Advanced Photo Resizing

This is some pretty crazy stuff. This technology could change the photography industry as we know it:

UPDATE: Web Design/Development

Well, after making about a half dozen designs I think we finally have come to a conclusion for my church's worship site. When I first started designing the site for my church they told me to just do whatever. I knew this was not a good idea because what I like might not be the same as what the church is wanting. It took a few of the "whatever I want" designs to help them realize they might want to have more say in this. So they sent me a ton-o-links and showed me sites they wanted to model after. HOORAY! I now have something to work with. I think the design I came up with might actually become the church's main site and then we'll model the worship, youth, and children ministry sites from it. It's a table/css base design. I'm really not crazy about using tables but they work for now and I'll continue to work towards making it all CSS. Like I did before in the previous post, I'm open for suggestions... oh yea, here's the link http://sterlingwoodworship.org/photo_main.html

Web design/development...

Well as many of you know I like to dabble in web design/development. The more and more I do it, the more and more I realize how hard it is. I've been able to fly by the seat of my pants on many sites but that was before I took on my church's worship site.

In the past, I would simply do what I wanted and the client would like it. This time around, between myself and the peeps at the church; we just can't decide on something. Now for starters, I'm an amateur web designer so it's hard for me to produce some of things being requested. I've gone through two (#1 , #2) designs so far and I think we're slowly getting there. So with all that said, here's the latest design for the site (it's only the home page and none of the links go anywhere). Let me know any suggestions, PLEASE!

Adobe Creative Suite 3...

I had the pleasure of attending a one-day seminar for Adobe CS3 today. It had it's ups and downs, but was still pretty sweet. There were two sessions you could attend, a print or web session. I went to the web session but probably should have gone to some of the print sessions. The Dreamweaver session taught me absolutely nothing, but I must say it was a pretty good one hour intro to the program. Then I attended the Flash session which was pretty good, it was rather basic so I kinda knew most of the stuff being covered but it's still such a complex program I'll take all the help I can get.
The third session covered Fireworks. This is the program that essentially replaced Image Ready when Adobe bought Macromedia. They showed us how to create a site starting in Photoshop, then moving it into Fireworks. I guess it's an alright method for doing a small simple site, but still gives some sloppy code. I think I'll stick to CSS.
The Photoshop session was probably my favorite. Our "teacher" was also a photographer, and a Nikon user at that, so he showed some pretty nice photography tricks. Really nothing I didn't already know, just really simple, slick ways to do it. One of the coolest things he showed us was how to take a 4x6 image and blow it up to a 30x45 (well at least that's as far as I got before I exhausted all the RAM on my MacBook Pro and the hard drive had to kick in) without distorting the image or losing any detail.
All in all, I feel like I know a lot more about the entire sweet and how it all works together, but still have a long way to go before becoming an ACE. It's back to the grind tomorrow...

Adobe Thermo

One of the biggest obstacles many web designers and developers have to overcome is how to "code the design". Well Adobe is at it again with Thermo. Here's a brief description from Adobe Labs of their latest project in trying to bridge the gap between designing and coding:

Check out the video demo!!

"Thermo" is an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs. Thermo allows designers to build on familiar workflows to visually create working applications that easily flow into production and development.

Features

• Use drawing tools to create original graphics, wireframe an application design, or manipulate artwork imported from Adobe Creative Suite tools.
• Turn artwork from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks directly into functional components that use the original artwork as a “skin”.
• Define and wire up interactive behavior, such as what to do when a user clicks on something, without having to write code.
• Easily design UIs that work with dynamic data, such as a list of contacts or product information, without having access to the actual data source. Design-time sample data can be used as a realistic placeholder when laying out an application, testing interactivity, and choreographing motion.

Applications created in Thermo are Flex applications that can be loaded directly into Flex Builder, providing a great roundtrip workflow for designers collaborating with developers. The designer's work can be incorporated directly into the production application with no loss of fidelity, and designers can continue to refine the design throughout the iterative development process.