For the first time, I actually implemented an idea I posted on this blog. Over the last few days I took some time and created some simple PHP scripts that do most of what I talked about in “Show Images Really Simple”.
It’s nothing really fancy, but it works (See a working example here). Oh, and I made it open source and called it “flabs file dump”: Fork me on Github!
Yeah, I know, there are millions of websites out there that do exactly what I need. But—you probably already know that—I am a minimalist. What I want is a webpage where I can easily upload pictures to and get a page with just that picture (but with some alignment and file information). And I want it to be simple.
My idea is to use Skitch (the most awesome Mac app for taking screenshots) and it’s ability to upload to FTP servers. Then I have a simple index.php and a .htaccess. The .htaccess tells the webserver to not show the image, but to call the index.php (a PHP script) with the filename as parameter. This script returns a small HTML page that embeds the original picture and beyond that it displays the filename, the file’s creation date a small textbox with the HTML code to embed the image with a link to this page.
Additionally, it would be quite cool to generate preview images (75x75px crop jpeg) automatically when first opening the images’ webpage.
And even more, it would be great to add an archive.php that loads all the information it can get about the files I uploaded (just a directory listening in PHP) and displays it sorted by date and with preview images. Furthermore, I would like to upload more than just images (like zip archives), but these files would not get special pages or previews.
Last night I couldn’t sleep. So I lay there awake for at least an hour and I thought of some things. Mainly just irrelevant stuff, but often I get some new perspectives on things just by letting my brain go out and do the job it does (hopefully) best, (re)organizing memories. Suddenly my stream of consciousness reached ‘alarm clocks’.
I had the (crazy) idea that it would be quite cool to have a super simple alarm clock that is actually user friendly. I don’t know what fancy clocks you’ve got but the most alarm clocks I own are much too complicated to set up for just letting them wake you on a specific time. Of course I know, they are not that difficult to understand that nobody could use them, but as my aim is to create the most perfect minimalism there is much room for enhancement.
What I imagined: A block of perfectly white plastic, about 10x5x2.5cm. On one side there is an almost borderless display (monochrome, but pixel-based and with high contrast, maybe OLED or something like that), on top is a huge button for ‘snooze’ and on both sides it has ‘arms’ you can move up and down (fancy levers) which also have an LED at the end.
It will behave like this: to set your alarm you just push both ‘arms’ up (enter alarm mode) and than you can set the alarm time by using the left ‘arm’ for setting the hour and the right one for the minute. Wait some seconds or push the arms up again and the display will say, ‘alarm set’ (yes, it should really use lowercase letters).
What happens if you wake up before your alarm clock? Usually you have to deactivate the alarm at all so it won’t go off later. With my alarm clock you just had to push the ‘snooze’ button once and it will ask you ‘already awaken?’. You then can either confirm this with another hit on ‘snooze’ (‘good morning!’) or you can, of course, ignore it and the clock will do nothing.
This morning I found Quicksand, a jQuery plugin for easy filtering of elements using really nice animations. Have a look, try it and say that it’s perfect for an archive page like the one tumblr uses. Sadly, you can’t change the template of the archive page on tumblr. (If I’m mistaken with this, please contact me!)
Well, let me tell you what archive page I would like to create (and maybe will create for another site in future): On top you have this tumblr-like selection of year, month and, as I would really like it, a tag cloud for a general filtering by subject/category. And, a search bar. Actually, I would like the search bar to be on the left, followed by the tag cloud in the middle and then the years and months. This area would have a fixed width so that you have to scroll vertically to reach the earliest years/months. And of course, you could combine these filters. Beneath that, I would like to see the articles put in little boxes similar to how they look on tumblr right now.
This is where Quicksand comes in. When you apply filters the new set of article boxes is instantly loaded via AJAX and replaces the currently visible ones using the effect Quicksand comes with. IMHO, this would be a pretty cool archive browsing experience!
Last summer a friend and I wanted to develop an iPhone game and came up with the following idea. Sad to say, we are both no iPhone developers and had no chance of realizing it. Nevertheless, I think the idea might be quite unique and maybe even cool enough to be actually implemented someday. (If you happen to be a developer and would like to do this, I would very much like you to contact me!)
Our concept was based on the idea of creating paper planes on your iPhone. When you start, you have a sheet of paper, which you can fold and turn by tapping on and tilting your iPhone in order to build your own paper plane model. Then you are able to paint it (e.g., by putting images on the sides and the wings).
The next step would be to let your paper plane fly (in 3D space, of course). You could on one hand throw it and let it fly on its own—e.g. in a virtual environment with special items like fans or walls—and measure the distance. On the other hand you could pilot your paper plane yourself and evade obstacles.
A final step would be to create an online platform to share your personal paper plane models and high-scores. Maybe later, you could even challenge a friend to play a multiplayer game with you (via WLAN or Bluetooth).
I just had a crazy idea: I blog about why I started a blog about crazy ideas.
Mostly, it was not a philosophical but practical decision. I made several attempts to write a regular blog about my life and the things I do, but it almost always turned out to be quite boring—even when I had something to write about.
Recently I wanted to try out tumblr for a new blog with minimalistic design and this time with real content and a concept that helps me to find ideas for new articles easily (and hopefully regularly). Since I’m a guy who considers himself creative and since I almost every day am annoyed by something (yeah, I’m very easily annoyed) and instantly have ideas how to make it better, I started thinking about writing these ideas down. First on my iPhone as notes, but then I chose to publish my best ideas on the tumblr blog I wanted to create anyway.
But why just ideas? Ideas can inspire you. Ideas can make you think of something you would never have considered in the first place. And ideas do that quite clearly whereas products mostly do not intent to inspire that directly.
And ideas have another real advantage. You can think of ideas, you can have ideas and you can communicate ideas without having to do any actual work (that’s the part I like most). I have, e.g., no idea how to build a glue that breaks on specific radiation, but I can think of it and can have the idea that it would be quite neat to have that kind of glue.
You see, ideas by themselves are quite effective and it’s not that hard to convey them. Besides that, I believe in creativity, and thus in ideas, lays the future of mankind. I know, it may sound quite strange, but when you think about it, or, when you think optimistic about it: It could be possible for mankind to resolve economic problems, make great materialistic standards possible for everybody, but then—what are we left with? I believe it’s our creativity—and that’s why I started a blog about ideas.
