Harvard University Chooses Panorama from Digital Media Magik.com

If you've spent any time on my company (DigitalMediaMagik.com) web site, you've likely seen the gallery of panoramas and you may even have seen (on my first business cards) the “Harvard Yard in Fall” one that I have inserted at the bottom of this posting. What you have probably not seen is this "same picture" being used as the masthead on a new publication of the Harvard College Writing Program — their “Harvard Guide to Using Sources” web site.

Since I do not know how long Harvard University will continue to use my panorama on their site… on the right is a screen shot that I captured (and then annotated slightly to highlight the credit to "Kevin G. Pammett" + the simple URL) to show off my panorama on one of the pages from Harvard's new web site. For a better look… the click-thru on that screen shot takes you directly to their site, but note that it may show different content from time to time. The arrangement with DigitalMediaMagik.com simply gives Harvard University the right to use it in their masthead (on all pages) for the entire site.

Below is a thumbnail of the “Harvard Yard in Fall” panorama … or, iff you have Java, click here to see the same picture in a pop-up panorama viewer that shows the image rotating thru 360° — demonstrating that there is no right-hand or left-hand edge to this picture; the two edges automagically connect to form a seamless image.

In October 2008 I took the 27 snapshots that you see above, auto- stitched  into a single 6175 x 833 pixel image. The resulting “Harvard Yard in Fall” panorama captures the New England Fall beauty of Harvard University from the center of the courtyard known as "Harvard Yard" on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Ma.

If you are interested in engaging DigitalMediaMagik.com to create — or to help you create — panoramas of your own favorite vistas… please contact me (Kevin Pammett) at your earliest convenience.

Making Use of Silverlight Technology — A Digital Picture Renaming Tool

In a previous article I introduced the Silverlight App that I call pixRename, and herein I'm announcing the "version 1.0" release of this tool.  To try it out on any computer that can run Microsoft's .NET Framework, follow the instructions at: http://bit.ly/pixRenameV1

Aside from wanting a "modern" version of my reName tool — I really do use it to process digital camera pictures — the other reason I created this was to get hands-on experience with the following Silverlight 4.0 technologies:

• Isolated Storage — relative to browser-based cookies, this persistence mechanism is a huge step for a pervasive development technology because it essentially gives you a database that's built-in. I use this to persist tool options and 1:many relationships that are really named sets of  (name,value) pairs — the so-called "Settings" or "[camera] profiles".
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a modern technology for creating, persisting, connecting and deploying UI components  — app controls  — which I use for buttons, labels, radio controls, checkboxes, special-purpose combo boxes and dynamic controls that reflect the end user's personalizations.
• Child Windows which share data with the main App, greatly simplifying the UI that you normally see, providing mechanism for a "Splash screen", the log for a "Preview" command, & general-purpose dialogs.

The "Change Settings" PopUp

Demonstrate an Object Oriented design, implemented with C#, lots of encapsulation, developed following the Agile paradigm. Uses ExifLib — an external .NET library that I adapted to work with Silverlight, described in this article. Gain expertise using Silverlight to make OOBs — like "desktop apps" — that run outside of the browser. Doing something significant with the .NET framework, including the System.IO classes that allow direct access to files and folders on the local computer's hard drive. I created a "Browse Folders" User Control because Silverlight 4.0 has an OpenFile dialog but you can only use it for files (not folders). Handling a multi-page .xaml application with dynamic pages.

Any comments or feedback please contact me (Kevin Pammett, © 2010 DigitalMediaMagik.com)