This page is dedicated to all pieces of code I have written or modified, which I never really got through to a full project. Here you will find some of these software artifacts. Bigger projects have their own sites:

• Caliph & Emir are sooo big they’ve got their own page.
• Lire has - due to its popularity - its own page.

SeamCarving (GPL)

The SeamCarving command line tool as well as the GUI tool are based on the paper of Avidan, S. & Shamir, A:. Seam carving for content-aware image resizing in the proceedings of SIGGRAPH ‘07: ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 papers, ACM Press, 2007, 10. It’s based on Java and released under GPL.

View a short flash demo.

It features mainly a content based resizing algorithm, which does not scale the image but re-targets it. This means it tries to remove unnecessary parts of the image.

• Java Webstart (Java 1.6 needed, ~50k): click to start the GUI tool
• Source & Binaries as well as Windows Executeable (Java JRE 1.6 needed) are available at http://code.google.com/p/java-imageseams/.

Following images might clarify the idea. The left hand side image is the re-targeted one. Note that parts of the water below the skyline appear scaled and the sky is cropped. All this is done without manual input.

<->

ChildrensGames (GPL)

Three small Java 1.6 games for kids in a package. Source is included in the package, license is GPL. There is also some i18n for English and German.

GuessWhat: This game displays images (randomly or in sequence) hidden by 6 blocks. With each mouse click (e.g. by touch screen) or pressed key one block vanishes and a part of the image appears. The image sets are configurable. Adding your own image set is easy: Just copy them to a subfolder in the unzipped folder.

Soundmachine: This game features a blue ellipse dangling around on a black screen. Pressing a button increases the twist of the ellipse and results in a rapid change of the background (like a flash).

SoundVis: The main idea is to animate a kid to make sounds by for instance clapping or yelling. The louder the sound the bigger the blue circle in the center gets. While this sounds trivial it is great fun 🙂 Note that the microphone has to be functional. A simple test is included in the start screen of SoundVis.

Installation

Download the games (~ 3 MB) along with the source and unzip them. Windows users will find executable files to start the games. Note that Java 1.6 has to be installed. Linux users will be able to run the games using the commands given in the batch files.