More or less every year since 2008 when I started this blog, I posted around the winter break that I would pause writing to enjoy a holiday with my family. This year is a bit different. I am currently completely rewriting the image rendering engine for SlideMagic with a number of objectives:

1. To finally enable proper smart cropping of images: if you scale an image, change its aspect ratio, crop, resize, whatever, SlideMagic will do the right thing and keep the item you want to be in focus, where it should be: in focus. The math for this is actually tricky, let’s hope I get it to work.

2. Improve the performance of the application dramatically, especially when zooming/resizing and repositioning images. I should be able to match “video game”-type response rates

3. (To remove a dependency on a very weird 1990s specification standard how images are rendered on web pages).

Non-beta SlideMagic users will not be guinea pigs for my plumbing changes, don’t worry.

Happy holidays everyone!

Photo by Mike Kotsch on Unsplash