Archive for February, 2008

Progress

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

After some early prototypes, proof of concepts and all round “learning” experience Tim and I have overhauled all that we have written and kept all functionality. My Uni days are now long gone, with every bit of 5 minute code at prototype easily taking 15 minutes to perfect… :)

Anyway, Tim has worked hard and put in some groovy functions, which in all means what we originally set out to do is *almost* complete – with one major flaw – we’re not *yet* storing anything.

This was our original problem, mulled over lunch whilst walking around the Business Park …

So, someone walks into a library and says … ‘I saw this book last week, in the history section and it was blue … do you know where it is now?’

The librarian replies ‘Do you know the Author, or the Title?’

‘No’ said the *now* frustrated customer…

Ah – but if we could somehow harvest the colours of a book, store them and allow users to search against them …

And this is how we were born!

Submit an ISBN

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

Wouldn’t it be great if you could submit an ISBN, and have Colourphon go away and find a jacket image for you?

Well now you can!

Try this out now!  and if you can’t find an ISBN to test, try this one: 0764555871

Cracked it!

Friday, February 15th, 2008

Yeay! Fixed a rather niggly bug.

Displayed colour counts were inaccurate, although the displayed colours were correctly identified as being the most prevalent in the image. This was a frustrating bug, as it meant that calculation of ‘percentage of image of particular colour’ could not be reliably calculated. I mean, I am looking at 36000 odd pixels, and the top colour is reported to have occured 12 times. hmmm.

The bug was mainly caused by an incorrect comparison, which assumed that all colours in the incoming array were repeated sequentially rather than randomly. All I had to do was check for existence of the key, rather than comparing the current value to the previous value. Voila.

go on, try it…