Vector Magic (Beta) IS AWESOME !

Few days back, i was posting a screencast on How to Enlarge Vector Picture Easily Without Losing Quality, this is one way to be able to enlarge an image IF you DONT have the original vector image !

Today when i go through my feed, Simon Willison posted an AWESOME tool to CONVERT ANY IMAGE TO VECTOR ! Brilliant ! And you know what ?! It's Flash ! Flex to be precise ;)

Vector Magic is the result of a Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research project by James Diebel and Jacob Norda.

Vector Magic is capable of tracing images and convert to a vector file, and with a PRECISE results ! Just upload your image and Vector Image will do the converting :D

I will try to give a few Highlights of what this Vector Magic is capable of (it's still even in BETA and am already very impressed)

1. Image Classification



First thing after you upload a picture if will automagically detect your picture's type. Currently they still only have 2 types, photograph and logo. This is not 100% accurate, so be sure to double-check, after it do the detection. But it should get the choice right most of the time ;)

2. Bookmark !



This simple information is brilliant ! If you had big picture to vectorize, and you can't even see the progress bar running, usually you leave the page open. But not anymore ! Just hit Ctrl-D and do somethin' else with your browser ;P

3. Zoom and Swap Your View !



After you get the result, the only thing you can do to check whether this Vector Magic did the job right or not, is to ZOOM in the result ;) Because you can see the quality of the vector more accurately if you can ZOOM in ;) And of course you have to compare it with the original image. And the Bitmap button did was a useful button ! Just a click, then you can view the original image :D NICE !

4. Geeky Enough ?



If you're curious, then play around ;)

5. Still Not Enough ?



Learn more about Vector Magic, they have a very descriptive screencast ;)

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The result is very nice :) maybe because the original image is nice too :P It might not look very good here (because i scale-down the image) Try to see the real size result by clicking me :D

Bottom words, you should really give Vector Magic a try ;)


[via: Simon Willison's Weblog]

Flex + Blogger = fBlogger

Continuing my previous post that mentioned fBlogger, here i gave you an update of fBlogger, this time i'll be continuing it using Flex ;)

So, until this point, here is where i've been :)

And for those who are curious, i got the data using php first, since Flash's SWF does not allowed to retrieve external data on cross-domain, this is due to the Flash's Sandbox policy (which is sucks :P)

Anyway, the data format that's been fetched using php is RSS, which is simple enough to parse in Flash, since it was an XML afterall :)

The link to post a comment will open in a new window, i'm planning to have it on the inside of the flash itself. But since i'm not very good at php, this might take a long time :P (have to learn about GET POST HTTP request etc. etc. in PHP).

So until then, enjoy the new fBlogger ^^

As usual, feedbacks are appreciated :D
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