basic stuff), and quidgets.prompts.save_image(some basic stuff). I suppose prompts for text file, music file, video file, etc... would also be good. Some one-liners could make apps like this more fun and easy to write.

3 comments:

  1. I think that adding comic style speech bubbles would be, erm, "the bomb" for such an application. Not ot get too carried away, but a few styles of bubble, with option to place it and also perhaps rotate so that the "arrow" point in different directions would be very cool. Perhaps it could be done using SVG so that it could adjust it's size to the text? Or maybe the other way around? I don't know enough about these things, but I think it could be hilarious. ;)

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  2. I agree with Stoffe. But, please, don't stop there. Why don't add more photos and make the first fun comic strip editor?

    I can imagine a web site full of funny geek stories!

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  3. Nice post. Thanks.

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