tspore.com

Children's Dental Group

2010-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Spaceshipdentist, is a massive beast that they wanted to convert to a CMS. This has lead to 11 different domain names all posting to various pages. We have used Modxcms, to manage this project, and really has come out very well. A lot of SEO work performed by someone else has been done, so we had to match page titles, create 65+ 301 redirects, etc. All in all I think that both the client and our team is very proud of this site.

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Spaceshipdentist

Fillmore Paragliding Launch

2010-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

The Fillmore Paragliding launch is a beautiful place which overlooks the valley. Overall I really enjoy the 10 minute drive to the top to see the valley. It was a bit overcast on the day of this shot, but still it is quite a beautiful place to live. On a clear day you can see the islands.

Fillmore City Hall

2010-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

To get this entire scene I had to use the 8mm fisheye. I have never been a huge Fisheye fan, but to tell you the truth in this case it was a life saver. I tried with the 7mm-14mm but I couldn’t get the whole shot.

Also the City hall is as far as I can tell the tallest building in town. Unwrapped the shot is ok, but I think that the movie is very pleasant to look at. Really I could spend all day looking at these pictures. The biggest disadvantage, was I didn’t quite get the pavement 100% with the lines. But I wasn’t doing this for a client, so I only did it once. (Also you can see me in the reflection.)

The Fish Hatchery

2010-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Fillmore Fish Hatchery, is one of my boys most favorite places to visit. Lot’s of fish, birds, and room to run makes it a frequent visiting place for us. Really I think I like the photo more than the video but all it all I think they both work. I don’t know how it happened but their are a few odd bright spots in the photo. The peeling of a 360 degree photo with a straight road is neat to look at too.

Casey's room.

2010-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

This was my first attempt with my current Equipment setup last year. I waited till the light in the room was nearly perfect. But after the first set of shots, I had to use the internal light, so its still good but not perfect -

This shot wasn’t really thought of to be used as a movie, until I assembled it, but I didn’t have a image of the floor So the next morning I shot the scene over again. All in all It is a beautiful photo, just have to crop off some floor, and I would be proud to show it off.

The next day I did shoot the same scene with a top and bottom picture so that I could make a 360 degree movie out of it, but the lighting wasn’t as good.

Really the lesson here is know what you want to do with a photo before you take the picture. (Of course I could always crop down the 2nd one for a print if I wanted too).

Below is the first attempt, not bad for a first attempt, with new equipment. But I think I am going to like this rig.

Equipment

2010-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Here is my basic equipment that I use to make these shots.

Lenses and Cameras

First let me say this I am a 4/3 SLR user. I personally love the system, so much that I started fourthirdsphoto.com . With that said I have basically 2 lenses that I use to create 360 degree panos - the 7-14mm, and the 8mm fisheye. The rectangular 7-14mm is probably the highest quality ultra wide angle lens I have ever owned. I have so little work to do with the images even at 7mm (35mm equiv. 14mm), that it is a no brainer to use. The 8mm fish eye too is a very fine quality lens, but I usually reserve it for very tight quarters such as the back door shot of the city hall. You can use any 4/3 slr but I usually use the E-30 or E-3. I am still waiting to try out the Micro 4/3 version of the 9-18mm but for overall perfection I prefer the 7-14mm.

tripod and heads

Overall I have a Carbon Fiber tripod, but any high quality tripod will work. But for a head I have been using Acratech’s products for years. They are top notch, and makes creating a Pano simple. The 3 products are - the GP ballhead, L Bracket, and the Nodal rail. The GP ballhead can be turned upside down - to provide a level base (This change takes about 1 minute - Beat that with any other system)

The Nodal rail, and L-Backet, allow 2 important features for 360 degree panos. #1 - lets you place the camera vertically with the L bracket. Which allows you to pull in most of the field of view. #2 - the Nodal rail let’s you run the nodal point, basically the optic center of the lens above the pivot point. To have a balanced photo.

The equipment is light, and compact. It is quick to setup, and travels well. Really this is the best pano system I have found any where.

Software

I use Auto Desk Stitcher Unlimited to process the shots. It is expensive, but the best that I have found. I basically convert the shots to medium sized jpgs (about 1000px vertically) then use the software to automatically stitch them together.

Finally I use VR worx application or Cubic converter to make my final shots. All in all that is how I do it. A lot of software is involved, such as the raw converter in my case Aperture. Photoshop, if its a HDR - then that software, and then Stitcher, and finally either Cubic converter or vr worx. Really I prefer cubic converter over VR Worx - just because of simplicity.

More info:
Acratech
Autodesk
(I do receive a small amount of money from clicking on the links above.)
cubic converter

Monitor Resolutions

2010-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

Overall monitor resolutions have grown from 800 px wide to nearly all monitors have grown to at least 1154 x 864. Overall, I see no reason to build a website to at least 950 px wide. Below is the top 10 resolutions of monitors browsing my sites.
Resolution - # of visitors
1280 x 800 - 19140
1680 x 1050 - 19110
1280 x 1024 - 1200
1920 x 1200 - 14650
1024 x 768 - 14062
1440 x 900 - 13382
1920 x 1080 - 3914
1600 x 1200 - 3647
1366 x 768 - 2805
1152 x 865 - 2213

Mobile Browsers in 2010

2010-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

As we talked about in The Google Beast we attempt to focus our time around the 80 - 20 rule. These rules do change over time, but here is a prime example of that theory in practice. On a look of mobile viewer on one of our large sites we broke it down too 5 players in this market.

The Numbers

We had over the last 30 days around 1,824 viewers who surfed the site. Of that group 1,600 used an apple device (e.g. 87%). 110 users (6%) used an Android based device. Only 69 users were on BlackBerry a small 3%, which was some what surprising to me. The last group each at less than 2% were Windows, PalmOS, and/or some other mobile device.

The Results

With this knowledge we have to ask ourselves so what does this mean? Basically how can we use the 80-20 rule? Both Android and mobile Safari are WebKit based browsers. This means we have a very robust device, which can use some very robust JS libraries, and CSS3, etc. So between Android, and iphone we have around 94% of the market.

Will the website look odd on a blackberry, maybe, but if we can grab 94% of the web, make it look very nice, then perhaps we can ignore the others. Or provide a simple view for that last 6%? Our friends at Aumnia , really are doing some very advanced techniques to deal with mobile websites. If you want to learn more check out their site.

The Numbers

Apple - 1,600 - 87.7%
Android - 110 - 6%
BlackBerry - 69 - 3.7%
Windows - 13 - 0.7%
PalmOS - 6 - 0.3%
Other - 26 - 1.4%

M.GraniteCreek.org

2010-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

Well this was a last minute throw together for them. All in all we built it using jqtouch, and spent about a week or so on it. A few improvements, such as to get the calendar RSS feed to work (which is hosted by a 3rd party software solution) as well as add in a JS detect script which I haven’t finalized my mind on. But they are very pleased.

What it should do -

Many people have a lot of ideas of how a mobile website should behave. Basically I am a minimalist, I would say for a retail business it should contain a phone number, and a address. For the church, we also wanted to print out the upcoming events. Finally we wanted to give it a good look.

So for a mobile site it needs functionality as a top priority too. We wanted it to be accessible as a full blown web application to be launched off your home screen. All in all we are quite proud of this. To see the video click here

A Tutorial

2010-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Not a whole lot of information exists right now about Rails 3. Basically since I am building an application from scratch, I will run it with Ruby 1.9.1, and rails 3. If you are coming from rails 2.3.x than a few things have changed. I wanted to post a quick tutorial on how to get started.

First setup your project

If you are running rvm (as I am make sure that you have loaded rails 3) see this post for more info. Since you have rails 3 loaded, which you can test with - rails -v and it should read something like - Rails 3.0.0.beta, you can next run rails fish which will create the rails3 directory structure. Next step into the directory cd fish.

Second Add in HAML

Rails 3 allows for many plugins but I have only test Haml to date. Instructions exist for this here. One of the new features of Rails 3 is the new Gemfile.

In this file you will need to add gem “haml”.
next run - bundle install - and it will load all the gems for the application
Third run - haml —rails . to install the plugin.
Fourth under config/application.rb add the following code:
config.generators do |g|
g.template_engine :haml
end
Next the git clone:
git clone git://github.com/psynix/rails3_haml_scaffold_generator.git lib/generators/haml
Finally we need to start running some applications.

Building the Application

Now we have the basic’s setup its time to see if it runs -
rails server should start the server. Just to make sure that it all works correctly. Next we need to build in some scaffolding - Since we are building an application called fish let’s make some types of fish. rails generate scaffold Minnow name:string size:integer color:string for simplicity we only setup a few fields. After that is completed simply run rake db:migrate and it should create the database and fields as are needed. again run rails server to start the application navigate to: http://localhost:3000/minnows and you can add, show and remove all the little fish that you like.

Generator

Last is to note the Generator - rails generate to know which commands you can do from the command line:

ActiveRecord: active_record:migration | active_record:model | active_record:observer | active_record:session_migration |

Erb: erb:controller | erb:mailer | erb:scaffold |

Haml: haml:controller | haml:mailer | haml:scaffold |

I really am liking Rails 3 - Just to have the modular architecture is quite nice.