tomputer

Here’s a recommendation for a piece of softare I’ve been using for a couple of years. Autostitch is a fantastic piece of software for creating panoramic images and the results are nothing short of amazing. I’ve tried several photo-stitching applications in the past: some require lots of manual intervention to approximately align the photos in the correct order, others produce distorted or blurry images. Autostitch has none of these problems, just import a bunch of pictures and it works out which of them are part of the same scene (it will exclude any that don’t fit but it’s quicker if you only select the images you want to join together), it works out which images need to go where, and it then creates a single panoramic image. Another great feature is that it can create 2-dimensional panoramas - most other applications only create 1D panoramas so the camera has to be panned in the x- or y-axis but not both. This is great for creating an image where you can’t get a wide enough shot to include the whole scene -for example when photographing a building on a narrow road where can’t position the camera far enough away to fit it all in. Oh, and did I mention that autostitch is free?

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Intro
I’ve created a Chumby widget to act as a basic remote display for XBMC. I’ve been using it and reworking it over the last couple of weeks and I think it’s now in a state where I can make it available for others to try. It works by retreiving an RSS feed from the Xbox that contains a list of the next 5 tracks in the music playlist. If no music is playing, the RSS feed will be empty. To achieve this I’ve written a simple web page that sits on the Xbox and uses the XBMC API to retreive information about the current playlist. The widget also uses XBMC’s http API to provide basic controls to play, pause and skip tracks. This is my first attempt at using ActionScript so the functionality is fairly basic, but if others find it useful I may add more features, or release the sourcecode.

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I’ve been through a few different RSS readers over the past couple of years but recently had settled on FeedReader. It’s free, does all the basics very well and didn’t have any glaringly obvious features missing. Today when I launched FeedReader it prompted me to download a new version which I dutifully did but while at the website downloading the new release I read a user’s comment saying that it wasn’t as good as GreatNews so I headed over to the developer’s site (CurioStudio) to check it out and was tempted by a couple of items on the featurelist:

It’s fast even with hundreds of feeds - I must admit that FeedReader takes a while to startup and shutdown and ocasionaly to move between feeds, not an age but long enough to notice.

It has stats, and I’m a sucker for stats! I can see my most/least read feeds and the most/least active (by number of posts).

It has a “newspaper style” reading view. This is the biggest draw for me because it’s much easier to find interesting articles by glancing at a page that is made up of several stories along with their title, content and images rather than by scanning down a list of story titles like the tradition email inbox view. Take engadget for example: I’ve noticed that I read a lot less of their content in FeedReader because the story titles don’t grab my attention, but in GreatNews I can glance at the page and see images of shiny new gadgets begging me to read more. Take a look a the two screenshots below from FeedReader and GreatNews to see what I mean (it’s also possible to create custom view styles using css).

The other great thing about RSS readers (from a user’s point-of-view anyway) is that there’s a very low barrier to switching allegiance. I exported all my feeds as OPML from FeedReader and imported them into GreatNews in no time at all and all that I lost was the record of which feeds I had read and which had new unread content - I can easily live with that.