Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Improvements on the sticker art creator

The previous version of polychrome, my nifty tool for wasting your company's stickers, only supported a limited set of embedded images. And even though those images had been carefully chosen, there comes a time when you want to experiment with more personal pictures. Enter the new version: you can now upload your images and have them converted.

You might have noticed that I emphasized the word upload. That's because when you do that, you don't really upload anything anywhere. I'm just using that particular interface to allow the browser to get access to a local file that you choose. If you don't trust me, just disconnect from the network after loading the page: the application will run unaffected.

Also, you will now see the number of stickers that will be needed for your creation (lots of them) and you can automatically apply a zoom to shrink your image to more realistic dimensions.


Oh, and sorry Internet Explorer and Safari users, but the File API is not supported by your favorite browser: you will still be limited to the selection of embedded images. Everything works fine with Chrome, Firefox and Opera on Windows. If you have tested other combinations, either working or not, just let me know.


Technical details


The reason I used the upload/FileReader API from HTML5 is simple. I first thought that just allowing the user to type in a URL would be enough. The application would load the image into the page, draw it, do some computation, and display a nice sticker chart. Except that does not work, because of security limitations. The "Same Origin" rule makes that impossible. When you try it, you end up with an image that you can display, but JavaScript cannot get access to its individual pixels and cannot do anything with them. It's essentially a write-only image. Useless.

So I crawled the web, looking for an online HTML5 Photoshop-like application where it was possible to upload images, willing to learn how that magic was possible. I finally found http://evanw.github.com/webgl-filter/. It's basically a WebGL effects demo, but what interested me was the upload function. It turned out it was quite easy. Just an old <input type="file">, then a FileReader plugged on the selected file, and with readAsDataURL() and putting the result as the source of my image, everything worked perfectly.

All in all, this small experiment taught me a few new tricks of HTML5. It's really becoming a nice platform for all sorts of applications.

If you are interested in code, have a look at the source on github.

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