Skip to content

Code Capsule Posts

Immersive design and the power of visualization

Some websites and web apps are using what I call “immersive design.” I have been researching blogs and magazines in hope for a proper name, and it seems that it is referred as “full-screen background“. I do not like this name because I do not find it descriptive enough. Technically, all backgrounds are filling the full screen, otherwise websites would look like crap. So I had to come up with my own name, immersive design, and a definition for it:

Immersive design is the use of a full-screen background image as the main design feature in a website, with the goal of creating a strong emotional impact on the user.

The term “immersive” puts more weight on the intent rather than the means. A full-screen background image is just a technical detail. The feeling of emotional immersion in the website is the real marketing value.

In this article, I am explaining why I am convinced that immersive design is one of the strongest yet underrated on-line marketing tools. I am also showing a few examples of immersive designs that I have been collecting while surfing the Internet.

How I successfully tested and rejected two niche markets using online surveys

I recently got some interest for micro-ISV projects (micro independent software vendor). These are small products/startups that require minimal time and financial investment, and generate small but steady revenue. The idea is that I would not build it myself, I would outsource it so that I can focus on other things than code. The time investment I am aiming at is around 4-6 hours per week. I am now researching niche markets in an attempt to create my first micro-ISV.

The paths followed by successful micro-ISVs have similarities, as they all include testing the market before doing anything else. Testing can take various forms, it can be a sales website, a prototype, or even a shadow product (faking the product and doing the computer’s work by hand before spending time actually coding the product). I recently had a couple of ideas for micro-ISVs and I wanted to test them before building anything, instead of wasting time coding something nobody wants. So here is at the story of how I tested and rejected two niche markets using online surveys. Please note that I am not explaining how I designed the surveys, but just what was the process of using surveys as a way to test niche markets. I will cover survey design in a future article.

I am tired of logging into websites

With the number of Internet services and web apps growing, the amount of statuses and indicators is itself growing. At the end of the day, you end up logging into 20 different websites in order to get a single value from each of them. And there are so many of them, just to name a few: StatCounter, Google Analytics, Apple iTunes Connect, Flurry, etc.

I am really getting tired of logging into all these websites, and here is my plan to fix it.

How to implement an algorithm from a scientific paper

This article is a short guide to implementing an algorithm from a scientific paper. I have implemented many complex algorithms from books and scientific publications, and this article sums up what I have learned while searching, reading, coding and debugging. This is obviously limited to publications in domains related to the field of Computer Science. Nevertheless, you should be able to apply the guidelines and good practices presented below to any kind of paper or implementation.

Hair Analysis and Detection in Facial Picture

Continuing on my experimentations with face transformation algorithms, I was wondering if it was possible to detect and extract, with a certain accuracy, the hair of a person in a facial picture. I found two useful publications on the topic, Detection and Analysis of Hair (Yacoob and Davis, 2006), and Frequential and color analysis for hair mask segmentation (Rousset and Coulon, 2008). Their approaches are quite similar, and make use of color models, frequency filters and Gaussian kernels.

Facial transformation framework on the iPhone

More than a year ago, I was playing with some Computer Vision algorithms, and I posted this: Active Appearance Models in C++ (Paamela). The framework I built back then was a bit more complete than a simple AAM implementation, and actually I went up to the point where I was able to transform the sex, age and ethnicity of a person in a picture. The code was basically sitting there, taking dust in my hard drive. I had been willing to try some Objective-C and mobile development for some time. With the use of some magic (and good cross-compiling skills), I have been able to port the code from Linux to the iPhone. I now have a fully functioning facial transformation framework running on the iPhone!