theclementi

Using low resolution photos as background effectively

Posted on February 28, 2015 by Clement

We now have big and high resolution screens on our devices. And often we have a great picture that we took on a smartphone. When we want to display it no matter as a background of a website/ document, or as a desktop photo, or whatever that will make the photo look really grainy and low res when expanded.

Recently i stumbled upon this website which allows you to view Instagram photos in an amazing way. And I noticed how they actually made itty bitty, tiny little Instagram photos actually looks good on my humongous 27-inch LED monitor of mine.

Notice how the photo doesn’t look that “low-res-ish” anymore? To make that even worse, this tiny little Instagram photo is actually taken on a HTC One (M7) camera, and you know that means: 4 Megapixels only!!

Ok lets remove some CSS properties here and see how it starts out if you expanded the tiny photo as a background: (If you make it large enough, you see all the grains)

First, they create a similar effect to a dark overly, making the background black.

Next the expanded photo is set to a partial opacity of 0.5, and a blur filter is applied.

And this is how it looks like now:

Basically its just making it softer, and it can all be done via CSS and voilà you have a much better background image now.

Hope you learned something today, I will share much more of these kind of stuff probably in the future.

Cheers!

Streamus: YouTube Music Player

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Clement

I’ve been using Spotify Premium for quite a while now, and it has been my source for any type of music and I would say it has been quite well. Sadly they had a disagreement with Taylor Swift though.

I still see a lot of my friends, especially those who are still students, listens to music through YouTube. I’m not saying its a bad idea, anyway it is a legitimate way to stream music as the artists are paid through ad revenues.

But then again a question that I will always be asking: How can the experience be enhanced?

Just a few moments before this blog post, I stumbled upon a post by The Next Web. And it’s awesome.

Introducing Streamus, the Chrome extension that streams music!

As simple as it sounds, it streams music from YouTube in the background as an extension.

Im not going write more about how it works or how great it is. You can read it at The Next Web’s article here.

Upon adding and using this on my Chrome browser, it inspired me to develop things on a different perspective. Usually the ideas I get for software development or related stuff are through problem seeking. This idea took it to anther level, giving me a new angle/view on development. With such a simple idea, a popular platform and tool, an establish source of content, you can create something so useful! I bet this thing is going to be a hit. Hopefully it doesn’t get taken down by YouTube though.

To all you students in school computer labs out there, office people who has access to the internet, all the chrome OS users, it is time to launch your Chrome Browsers!

All aboard the Chrome app and extension development train! and also time to listen to Taylor Swift songs 🙂