After much uploading of photos and typing of text, my friend and fellow sculptor Steve Shaheen has told me I can take the wraps off of Tuscany Study, a website I recently built for his painting and sculpting courses in Italy. This was a fun project that allowed me to design a look that balances a rich, earthy color scheme with an elegant, contemporary aesthetic. It was also fun to help Steve figure out how to distill and present information about his courses to prospective participants. After building the site, I can’t wait to get to Italy myself. Who knows, maybe this will buy me a free trip…

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!

I was just going through Google’s results for MoodLogic, a company I used to design software and webistes for (I was *ahem* Director of Product Design *ahem*) to see if I showed up anywhere, and I came across this blogger’s old review of our MP3 jukebox software. Here’s some of what he had to say:

Ran into the MoodLogic 2.0 MP3 organizer this morning, and I think it’s the best answer I’ve seen to everyone’s growing MP3 libraries.

It’s really nice to see grassroots appreciation like that for something I helped create, even if it was so long ago. MoodLogic had its problems, but many of them were due to the time it was founded (right before the dot-com crash in 2000) and there were a lot of smart, hardworking people who put their best efforts into the company. Now if iTunes would just incorporate MoodLogic’s technology, life would be sweet — no more untagged MP3s and useless genre information!

City Creator is a fun little site that lets you easily create your own pixel-art cities like the recently-mentioned Lovepixel. The site is really simple and lets you get started making your own city right away — no account registration required. You choose a city theme (currently there are three — futuristic Blankton, snowy Snoland, and medieval Medieville) and begin creating your city by drag and drop. When you’re finished, you can save your city design or send it to a friend, but to do so, you have to register.

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