We’re taking our first steps towards better catering to the mobile crowd. Pointing your mobile Safari on your iPhone or your iPod Touch to http://m.welovetypography.com will lead you to this:
You’ll notice that this is really just a simplified version of WLT – and that’s how it’s meant to be for now. Comments are open. We’re especially interested in ideas on how we might push the mobile platform even further.
In addition to the numerous features we have planned for WLT, we’ve been listening to feedback. Something that quite a few of you have requested is an easy way to submit your own images. Enter the Repositorium. This will now allow anyone to submit their type-related picks.
Perhaps you noticed those thumbnails on the right — pulled straight from the WLT RSS feed. That’s the handiwork of @eightface. It will be released as a WordPress plugin soon.
We’re working hard on a number of other new and wonderful features — many of which will get you all more involved.
Thanks for your feedback. Enjoy.
Thousands, in fact tens of thousands of people are browsing WLT. Some are still unaware of a couple of features that have been here since launch. In fact, even I keep forgetting about them.
First, there’s the keyboard navigation. Yes, it’s been there right from the beginning. You can go ☜ and ☞ by pressing the appropriate cursor keys on your keyboard:
Search has also been a great success. Did you know that you can install a custom search feature for Firefox & Internet Explorer? You might have noticed that blue glow around the drop-down where you select your preferred search engine for your browser. That’s where you click if you wish to add WLT search to the list:
The technology behind this is called OpenSearch, and you can find out more about it at http://www.opensearch.org/Home.
So what’s that other icon to the right of the search field, you might ask. That’s Cooliris, a plugin for Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer, that makes browsing WLT look like this:
Believe me, this picture does little justice to the actual experience. Your feedback is always welcome. Just leave a note in the comments below.
If you’re still here after reading the headline, we’d better get right to the point. We are working on a new search feature for WLT – searching for similar images. The results have been pretty impressive so far, considering that I’ve only been familiar with the subject for less than 24 hours.
The process mentioned in the headline works pretty much like you’d expect: you compare a histogram from an image to the histograms of every other image and sort the results. And speaking of results, here’s one:
Currently, however, there are some performance issues that I have to solve before opening this feature for everyone. The processing time for data collected from 850 images is in the neighbourhood of one second at the moment, which isn’t really as fast as it might sound.
In the spirit of keeping it short and sweet, here are two ways of approaching similarity detection, the first one written in Python:
h1 = Image.open(image1).histogram()
h2 = Image.open(image2).histogram()
rms = math.sqrt(reduce(operator.add,
map(lambda a,b: (a-b)**2, h1, h2))/len(h1))
The second one is the much raved about histogram intersection:
There’s something rather bizarre about posting this sort of stuff on a site about typography, but I kind of like it. Let me know what you think.
Sources: eng.tau.ac.il & mail.python.org
This is where Kari and I will announce new features and seek feedback. It won’t be updated often, but it will keep you informed and up-to-date with what’s happening in & on WLT.
Since launching on April 15, WLT has proven pretty popular — we’re pleased about that. However, we’re always looking for ways to improve what’s already here. We have a bucket-load of new features planned, so stay tuned.
About membership: there appears to be some confusion about this. Membership is by invitation only. Members do not have invites to give away, so wining and dining them, and buying them lavish gifts won’t work. The only invitations come directly from me. However, we’ll be doing much more to get you all involved, so keep your ears (one ear per listener, of course) to the ground.
And here are a few of my recent favourites: one, two, three. The third made me smile.
