The Boulder County Business report ran a spot on Fluxcapacity and the other nine 2008 TechStars companies earlier this week. Our snippet is below, but click through to read about the others.
Have you ever opened a huge JPEG in your browser, only to watch it slowly download, filling up line-by-line? More than likely, this means the file is a so-called "baseline" mode JPEG. It's great for digital cameras, because it is relatively simple to encode a baseline JPEG, which means you can take pictures faster, but it's somewhat non-ideal for web display because of the sequential loading behavior.
There's a different JPEG mode called "progressive" which improves the situation a bit. Conceptually, it is useful (and quite accurate) to think of progressive JPEGs as first containing a "blurry" version of the image, followed by a series of refinements which sharpen the image, until you arrive at the final, crisp, version. There's a lot of added flexibility in the progressive mode. For example, you could first sharpen an important part of the image (say, the sea turtle's face) and get around to the rest of the image later. In some cases, it is also possible to maintain the same level of quality while shrinking file size, but doing so requires a sophisticated JPEG encoder. Progressive JPEGs are also more difficult to decode, because the information in each pixel is scattered across the file.
I have been spending most of my spare time (and some of my non-spare time) adding progressive JPEG support to Fluxify. I just applied the update to our server, and while there is nothing visibly noticeable, Fluxify should "just work" with progressive mode JPEGs. It also turns out that there was a bug that prevented us from sending grayscale JPEGs, which is fixed now, too.
So, now you can go learn all about JPEG on Wikipedia. The Progressive JPEG article isn't written yet. Any takers?
We've been incognito for awhile, but that doesn't mean we've been lazy. We spent the last seven days or so building a free service, to which the rest of this post is dedicated.
If you have a digital camera and have ever tried to email photos to friends or family, you've probably been faced with an inconvenient set of tasks that goes something like this:
If you're like me, you just find this cumbersome and annoying. If you're like my Mom and Dad (who do own a digital camera that produces 12 megapixel photos), the barrier is so high that you simply don't bother to try.
To make this easier and more accessible to everyone, we've published a web-based tool we're calling Fluxify that lets you automatically resize, upload, and email photos... without the effort.
It's free, and it doesn't require you to create an account. It should work in at least Firefox and IE, and on both a Mac and a PC. We built fluxify in Silverlight, and so you'll be prompted to install the Silverlight browser plugin if you've never visited a Silverlight-enabled site before (just like the first time you run Flash).
Fluxify is interesting in that it resizes your photos before it uploads them, saving you time and bandwidth. For web developers, we think this is a pretty revolutionary cross-platform capability: You can drop the "Max file size: 500KB" fine print (just resize it on the client-side), and avoid using cumbersome ActiveX/Java alternatives to achieve the same result.
We'll be posting another entry with more technical details on how we built Fluxify, what's going on behind the scenes, and how developers can incorporate similar client-resize features into their own services on the web. For now, we've assembled some details on the about page.
Check it out and let us know what you think!
