8 Responses to “Sunday, October 10, 2006”

1. may
   October 9th, 2006 | 10:36 am

   wow, you got some nice pics of the planes! and your sis and zara too! :-) (i think it takes less time to load though when you put the pics in a slideshow)

2. Travis
   October 9th, 2006 | 11:10 am

   Looks like you guys had a good time and the dog had a GREAT time! lol

3. peliom
   October 9th, 2006 | 11:23 am

   Really? I thought the Slide Show was taking forever. I’ll do some side by side tests.

   The other thing is the Slide Show uses flash, which uses a lot of CPU in Safari. The images just sit there…

4. may
   October 9th, 2006 | 12:48 pm

   okay, I admit, I’m probably making up the “less time” thing…I guess I think it looks nicer and more compact in a slide show (we designers make up silly stuff like that when we don’t want to admit the real reason for something :-)

5. Q
   October 9th, 2006 | 1:38 pm

   Personally, I like the tall “essay” (or however you want to call it) format. Then again, I’m an impatient engineer and I know nothing about design.

6. peliom
   October 9th, 2006 | 3:05 pm

   For those interested, here’s what I was thinking about when I posted everything as a single image rather than a Slide Show, or a series of separate images:

   • Slide Show has non-trivial overhead, makes it slow to load the TikiRobot! home page every time I look at it.

   • A single image, loads over a single HTTP request, 1.2 MB. I could compress it smaller. Once it’s downloaded it stays cached and so doesn’t slow down page load after that. I’m actually displaying it at half it’s width, which is inefficient. You can see Full 599×12833 Image.

   • I like the minimalism, the lack of captions. Each of these pictures on their own is boring. Strung together in a strip, you don’t know exactly what is going on but you get the big ideas. I like the fact that the “bad” pictures (the ones with poor composition or very blurry) are actually my favorite ones: The first picture in the strip, heading out the door with Zara in the lead. And the in the middle of the strip, a blurry picture of a crowded Golden Gate Bridge zooming past. The shot was not intentially made blurry, but as it turned out it captures exactly how I was feeling at that moment.

   • I wanted to see how hard it would be author this format. It’s so plain and looks simple. But I wanted to create the image without using a photoshop-type of application to cut and paste all the images into a single image manually. Here is what I did:

   – In a text file, make a list of the images using local file:/// URLs
   – Use search-and-replace to wrap those URLs in a standard IMG tag with width=600 (I should have used 300).
   – add a BR tag between each IMG tag
   – Open the text file in Safari, all the images are loaded in a vertical strip.
   – Discover that if I use Safari to convert this page to PDF, there will be a bunch of page breaks, and there is no way to turn off page breaks
   – ( Actually, thinking about it now, I could have gone to Page Setup and defined a custom paper size that is veerrrrrry tall )
   – Resort to a custom command line application that converts a WebView to PDF which by totally weird coincidence I had written last weekend for another purpose.
   – Open this very tall, continuous “static slide show” in Preview, and save-as JPEG.
   – Upload to TikiRobot!

   Yes, I know am insane. For whatever reason I find it more enjoyable to generate images programmatically rather than manually cut and paste them, even if it actually takes longer (because of writinig custom software) to do it that way .

7. may
   October 9th, 2006 | 6:33 pm

   I think it’s the big blank expanse of gray that is sort of unsettling to see (as one waits for the download)…whereas with the SlideShow thingy it’s a smaller expanse of gray and you can read other stuff while you wait. Plus you have such nice captions :-)

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