Focused Image Cropping with smartcrop.js
Images tend to make any page more engaging, especially when done right. The problem is that automating image creation and sizing can be a very difficult task, especially when the image is uploaded by a user -- who knows what format, size, and resolution the image will be. Hell, who knows if they're actually sending you an image for that matter (though validating that they've uploaded an image isn't too difficult).
I recently found out about smartcrop.js, a brilliant JavaScript utility which analyzes the contents of an image and finds the focal point (a face, for example) of any image. It's easy to use and does an outstanding job picking up on the important part of an image.
Check out a few images I put through the smartcrop.js testbed:




I wont bother showing the super simple code sample -- you can view that on the smartcrop.js repo. And be sure to play around on the testbed. I love recognizing developers for their feats and this is some incredible work by Jonas Wagner!
![CSS Animations Between Media Queries]()
CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...
![9 More Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos]()
With Firefox OS, asm.js, and the push for browser performance improvements, canvas and WebGL technologies are opening a world of possibilities. I featured 9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos and then took it up a level with 9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos, but I want to outdo...
![Fix Anchor URLs Using MooTools 1.2]()
The administrative control panel I build for my customers features FCKEditor, a powerful WYSIWYG editor that allows the customer to add links, bold text, create ordered lists, and so on. I provide training and documentation to the customers but many times they simply forget to...
![iPhone-Style Passwords Using MooTools PassShark]()
Every once in a while I come across a plugin that blows me out of the water and the most recent culprit is PassShark: a MooTools plugin that duplicates the iPhone's method of showing/hiding the last character in a password field. This gem of...
Excellent find, thank you.