Riya - A Visual Search Tool

I came across to a similar technology when I interviewed a candidate for my previous company. She develop a colour recognition application by calculating percentage of colours in a photo for her thesis project. But my interest dies as I can't imagine how to monetize the idea. That is before I discovered Riya.

Riya is a facial and text recognition technology with an intelligent interface. Face recognition technology isn't new. You can find it in cameras, cellphones and biometric devices but for the sake of web application, this is really great.

I decided to try out Riya's functionality. The process starts with registration and choosing a privacy setting on your pictures. You then download a client application (around 40MB) that uploads photos you choose to include in Riya. The actual uploading takes a while - about 4 hours for each GB of photos. Instead of waiting around, Riya will email you when the process is complete.

That’s when the fun starts. In my case about 60 pictures were uploaded. I was presented with a view of facial thumbnails of everyone in my photos. Riya asks that you begin to educate it by telling it who the people are. And then click the "Run Rec" button, it then very quickly starts to auto-tag pictures with a surprising level of accuracy.

I could also allow friends to tag and search my photo and let it all searchable in public search. On this extend I realize that Riya might have some privacy issues in the future. Imagine if Riya get so much data on people that I could take a picture of a crowd, upload it to Riya, and instantly have the names of every single person in the crowd. It almost like FBI's backup suspect database.

But if Riya choose client/partner wisely it might benefits us all. Just look at like.com. You can identify a similar accessories or item detected in any photo. You can even select your favorite celebrities photos and copy their style. Paris Hilton wannabe, this is your day.

Relay - file and directory management

I love small apps. Most of the time it is just a straight forward function with minimum effort. While searching for the AJAX version of file and directory management, I found Relay. Develop by Chris Iufer, this is a free distribution piece of software.

We are freely distributing the software open-source. So we hope it comes in handy to all those readers of yours who were begging to get their hands on a copy of it. The project is launching as a public Beta, and we hope that the community will really help us make this thing stellar. Were positioning it as a better way to manage your site files for things like blogs or personal homepages, and to transfer files between artists and their clients.

Features

• drag-n-drop files and folders
• dynamic loading file structure
• upload progress bar
• thumbnail view, including pdf
• multiple users & accounts with basic administration
  

And here is the scripts for your own pleasure. Enjoy

Bright Future for Adobe Apollo

In case you haven't heard of this, Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime (like Flash itself) being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop. It's due to release on Adobe Labs in early 2007.

The idea is that developers will be able to bring their web applications off line and take advantage of things a desktop application can do like drag and drop file, etc. Despite that, Apollo will be running on a cross platform machine like PCs, Macs and Linux.

Bringing visual rich content like Flash isn't new. Macromedia started it with Macromedia Central. Central acted as an application manager and Flash applications written for Central ran inside a Central desktop client instead of as separate applications, the model Apollo uses now. Some said that developing apps with Central was a nightmare. I don't really know because I never touch Macromedia Central before, but later Macromedia Flex (now Adobe Flex) has made writing applications in Flash much more simple. In fact, Apollo wouldn't have been possible without the Flex framework.

I heard that the AJAX support in Appolo will make AJAX development much more easier. Currently AJAX developers need to deal with a variety of different browsers and that requires extra time and cost. But since Apollo is a cross platform itself, so you can ditch the hacking process as you are now dealing with RIA desktops. You can just port your current Ajax application to Apollo with almost no code changes.

In conclusion, Apollo seems uniquely positioned to open the world of desktop application development to the average web developer, so that should spur the development of a lot of new apps. It's up to the developer to create applications that make people's lives better and that are easy enough for the average user. So keep on refreshing the Adobe Lab.

AJAX Edit-In-Place - Flickr Style

If you have ever use Fickr, you might be wondering how on earth they can save the title and description by simply hovering on the elements without reloading the whole page.

With this feature you can imagine how many page load you can save or at least it can impress your friends or boss :D

Ok basically it has two components, the user interface manipulation and the AJAX call itself. This AJAX uses Prototype,a JavaScript Framework.

I uploaded a working source codes so that you can test it on your own.

Happy programming.