Bits and Pixels

Today I releases a couple of updates to my website. In order to test a few new features, I completely re-did the UI for the pictures. When you go there now you will see some polaroid-style photos. I was inspired by this post from the guys at ZURB. The albums view now shows some seemingly randomly positioned photos with a custom text that looks like hand-writing. I used the Google Web Font API for this. While being at it I also replaces all the head graphics with actual fonts. This reduces the number of requests made to fetch the data and the total amount of bytes loaded. In the next weeks I will try to roll-out some more features to the site. I plan to overhaul the portal page a bit and to optimize performance even more. By the way, you can now also reach this site at s13g.com :)

This week I've got a new toy: The Nikon D7000. Today I had a chance to test it for the first time. I am with my folks in Germany over the weekend and the weather is gorgeous. One of the great new features of the D7000 is that it can shoot HD video at 1080p and 24fps with auto-focus enabled throughout the shoot. I didn't have a camera that could shoot HD video before, except for my recently purchased Canon S95, which "only" shoot 720p. After some tests in the garden using flowers and fishes as my subjects I have mixed feelings, although I am mostly positive: The picture quality is stunning. Especially when watching the footage on a big 1080p screen. The DSLR lenses enable you to shoot with shallow depth of field which enables some quite professional looking shots. So what's the downside you might ask: Although the D7000 is able to focus throughout the shoot, the focusing technique used is not very good. The contrast detection mechanism forces the camera to focus in...

It's been a while since I wrote by last blog post. I've decided that it's time get the dust of this blog and to throw a new entry out. And again I hope, that this time I might be able to keep some more posts coming. Anyway, on to the actual topic of this post: I just released the source code of an application I worked on in my 20% time at Google. I called in PicView. It's a photo viewer application for Android. What can it do? It can download and show you photos from Google Picasa users. When you start up the application you can enter a Picasa user name, such as "saschah", which is mine. You will be presented with a list of albums of that user. A tap on the album will show you thumbnails of all the photos in that album. A tap on one of those - you guessed it - will show you the photo full screen. In full screen mode you can tap on the left or right-hand side of the photo to go back and forth the current album. The app is also caching heavily. Every download ph...