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…

Tim Lucas, of the very popular toolmantim.com Rails blog has saved me a good deal of work by wrapping the Kropper code into a Rails plugin. He’s also using Kropper on webjam.com.au. This is great news, and it’s really gratifying to me that a) people like my first open-source project enough to contribute code to it, and b) someone as smart and talented as Tim is contributing. I’ve read Tim’s blog quite a bit since I started working with Rails, and it feels great that to be collaborating with one of the people I’ve learned from.

Update: Tim has finished his pluginized version of Kropper! You can access his plugin source via SVN or your web browser here: http://rubyforge.org/scm/?group_id=3936. I’ll post another update when I get around to refactoring the demo app to use the pluginized code.

http://dailyfratze.de/ is a website that lets users create their own ‘picture-a-day’ photologs. It’s a very cool service, and a great place for Kropper to be used. When users upload their photos, Michael’s using Kropper to let his users control how their images get cropped to the right format for their daily photologs. Now, let’s get this site in English!

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 >