It’s been a long time coming… Croppr has grown out of it’s infancy. Sparked recently by the release of Gravatar 2.0 and the Ruby on Rails podcast Camping II, I dove back into the code and cleaned it up. Croppr now adheres to the minimalistic principles of Camping. RMagick was thrown out in favor of ImageScience. The javascript was tweaked for performance and readability using the ever so light and powerfull MooTools. The magic is really in the javascript, I encourage you to check it out. All the pieces come together as a living tutorial of how to implement Croppr on your own. Go play with my vain demo! If you want to get sneaky and upload your own image tag /new to the end of the URL, but keep it clean… Here’s an overview on how to get her up and running on your own machine:

sudo gem install mongrel
sudo gem install camping
sudo gem install json
sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby (you need to have sqlite3 installed) 
sudo gem install image_science (you need to have freeimage installed)

svn co http://svn.vandev.com/croppr/trunk croppr
cd croppr

ruby croppr.rb

It’s that easy. You should be able to follow the documentation in the javascript and the implementation example in the camping app to get her working yourself. Goodluck, and let me know of any crazy browser issues. I half-assed tested it in IE 6 and 7… Safari and Firefox are golden.

I threw together a quick and simple way to make a presentation on a mac using Quicksilver and Camping a while back. Well, I finally got around to refining it and putting it into a both tiny and awesome package. This puppy is made of two files, and makes presenting dead simple. You just outline your thoughts in a text file, and QuickPresent smacks it onto your screen using Quicksilver’s largetype feature. Not only that, but it also gives you a slick little web interface to show you what you’ve said, and what you’re about to say. Let me show you…

A few other slick features include automatically opening URL’s and Files from your hard drive. All you need is Camping and Quicksilver (with the command line tool (qs) plugin installed). Just type camping quickpresent.rb from the command line and your up running. If you want to try something cheaper than Keynote or Powerpoint, play with QuickPresent. Let me know what you think.

Get it from my SVN Repo: http://svn.vandev.com/presenter

The SDRuby podcast site is filling up with great episodes. One of which being my little talk on camping and Croppr (Episode 002 on the bottom). The thing has been up for a couple of monthes now, but my posting consistency has been miserable lately. I’ve had more pressing issues, but today is a new day. My next project will be pushing this thing over to Mephisto. I should also spend some time fixing the Rails date_select helper, but that’s another post all together. The next time I speak, the entire back end of this puppy will be different… totally awesome.

So, I finally got around to testing TextMate’s new blogging bundle. It’s dead simple… Anywho, I figured I would use it to give a sneak peek of my newest invention Croppr, which I will be revealing in it’s full glory tomorrow night at SDruby.

All right, so Croppr was born out of a desire to make a better way to crop images online. Specifically the need came from my buddy Tom Werner’s pet project, Gravatar. The inspiration came from iChat’s avatar cropper:

After days of arduous JavaScript hacking with the help of Prototype and eventually Prototype Lite with moo.fx I had a lightweight browser equivalent. Have a peek and play around.

What good is a lightweight JavaScript cropper without a lightweight back end to actually do the cropping? Enter camping. In just 225 lines of sexy Ruby code I have a fully functional image cropping machine. I hope to have a running demo available in the near future. As far as licensing goes, I’m still working on it so hold your shorts. Until than, come to the SDruby meetup (start driving now if you have to) and see all the awesomeness that is Croppr!