Sharp as a Marble - Free toy to play with

<< Agony | Home | They say a dull knife is the most dangerous thing in a kitchen >>

Free toy to play with

Geekdom

So, I'm in the midst of learning Silverlight which is, in the most basic terms, Microsoft's answer to Flash. Yes, I'm a Microsoft drone so my opinion is skewed, but I used to work with Flash and remembered every time I tried to get anything working, I found myself longing for a root canal sans Novocain to take my mind off things.

Anyway, Silverlight works on Macs as well as PCs natively and Linux people have Moonlight which should work just fine (can't say for sure, I've not tried it).

Having gotten that out of the way, here's the beta for my sign generator. Simply click on the sign, start typing, and viola! Bring teh funny!

Wet T-Shirt Car Wash

This is, of course, a beta. There are many things I need to fix

Lettering needs to be randomly spaced (this worked in my original application, the porting to Silverlight didn't seem to take).
The ability to substitute letters – I.E. an upside down 3 for E, 1 for L, etc.
The occasional red letter
A better export. PNG is awesome, but it's large (your file will be about 2 megabytes)
Prettier UI. That's as basic as it comes
More signs – In the works is a KFC sign, but I'd also like to be able to do those Road Signs.

Please give it a shot, let me know if you have any problems.

posted @ 3/1/2010 10:13:26 AM

Comments

Joe Huffman says:

on 3/1/2010 10:22:36 AM

There was no cursor. I couldn't see where my next delete/character was going to be. IE version: 8.0.6001.

I like the concept and this is a good start.

Robb Allen says:

on 3/1/2010 10:30:37 AM

Joe, at this point, you're technically typing in a textbox with 0 opacity. It's a fairly brute force way to deal with it, and I'm sure there's something less hokey, so I'll be attempting to get that in place as well.

Lars Gebauer says:

on 3/1/2010 10:34:13 AM

It works. ;)

http://gebaueredv.blogspot.com/2010/03/spielzeux.html

KTZF says:

on 3/1/2010 11:26:56 AM

I dig it!

http://ktzf.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/thanks-to-robb-alan/

Crucis says:

on 3/1/2010 2:04:22 PM

Well, it doesn't appear to work for Linux systems yet. My Linux/Firefox browser saw nothing.

A bit more work, perhaps?

Robb Allen says:

on 3/1/2010 2:08:39 PM

Crucis, you would have to manually install the Moonlight system. How that works, I have no idea.

Timmeehh says:

on 3/1/2010 3:09:32 PM

Pretty Cool.

Of course the first sign should read :

PANTS? WE DON'T NEED NO STEENKING PANTS!

USCitizen says:

on 3/1/2010 9:47:27 PM

Backspace no worky for my bad mis-spely typy skilz.

Dixie says:

on 3/2/2010 1:54:21 AM

(Looks at sign)

I'd buy that for five dollars!

Ken says:

on 3/2/2010 1:56:11 PM

I'm not sure what compression you're using on the png image. I saved it to my desktop and it was around 2 MiB like you said. I opened it up in MSPaint and just did a save (no changes) and it's now 904 KiB

Is there a color profile as well? I noticed the post from Lars looks "ghostly" as well as viewing it in the "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer", but in MSPaint it looks "right"?

Robb Allen says:

on 3/2/2010 1:59:00 PM

The PNG exporter is a free bit of code I pulled of the Interweb Tubes, so I don't know about the compression or color space at all, sorry.

Billll says:

on 3/2/2010 6:10:18 PM

2.1 megs initially, but opening the png in MS Photoeditor, and changing the contrast and balance got rid of the faded-out look, and reduced the file size to 458 Kb.

Looking forword to a

"City of Littleton
fines doubled
we need the money"

Fred says:

on 3/3/2010 2:45:50 AM

Microsoft program no likey Chrome.

Robb Allen says:

on 3/3/2010 9:48:59 AM

Fred, sorry. That's a Chrome issue that I can do nothing about.

Comments have been closed on this topic.