When did I become the Javascript guy?

I have been busy working on locidesktop.com lately. One popular feature request from the beta testing was to use website favicons, so that links become more readily identifiable – which I have implemented after several late nights, and abusing my quad core.

A few of the 3D Favicons used in locidesktop.com

I built a pipeline that downloads favicons, extracts PNGs which are then processed in to a 3D scene and rendered for missing resolutions (.ICO files can contain multiple resolutions). I've tweaked the way that the 3D icons are produced, and they are significantly better than my first attempt – although some do come out better than others.

The 3D icons are integrated in to locidesktop so that they are pulled in whenever you add a site to your desktop. At the moment I have about 20,000 of them, and I'll be adding more in the future.

The desktop editing interface has been polished considerably, and I think that it is pretty slick now, although there are still plenty of improvements to be made, especially in the area of context sensitive help.

If you really want a beta invite, let me know.

I've also created a test account so that I can demo the features of locidesktop.com without a login. The url is http://locidesktop.com/test/ to view the test desktop, and http://locidesktop.com/test/default/edit/ to play with desktop editing (but you won't be able to save).

As always, I welcome feedback…

This blog post was posted to It's All Geek to Me on Thursday December 3rd, 2009 at 8:08PM

3 Responses to "When did I become the Javascript guy?"

Jason

December 5th, 2009, 2:50 a.m.

Great work!

I think if you are going to compete with the Chrome/Chromium launch page (and sure-to-come follow ups from Firefox etc…), then you're going to need to embrace speed and no better way of doing that than using the new HTML 5 stuff like localstorage.

Then you can have an extremely fast, scalable system with ads (or what have you) stream down after the render of the initial page.
Olaf

December 11th, 2009, 9:35 p.m.

Hi Will,

Any chance you will make the code available? How about exporting the icons in .OBJ (WaveFront) format? I'd like to use some of those icons in Blender.
Will McGugan

December 13th, 2009, 11:28 p.m.

The site is now public beta, so feel free to sign up!

http://locidesktop.com/ [locidesktop.com]