I finally had the time to put the finishing touches on my first open-source Rails project — Kropper, an easy-to-use image cropper that’s well-suited to cropping user-profile images and other cases where you want a cropped image to have a certain aspect-ratio.

Features

• It’s easy to use, and it looks pretty sweet.
• Very little Ruby code to add to your app, especially if you’re using attachment_fu to handle images.
• It works with either ImageScience or Rmagick as the backend image processor.
• It’s been tested in IE 6 & 7, Firefox 1.5 & 2, and Safari 2.0.4.
• You can decide whether images are just cropped to the shape of your cropping stencil, or also resized to actual size of the stencil.
• You can easily change the UI around—the appearance, size, and shape of everyting, including the cropping canvas and cropping stencil, are defined with CSS.

Here’s what it looks like. Click on the screenshot to go to the demo site, try it out, and get the source for Kropper (and the whole demo site).

Let me know what you think of it! Now if I can just find time to finish my Captcha plugin…

Update: Kropper now has a rubyforge project page!

A while back, Jossie, a friend of my girlfriend’s, decided she wanted to make someting for the UK charity site pimpthatsnack.com, which features giant versions of everyday snacks and treats, sells ads against their hyooge traffic, and donates all the skrilla to charity.

Now, most projects on the site are big candy bars or marshmallows or something, but Jossie had a better ideas — to make a giant version of one of those liquor-filled chocolate bottles. It was quite a process, with much scientific experimentation and sampling of the key ingredients. The girls loved it — getting drunk and eating chocolate at the same time. You can see the final product below. Click here to see more pictures and read about how to make one of your own >