A Side Project

I have been working on a side project for what seems like forever now, but I have set up a blog dedicated to it. All it currently has on it is a few screenshots and an introductory post about what exactly it is, but you can check it out here.

The source code isn't actually available yet as its not even in beta yet, but I'm hoping it will surface before the end of the summer. Would love to hear peoples thoughts on the project!

A New App - Photo Effects and Filter Library

Recently I started looking at experimenting with the camera and manipulating images on the Android platform, and after a few weeks of experimenting I have finished and released a new app to the market that lets users capture still images and then apply a selection of filter/fx to their pictures.

It's a simple app, and is just a bit of fun for the user - the effects available are things like outline, neon, invert, b&w, pixelate, etc. There are more details about the app and some demo pictures on the page linked at the top of the blog entitled cutting room.

My experimentation started simply with playing about with some of the many Java image filter and effects libraries that are available such as Marvin and JH Labs. The Problem you find immediately when trying to link these up with your Android app is that the Android JRE does not include the core java AWT package. This limits the use of practically every image filtering library available as they all use java.awt.BufferedImage and the rest of the awt package.

Instead of the BufferedImage class, the Android platform provides its Bitmap class, and looking through the filter classes, it seemed like it should be fairly straight forward to port some of them over to Android, so I went with the Marvin library.

You can check out my final effects app the "Cutting Room" on the market, but I have also released the ported Marvin effects code on google code as open source, so feel free to check that out and use it for anything you feel fit!

I will post again soon walking through setting up an app to use the camera, so stay tuned for that.