Dear Interwebs,

Is this possible?  I’d like to create a mouse-deformable elastic SVG image.  In other words, the user can click anywhere inside the image and drag the mouse around, and in response the object(s) underneath the cursor would be stretched in the direction of mouse movement, as if they were rubber sheets.  The clincher is elasticity — I’d like the distorted objects to animate back to their original shape on mouseUp or loss of focus.

I’ve been reading up on SVG animation docs last night and this morning, but I haven’t found any actual examples that come close to what I’m talking about.  Most of the tutorial sites deal with primitives (and justifiably so, of course), and this concept clearly involves  different stuff … restoring original positions of the nodes, etc.  Got any help?

Thx!

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Way, way back in aught 7, I wrote this rarely-read piece about the trials of converting the legacy PhotoCD (.pcd) format into something useful on a modern day computing machine.  The principle problem was that since no new files were being produced in .pcd format, the knowledge of how to correctly decode them was slowly beginning to atrophy, even though the spec was open and the source code to tools like ImageMagick was open as well.

Just last week, I received an email from Ted Felix, the PhotoCD decoding ninja who did all of the groundwork for the applications I mentioned in the original article. Since the piece has gone into read-only archive mode following the transfer of Linux.com from SourceForge to the Linux Foundation, I’m posting the info Ted sent to me here, instead.

The news is the launch of a new command-line tool called pcdtojpeg. Pcdtojpeg appears to use Ted’s luminance look-up-table (LUT), which correctly converts from .pcd’s weird PhotoYCC color model to standard sRGB without blasting out the highlights. I haven’t used it yet to report on any other fancy features, but it’s good to see work in this area continue.  I only wish it were pcdtotiff….

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If you haven’t already, please go over to this Pledgie campaign page and make a modest donation to help support the best volunteer-driven event for people who use free software and love graphics: Libre Graphics Meeting 2009.

LGM is half-workshop and half-conference; developers that work on all sorts of graphics programs gather together and collaborate on tools that make graphics better — we’re talking photography apps, drawing apps, pub design, 3D modeling, fonts, and this year even video editing.  But there are also a lot of “behind the scenes” projects and libraries that make an important contribution, too — from rendering SVGs to managing color to printing.  When the teams that build these libraries and applications get together in one place, it enables more innovation, better communication, and makes all of the apps rock that much faster.

But LGM has no corporate overlord to make it happen; it is completely volunteer-driven and self-supported.  There is no expo floor and there is no entrance fee; the conference depends on the kindness of the community to make the venue, accommodations, and travel possible.  And for the past three years, the community has come through admirably — helping bring the conference together and in turn reaping the rewards of better graphics on Linux, UNIX, Macs, and even Windows.

But wait, didn’t I say that LGM was only half workshop?  That’s true, because even if you’re not a developer, you’re welcome to attend,  and attend free of charge. You can learn how to help out, learn how to make better use of the graphics apps that you already love, learn about applications and features that are brand-new, plus enjoy demos and performances from the free graphics community.

So if you edit photos, sketch, paint, design, or build in 3D, for fun or for work, you’ve got something waiting for you at LGM 2009. And even if you can’t make it to Montreal on May 6-9, you can help make the conference bigger and better for everybody. All you have to do is visit the LGM Pledgie page and make a small donation.  Why not now?

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Earlier this week, Eye of GNOME dev Frederico Mena Quintero blogged about EOG and image management. I think EOG is great and all, but the best part of the post was that he reminded me of the now-defunct CompuPic, a pro-level (sort of) photo management app that for a brief period of time a few years ago was available for Linux.

It’s gone now, of course. But it was fun while it lasted. Ironically, the worst part was parenthetically attached to the same paragraph, in which he matter-of-factly said that these days everyone agrees that F-Spot is the bee’s knees of image management. Well, that’s just not true.

F-Spot is barely more useful than the back of a sticky note when it comes to managing your images. Image management for grown-ups is about the image metadata, and the only metadata that F-Spot thinks about are tags. Yikes.

Tags are a Web2.0 fad (hopefully soon to die in obscurity!) that have the unique distinction of growing less and less useful the more you use them. They don’t scale, they have zero context, and they’re all nonhierarchically equivalent.

Could you manage your digital music collection solely by creation date and tags? Not hardly.

I’ve worked as a photographer in two different contexts: in-house and freelance. Pros manage their photos with metadata-aware, smart tools like Extensis Portfolio and ACDSee. If you think that home users don’t have the same needs as pros, look forward one year. A year from now you’ll have twice as many images to keep track of as you have today. Pros’ problems are the same as home users’ problems, just a few years (or even months) ahead.

The frustrating thing is that there aren’t any Linux apps that intelligently manage photos. For a while there was imgSeek, but development of it seems to have stopped. What I’d really like to know is how hard-core Blender users do their digital asset management — it’s much the same as photos; different metadata in part of course. What do the troopers behind Elephant’s Dream and Peach use to keep track of the countless 3-D blends?

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