Finally available for us to use it! What can we do? No only explore but also create!
So how does Photosynth work? Photosynth analyzes your photos for similarities to your other photos in the set and then uses the information to estimate where the photos were was taken from. Photosynth then re-creates the place the photos were taken and uses that as a canvas to display your photos. Pretty neat huh? The work done in analyzing your photos is done via the above mentioned Photosynth plug-in.
Windows Vista Team Blog
I’ve found an interesting project of the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies. It allows to create 3D models from a video.
Select the points in several frames to catch all perspectives, then a 3D model is made using the video images as textures.
You can see the video and read more about this project in this website.
Yesterday I took a look at Songbird Media Player. I must admit that I was very excited as a read about this open source media player. why? Because it has many things that look like my favorite web browser: Firefox! 
The screenshot bellow shows the default look & feel of this application that looks a lot like iTunes. I like a lot the library navigation. You can filter the musics by year, artist and album in a simple way.
How about Firefox similarities that I talked about? Here it goes. It is “developers friendly”. Has themes and add-ons support like Firefox. It allows tabbed browsing with a Firefox-based internal browser. As you can see in the screenshot below some interface elements like options and Add-ons menu are similar to the analogous ones in Firefox. Almost a copy of them, which can be nice while getting used to Songbird interface. This project is powered by Mozilla (which explains a lot 
).
The screenshot below which shows a album browser isn’t a built-in feature. It is a Java-based add-in which I installed. Looks nice but has some issues about resizing, and hangs a little bit too… You can navigate through the add-in list in here.
My deception was when I played some songs… Songbird takes a lot of memory and CPU usage in order to work.
I’ve tried iTunes 7.5 and tough it uses an considerable amount of memory it almost “doesn’t require” CPU time. I must confess that this memory usage of 47Mb doesn’t bother me. 2Gb of RAM is enough to handle it And I’m used to Firefox memory usage as you can also see in the screenshot.
With Windows Media Player 11 I had some great results about both CPU and memory. It is the least I can expect with a media player built-in into the operating system.
I must confess that I don’t use media players that often, and when I use it’s just to listen to music and leave the player running in background. Songbird seems promising, but for now I won’t use it because it doesn’t fit my needs (low memory, low CPU,shuffle and playing!). Although my experience wasn’t good, don’t stay stick to what I have written. Install it and give it a try!
Have you ever heard aboutsplashup? Maybe Fauxto (which was a previous name)?
I haven’t heard about them until I found Splashup on the web.
This is a tool that allows you to edit your images using a Adobe Flash based interface. You can edit files from your hard disk or access your Flickr, Picasa or Facebook images and photographs. It is great when you are in a public computer without any good software to edit some photographs you want to put in your blog. Upload your image, resize, crop, apply some effects and publish into you Flickr account or download it into the computer.
You can edit several images at the same time, and even work with layers! I was really amazed while I tried it out. It is in Beta stage. But this stuff has a lot of potential. You can even work in full screen mode! One functionality that I didn’t go quite well was importing an imagine from my webcam. It didn’t work 
Here’s a screenshot.
Vamos ser realistas, o Paint não serve para nada (ou pelo menos para muito pouco). É preciso um editor de imagem mais poderoso. Por outro lado algumas ferramentas mais avançadas são pagas e pesadas.
Deixo a referência ao paint.net, a minha ferramenta de eleição. Open Source, simples e intuitivo, ainda por cima leve, e com uma panóplia de plugins interessantes. É possível inclusivamente criar plugins em C# por exemplo.
Ficam aqui algumas capturas de ecrã para terem uma ideia da interface.
Enquanto dava uma vista de olhos na nova edição da Microsoft Magazine descobri um pequeno artigo sobre um produto chamado Microsoft Media Room. Esta é o sistema base para a interface do MEO da Portugal Telecom do qual falei na entrada anterior.
Podem ter uma ideia do interface do MEO e suas funcionalidades se virem a “Interactive Demo” no site do Media Room. (não é interactivo… é um vídeo. lol) Até meio do vídeo, em grosso modo são funcionalidades já presentes no MEO.
Na Microsoft Magazine (página 7), fala-se que no futuro este sistema poderá ser um autêntico media center, com possibilidade de ter lá vídeos e fotos pessoais.
E já que falo do MEO, fica aqui já mais algumas notas sobre a minha utilização. Tenho 2 boxes em casa. Isto permite ter as 2 televisões ligadas, mas ao fazê-lo perdemos a hipótese de gravar emissão de um terceiro canal.. É pena. Basicamente existem 2 “ligações de vídeo” disponíveis, que podem ser utilizadas para gravação, ou visualização directa.
Uma funcionalidade que descobri hoje, é que o MEO vai gravando automaticamente para disco a emissão que estamos a ver, permitindo sempre que desejado voltar atrás no programa!
