June 18th, 2007 by acqualia
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In our rush to get 1.0 of Picturesque out before the close of the Apple Design Awards, we didn’t give the image resizing features the love and attention they deserved.
As a result, our current implementation of resizing is less than great, and images loose a lot of their quality when scaled down in Picturesque.
Resizing isn’t technically beautification, but it is one of those day-to-day tasks that people do a lot and neither Preview or iPhoto do it well. In the past I’ve used Photoshop for most of my image resizing, which seems like overkill for such a simple task.
So one of the most frequent requests we receive is for better resizing in Picturesque and we’ve been working on integrating a new resizing algorithm into the app, which will be part of the next update.
Here are some samples of the old resizing algorithm quality verses the new resizing algorithm quality:
As you can see the improvement is pretty dramatic:
Expect the update in the next week or two, and keep your improvement suggestions coming.
-Zac
June 14th, 2007 by acqualia
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I’m ecstatic to announce that Picturesque has won an Apple Design Award in the student category. Nik Youdale and I are at WWDC in San Francisco at the moment, and last night we were called up onto the Moscone stage to receive one of Johnny Ive’s gorgeous glowing cubes.
This is a dream come true for us, it’s just totally awesome and we’re over the moon.
We only learnt Cocoa last year and this year we get to go back to Australia with a design award.
We’d like to give a big thanks to the AUC for sponsoring our trip to WWDC, and thank you to everyone who has downloaded Picturesque and given us feedback.
April 24th, 2007 by acqualia
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I’m very pleased to announce we have a new application in the works. It’s called ‘Picturesque’ and it’s our most “delicious” app to date, with a very simple “drag and drop” style metal UI, a few animations, and a sleek black inspector.
The word “Picturesque” literally means visually attractive, and the point of the app is to beautify images (in batch too).
Inspired by Apple’s use of gorgeous images on their website, we’re kicking off with 6 tasteful effects in 1.0: Reflections, Shadows, Glows, Strokes, Curves, and Fades.
Here are some examples of images beautified with PQ (Picturesque acronym) and you can see a quick movie of PQ in action here.
March 1st, 2007 by acqualia
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What is Qualia?
Welcome to the Acqualia blog! I’m going to kick off by explaining what “qualia” actually means because I keep getting asked.
The cool thing about the universe and how we as minds relate to it is that each of us experiences things in the world in a totally unique way.
For instance, both you and I could eat two parts of the same chocolate bar, and yet the experience of tasting the chocolate will be subtlety for both of us.
I can never really know exactly how you feel about chocolate. You could try explaining it to me, but words will never convey the richness of the experience itself.
This is called the “qualia” of the chocolate, I have my own qualia of the chocolate which is completely unique, and will never be exactly the same as your qualia of the chocolate.
Everything that we can relate to has a qualia, an early morning sunrise, a piece of jazz music, the smell of baking muffins.
Each of these will be experienced by each of us differently. So what does this hae to do with software developing? Not much. I’ll post something on our upcoming application “Picturesque” next time.
