Ross Burton:

Impressively, whilst it took three and a half years for the first billion pictures to be uploaded [to Flickr], the second billion took only three months.

[..]

Second, the Flickr team have just added some new features, specifically a world map with popular tags overlaid and a new Places interface, providing a summary of a particular location. The new map has temporarily lost the ability to zoom in straight away (press Search then Go to get the zoom bar), but the Places interface is amazing fun.

Nothing to add. Just trying something like a search for photos tagged “river” in, say, Germany yields tons of wonderful pictures. And the places feature – specifically, for the place Shanghai that it happened to pick at random – led me to this:

Awesome.

Many months ago, I worked on a MYSTlore feature called Palapeli. Why the name? Well, I needed an obscure word as a codename because generic terms are boring, and it appears palapeli is the suomi (Finnish) word for jigsaw puzzles. And, jigsaw puzzles is what the feature was to be about. You take an image from MYSTlore’s database (it has plenty) either at random, or chosen from a category (say, only images from Riven), or picked in particular, and then have the server generate puzzle tiles for you.

But, alas, my skills weren’t quite up to it, at least not within reasonable time constraints. Splitting an image into a grid of tiles isn’t hard; doing so with “interlocking and tessellating”, as Wikipedia calls it, makes for much more of a challenge (to me, anyway). Delivering the tiles to the client isn’t hard; implementing drag and drop and verifying that the pieces really are meant to fit together is another matter.

So I dropped the thing for a while and put my respective OmniFocus¹ project on hold, but never really gave up.

Today, I made significant progress – but not with my own project. Rather, I found a decent pre-existing jigsaw puzzle implementation that, like Palapeli, uses JavaScript on the client end, and PHP server-side. Its demo page convinced me that this was more than good enough for a start.

This isn’t quite as sophisticated (yet) as Palapeli would have been. For example, as you can see from my project screenshot, I was going to have randomized tile sizes (for higher skill levels). What’s also lacking is a means of fetching the images straight from MYSTlore using either the MediaWiki API or a custom way of accessing the images (possibly directly by their file names; they’re not stored in the database).

But for now, I’m sufficiently pleased with it to launch it like this. So go ahead and fool around with it. Here’s the docs, here’s the puzzle (refresh to get a different image), and here’s the variant you perhaps didn’t want to see.

1. Yes, I’m one of the lucky alpha testers. ↩

Perhaps the one thing I’m the most thrilled about with my S3 IS is its macro capabilities, which exceeded my expectations. A few samples:

You’ll have to zoom in to get a better idea of the true amount of detail. Flickr, I still sorely miss Aperture’s loupe tool!

Made a ton of photos of Dschingis this evening; every one in here starting from the fifth. There’s also some from last year in this set.

A little selection:

Bonus shot:

That’s my stepbrother Pitt (the dog is his), and his mother Gerda.

Quiz: how did I make this?