He's coming.
This matters. This is important. Why did you say six months?
Why did you say five minutes?
Tuesday, August 14
Here's a list of the words and colours available for menu items. Eventually I'll have a dynamic generator set up so you can use any word at all, but for now if you need other words you'll need to file a New Menu Item Request and wait a couple of hours.
more...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:24 PM
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Post contains 857 words, total size 17 kb.
Sunday, August 12
The new theme builder module in action. Well, almost in action.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:23 AM
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Post contains 14 words, total size 1 kb.
Friday, August 10
Click a banner. Any banner.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:13 PM
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Thursday, August 09
Here's a sample with an ad, the mee.nu logo, and the menus overlaid. It's a little busy at this size; making the main banner section larger helps with that.
You can choose from white or black text for the system menus. Other colours maybe later.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:26 PM
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Showing off some of the more advanced text styling features:
Since I don't have time to produce an extensive library of text effects, I've just added a feature to create the text from an image. The Morning Coffee example actually uses the kitten image for its text - and vice versa.
If you use an image for your text, the system can't (yet) automatically defringe shadowed text. Manually setting the background colour to orange did the trick for the Hothouse example.
As usual, click for biggie-size.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:05 AM
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IT WORKS!!!
Now admittedly I've spent most of today yesterday on subpixel optimisations, because that's what I do (and because at typical monitor resolutions, subpixel optimisation matters). It's so cool when you nudge this to the left by exactly half a pixel and that little artifact just POP and disappears.
I still have to finish putting together the page that lets users access this, and note that I did spend a minute or two cropping these images rather than letting the system do it automatically. But all the effects are applied by the system with a single function call.
Typical generation time is 300 to 400ms on the test system.
The final two problems were both related to drop shadows: Removing the fringes on shadowed text without affecting anything else, and removing artifacts from the shadows on the rounded corners, which were generated by overlapping shadow sublayers. That one was an example of a half-pixel nudge.
There are a lot of subtleties that aren't immediately apparent. The text has a dropshadow. The shadow isn't just gray; it actually darkens the pixels underneath. It has to precisely follow the contours of the text, but never show through the text, even though the text itself is partly transparent. (Technically this is wrong; the opacity of the shadow should be multiplied by the opacity of the text and the resulting fainter shadow should show through. In practice though, this looks terrible.) The text has to be anti-aliased with the background and with the shadow, and the outer edge of the shadow has to be anti-aliased against the background as well. And because the shadow is composited with the background using itself as a mask, you have to actually use the square root of the desired opacity when drawing the shadow.
Little things like that, but you know when you've got them right:
(Click for biggie size.)
The menu text, ad and logo are overlaid by the browser, so they don't show in these samples.
These don't showcase all the features yet; I'll work up some more examples once I have the user interface up and running.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:24 AM
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I need a life.Monday, June 25
Wickedpinto tagged me:
Each person starts with 7 random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to then report this on their own blog with their 7 things as well as these rules. They then need to tag 7 others and list their names on their blog. They are also asked to leave a comment for each of the tagged, letting them know they have been tagged and to read the blog.Well, okay then:
- I have broken every major bone in my body, with two exceptions.
- My favourite sport is parasailing. I do this every Sunday without fail, except when I am actually in traction. (See 1.)
- I own a 6-foot teddy bear named Inigo Montoya.
- I once ate an entire Thanksgiving turkey without gravy.
- I am a tetraploid mutant, having 92 chromosomes. I also have two livers.
- Despite that, I am unable to metabolize alcohol. Any alcohol I consume remains permanently in my system, like dioxins do for other people.
- When asked to provide random facts about myself, I invariably lie.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:52 AM
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Post contains 169 words, total size 1 kb.
Wednesday, June 20
I've been working with our graphic designer on a new template design for mee.nu, and this is an example I've worked up:
more...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:39 AM
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Post contains 92 words, total size 1 kb.
Friday, June 15
mee.nu is live.
The queue forms here.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:26 PM
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That banner up top is the draft version of our ad-supported site banner. Yeah, it's a bit too busy, particularly on this site; I'll be handing it over to our designer who's working on the new standard templates to produce a nice clean version.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:57 AM
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Post contains 47 words, total size 1 kb.
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