What is Simler?
November 29th, 2009
A few weeks ago welikesmall and I launched a new site for Sarofsky Corp. a design driven production house based out of Chicago, IL. They do amazing video work – I’m a big fan of theirs.
The site is running a 100% custom Django based CMS that allows users to easily upload new projects, including production stills, multiple videos, downloadable media and other information. It also includes an externally embeddable Flash video player that I wrote which allows users of the site to embed videos anywhere they want.
I did all of the development work – which utilizes both heavy Python scripting on the backend, but also quite a bit of jQuery work on the front-end. I ended up using SWFObject 1.5 because when I used 2.0 it wouldn’t allow me to effectively clear out an asynchronously loaded SWF and replace it with static content. Odd.
You can see this site @ http://www.sarofsky.com.
This is pretty exciting for me, and I think that after all of the hard work we put into that site the entire team at Odopod deserves a hearty congratulations… I’m really glad to see this site receiving the recognition that it deserves.
Also – it’s nice to see the CMS getting some of the attention – although I’m biased – because I wrote this one.
Yes, it’s true. I’ve resigned from position as Senior Developer for odopod. I really enjoyed my time there and I learned a great deal from both the partners as well as my colleagues – and I wish them all the best.
I just found myself increasingly drawn to my freelance work, as well as my various personal projects – most of which sit unfinished (including this website). I’m excited to have a chance to revive some old stuff, and introduce you to some of things Kiala and I have been busy dreaming up these past few months.
I’m very lucky to know a fantastic group of wonderfully successful people who have been able to provide me with steady work so far, but I’d always love to hear about new projects – you can reach me @ dane@doesnotvalidate.com.
I’ll be updating this site with my most recent launches – like this project that I worked on with the guys over at Instrum3nt for DC shoes, and the new Odopod site.
I’ve got some really exciting stuff happening in the next few weeks, and I’m very optimistic about the future. Thanks to everyone who helped get me here.
In the past few months I’ve launched a few projects – I’m planning an in-depth post about each of them, but for now here’s some images and links.
I can’t seem to get sorl thumbnail to play nice with transparent PNGs, it keeps adding weird black and grey backgrounds because it’s doesn’t maintain the alpha channel in it’s output.
Python’s PIL Module uses different versions of the Image.save() method depending on the format of the image being saved. sorl thumbnail uses the following call when it creates the final image output:
im.save(self.dest, quality=self.quality)
This call utilizes a parameter call quality which, according to the documentation is only available on JPEGs. Even changing the THUMBNAIL_EXTENSION in my settings.py file to “png” still didn’t make it maintain the alpha channel the way I had expected it to. Bug 56 is currently open for this issue at the sorl thumbnail project home.
The solution
I wanted to setup a way to pull the images off of the transparency resize them and then drop them on an opaque background of it’s own independent size.
So the first thing I did was to load in an image via PIL:
im = Image.open(filename)
So now that we’ve got our image we need to create the opaque background for it… right now we’ll just use a solid black one. Use the following PIL method call to create a background at an identical size to the original image:
bg = Image.new('RGBA', im.size, (0, 0, 0))
At this point I’ve got two images, im the logo file and bg the opaque black background. Using the PIL paste method I can stick there two together.
bg.paste(im)
which gives us the following image:
If you’re like me, you’re like – “WHAT THE HELL?!?! I just pasted a transparent PNG on a black background, why is it all white???” The answer is because you didn’t tell Python to maintain the alpha channel when it pasted.
The way that PIL deals with transparency when saving or pasting PNGs (that have a mode of “RGBA” or “P”) is to allow for a “transparency” parameter which is an integer from 0 – 255 which is sort of like a transparency tolerance for that image, and represents the “opaqueness” of the pixels to maintain transparency for. Since this is different for every image what we need to do is just maintain the value of the PNG we’re working with.
Note: that if you paste an “RGBA” image (WE ARE!), the alpha band is ignored in a paste. You can work around this by using the same image as both source image and mask – like we have below. More information at the PIL Handbook
Change the paste call to look like this:
bg.paste(im, (0, 0), im)
which produces this:
This is one of the first projects I worked on with STRUCK over a year ago for laminate floor manufacturer Pergo.
While we were busy building the site – Pergo was purchased by another company, and we were never sure if the site was going to see the light of day.
Well today it finally launched.
The site is written on this massive .NET e-commerce engine and I was in charge of all of the backend programming work, as well as managing the .NET + AJAX + Flash integration points.
URL: http://na.pergo.com/
URL: http://www.timberlinelodge.com
Agency: Nemo
Role: Lead Developer
Technology: PHP / Wordpress
Featured in the Wordpress Showcase
Hallo, Dit is Struck from Jeramy Morrill on Vimeo.
This video makes me feel all warm and nostalgic on the inside, like a cup of hot cocoa. Congrats to the team @ STRUCK! I miss you guys… especially GareBear!
John Stainer from Battles pays a visit to the Seoane studio.
via kotaku
