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.
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…
Turning website favicons in to 3D
The feedback I recieved from Reddit about locidesktop.com (my hobby project) was encouraging.
If you would like to join the beta program for locidesktop, please leave a comment below…
One of the comments pointed out that although there is a large choice of icons available, there isn't always a clear recognizable image for each site, and it would be nice if locidesktop would use ‘favicons’. I had considered using favicons previously, but rejected the idea because they are just 16x16 pixels in size, and I wanted to use large images for icons.
I didn't want blurry scaled icons either, and I may have abandoned the idea if a Reddit user hadn't pointed me at this which recommended embracing the pixelated look of favicons for use at desktop icons. I figured I could take this idea a step further and render 3D images from any given 16x16 image, using a combination of Python, Mako templates and Povray – the same combination of technologies I used for my (now defunct) 3D pie chart project.
