Category: Technology

Categories
Graphics/CSS

Vector Magic: The tech that could, the company that could not

Vector Magic originated as a free online service hosted at Stanford University. You could upload a raster image, such as clip art or a photo, and use the service to generate a vector-based image. You could then export the image in a format such as SVG.

The service was simple to use and did an excellent job, especially if you’re not experienced with using tools like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape’s Trace functionality.

The developers behind Vector Magic split their software off from Stanford, creating a company named Vector Magic and began to offer the web services for a price. Unfortunately, the price was high: to download a vectorized image would cost about $2.50 American, which ended up being too steep for most folks.

The company then came out with a monthly “all you can download” subscription service, costing $7.95 a month. That’s not a bad price for the service. However, the company also demands that you maintain a credit card on file, which is something I’ve never been comfortable with. Again, a case of good technology but not the best business practices.

I looked forward to the long awaited Desktop tool, where I could create as many vectorized images I wanted without having to pay $2.50 per vectorized download, or tie into a monthly subscription service that wants to keep my credit card on file.

Vector Magic just announced the release of their first desktop product, this one for the PC. The Mac version will following in a couple of months. This is a production release—if there was a beta release, it wasn’t public. I tried the application and it is very efficient, and does a terrific job at converting raster images into vectors. For one license you can also run the application on two machines, though you have to activate the license on each machine over the internet. If something happens to one machine, an email to the company should be enough to open the license for install on another machine. Should be enough, as there is no formal deactivation process, like you would have with Photoshop.

However, the cost of the application is $295.00. This is more money than I’m willing to pay for a tool just to make a vector conversion of an occasional raster image. I’m not one to begrudge people making money off their work and products, but I’ve been effectively priced out of Vector Magic’s market. It’s time for me to return to an open source tool like Inkscape and regretfully leave Vector Magic for those whose use of the product either justifies the cost, or who have deeper pockets than mine.

Vector Magic desktop tool

Categories
Books Technology

Amazon S3 and Kindle

It’s not just SmugMug and other client applications that aren’t working because of Amazon’s S3 failure. You can purchase a book on Amazon, and it shows among your books in Content Manager, but the book won’t download. The same holds for any subscriptions you try to download.

You don’t get an error or a message. You just don’t get the book. I’ve been back and forth with Amazon trying to figure out why my new purchases weren’t downloading, until I saw the posts about S3. I’m assuming that the book files are stored in S3 storage. Understandable. What’s less understandable is the absolute lack of communication about why a book is not downloading.

I have to wonder if this isn’t related to Amazon’s new video download service. If so, then we may be in for some interesting times.

Amazon also put out a Whispernet upgrade today, and several people have been told this is the problem. However, if the issue was networking, we wouldn’t be able to access the store. We can access the store, but we can’t get our purchases to download. That strikes me as a storage access problem, not a Whispernet problem. Since the timing on this is identical with the down time on S3, I would say these two items are related. Either that, or Amazon is having a system wide failure.

Just received from Amazon:

I apologize for the difficulties you have experienced while trying to download from the Amazon Kindle Store. We are currently performing upgrades on some of our systems that handle file downloads like yours and this is responsible for the error you encountered. Please retry your download again in a few hours and let us know if this problem persists.

That’s the first time I’ve heard a system failure called an upgrade. Amazon is not handling this incident well.

Amazon is all better now and we’re able to download our books. One of the books I purchased was my own, Painting the Web. I just couldn’t resist seeing the whole thing in Kindle.

However, you can forget the “enough room to store 300 books” if you buy my book on the Kindle. The largest book I’ve had to date was 6MB. Painting the Web took a whopping seventeen MB of space. I’m not sure if it’s the heaviest Kindle book there is, but it certainly has to be up there with any others.

Categories
Internet

Streaming video from Amazon and Roku: a perfect match?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Amazon is releasing an upgrade on its video delivery system today. Unlike its previous offering, you’re not limited to a Windows only box in order to stream video to your computer. You also don’t have to completely download the video in order to start watching (similar to what’s offered in iTunes and AppleTV, as well as Netflix WatchNow).

An interesting twist on Amazon’s offering, which is going to make it attractive over Apple’s offering is it’s cloud-based support for videos. If you purchase a movie, you don’t have to keep a copy on your computer or backup storage. Instead, the video will be available at Amazon, ready to stream at the click of a link.

Amazon isn’t looking just to win within the computer desktop market, it’s also looking to connect this service to hardware devices, including Sony’s high-end Bravia line. Currently, you have to purchase an optional tower in order to access the video (and at $300.00, the offering isn’t cheap). Eventually, though, the web video service will be built into the television.

Another possible hardware partner for Amazon’s new streaming service is Roku’s new Netflix device, the small, video streaming device that currently streams Netflix’s WatchNow offerings. Roku recently announced that it is looking for additional content providers—with Netflix’s blessing, as Netflix is looking to place its service in other devices.

What Roku’s box needs from a service is streaming video, as well as cloud-based storage as the device has no storage of its own. The talk in the Roku forums is that the device will be streaming YouTube videos, but these videos typically don’t look every good on a larger monitor, like a TV; especially an HD TV.

Another strong Roku possibility is Hulu, the online video streaming service by NBC and a consortium of other companies. CBS now has new HD quality video streaming services that would also be excellent source for the Roku box.

However, what Amazon’s new service would provide would be a way to stream new movies. The Roku device is also capable of streaming HD quality video, which would provide an outlet for HD quality material from Amazon. The Roku box is also cheap, which can’t help but make it attractive to Amazon. In fact, the Roku’s price could be the key that enables mainstream switching to online video.

If Amazon does stream its offerings through Roku’s video box, the device could become the Amazon equivalent version of AppleTV, only cheaper, smaller, and with access to 10,000 free movies and TV shows in addition to pay-to-play newer offerings.

(Also see NewTeeVee, which wonders at a Amazon/Roku mashup)

Update I updated the text to reflect that iTunes does have the video watching capability as AppleTV. In addition, I adjusted the comments so that you can now leave your contact information.

Categories
Weather Web

Where or where is my Weather Underground

Looks like someone forgot to pay the domain renewal fee at Weather Underground:

update

The Weather Underground issued the following statement:

Hello Wunderground users. We first want to apologize for the connectivity issues that many of you are or have been experiencing. The problems were caused when someone at our domain name registrar inadvertently made a change to our domain name record. This essentially means that in the yellow pages of the Internet, they got our address wrong. Most people were left unable to the find our site and were instead presented with our registrar’s default page.

We’ve been working frantically here trying to do anything we could to minimize the damage. We’ve just received word that in about 2 hours most of the connectivity should be restored thanks to some quick work by our registrar. In the meantime if you’re in contact with individuals who cannot access the site through the wunderground.com domain name, please let them know that they can still access the site through weatherunderground.com.

Amazing how vulnerable we are to a slip in the DNS, eh?

Categories
SVG

Zooming with SVG

I wanted to highlight a comment Bruce Rindahl made to an earlier post (with his permission):

http://www.lrcwe-data.com/DeepZoom.svg is a modification of a project I have been working on. I hacked together some code to mimic the animation effect of the Hard Rock site. First some credits.

The original work was funded by the State of Colorado and Division of Water Resources. Earlier work by the Urban Drainage and Flood Control District.Everything was based on work done by (and GPL’d) at www.carto.net.

The animation was done using SMIL attributes in the SVG standard. It requires the Adobe SVG plugin. It will run on say a Windows 2000 machine in IE6 using a 5-year old plugin […]. The imagery is over 60 GB (almost 2 orders of magnitude more than Hard Rock) served up via an Open standard WMS server (Mapserver) via a Python based cache program (TileCache). Vector data is displayed via SVG using an open source database (PostgreSQL/PostGIS). Without the animation it works in Opera, Safari, Firefox3, and IE with the plugin. The animation works in Opera but has a bug in it which makes it jump – I am tracking that down. Safari should handle it soon. The animation can be jumpy at times but part of that is the coordinate system I am using. The Adobe SVG plugin struggles with numbers that high. Everything is controlled via JavaScript.

Bottom line for me – meh. The animation is cute for a while but it is not worth the extra overhead. Keeping all the downloaded photos just so the user always sees an image is not worth the memory required. The default display is just like Google maps which most users are familiar with. I agree with Mr. Ellis that the development tools are not there to match what is available for Flash but then who would build them when Microsoft won’t support it?

Unlike my earlier silly little example, Bruce’s work is impressive, especially when you consider that most of the technology and specifications used in the effect have been out for years, and it works with Adobe’s now old SVG plug-in in IE6. His work isn’t based on one packaged framework, either, and pulls together previous GPL’d work, as well as several open source technologies into one, cohesive whole.

Bruce also makes an important point: why do the effect? It takes up bandwidth, requires extra work, and what does the functionality provide, other than a few useful implementations like Google Maps? If you want to know why something like JPEG 2000 hasn’t been implemented in most browsers, and only brokenly with Safari (because of a broken implementation in the Mac OS X), it’s because few people are asking for this functionality. In addition, as Bruce notes, why would people expend effort when we know the work won’t work with IE?

I see work like Bruce’s and others as a worthwhile effort, regardless of Microsoft’s unwillingness to meet its earlier commitment to standards. Adobe’s SVG plug-in is not the only SVG plug-in, as Examotion is actively working on an SVG plug-in, which should handle what Adobe does, and more.

More importantly, the more we use these technologies, the more tools created, leading to more sophisticated works, leading to better tools, and so on. We have to prime the pump before we can draw water.

As for whether the effect is useful is really in the eye of the beholder. For instance, I don’t see that the previously linked Hard Rock Cafe’s application to be useful, especially given how limited the access is to the application. However, I’d like to have the pieces that go into the effect, of which Bruce has demonstrated an open source equivalent. (About the only thing missing is JPEG 2000 for advanced image compression. )

By having the pieces in place, we’ll be ready when we do get ideas of how these effects can be combined into something useful, or innovative.

Bruce also supplied a link to a variation of the application that works with Firefox, Opera, and Safari.