Gracepoint After Five

I finally found some time to move PunyPNG to its own dedicated slice (previous it lived on Gracepoint After Five’s slice).

You can now go directly to PunyPNG via this new URL:

http://www.punypng.com

(http://www.gracepointafterfive.com/punypng will now be redirected to the new URL, but any API calls will not be redirected)

I heard about Alltop on Smashing Magazine so I decided to check it out.

This is what I saw on it’s homepage:

• Smashing Magazine
• Strobist, DPreview, Joe McNally’s Blog, Digital Photography School
• Mac Rumors, Mac World
• Lifehacker, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki

Wow!  How did Alltop anticipate all of my interests?  It was like it knew what all my subscribed RSS feeds were.  Perhaps some new fancy Web tech where they got into my Google Reader feeds or something.  So I fired up another browser, cleared the cookies and went back to Alltop, only to see the exact same feeds!

And so, it hit me.  Alltop is psychic.

That or perhaps all who are part of the my middle-age web techie demographic are all predictably into the exact same things.

Sigh.

Anyways, check out Alltop, it’s pretty cool.

Recently, our church purchased a sweet Canon EOS 7D for the express purpose of shooting video.  It’s an awesome camera, but most of us didn’t know how to use it.  After spending a few months with this camera, I decided to record this tutorial on using the 7D to shoot video.  Though having photography fundamentals is really useful, the tutorial just assumes you’ve shot on a consumer DV camera in the past and introduces the basics and not-so basics of the 7D — all from the perspective of shooting video.

Now, this video is really, really rough.  I threw my own personal 7D on a tripod and hit record.  My son was just born when I made this recording so I know I look like a zombie in this footage.  Focus on the camera, not me ;)

Tutorial Chapters:

1. Introduction (11 min)
2. Lens Overview (19 min)
3. More Lenses (14 min)
4. Camera / ISO / Exposure (15 min)
5. Exposure Triangle (20 min)
6. White Balance (8 min)
7. Presets (7 min)
8. Production Techniques (12 min)
9. More Production Techniques (8 min)

Tutorial Notes (PDF, 2MB)

You can also watch see the entire tutorial as a playlist album.

We just pushed out some hot new features to PunyPNG today:

• Added option to preserve EXIF data, to maintain copyright and other image metadata
• Added option to skip bit reduction when compressing.  This improved IE6 compatibility (see PunyPNG’s IE6 support)
• REST-based API support (beta)

We also fixed a handful of outstanding issues:

• Improved performance of dirty transparency compression
• Improved simultaneous uploading of multiple files
• Fixed bug where the total savings being reported were incorrect

You can now sign up for PunyPNG to save your custom compression options and get assigned an API key.  We’re also excited to release the long-awaited PunyPNG API.  This will give you the ability to optimize multiple files in batch using a REST-based API (responses are in JSON).  Smusher is a great example of how you can use the command-line to invoke PunyPNG without sacrificing your own CPU cycles.  The API is currently in limited beta, with some restrictions to ensure nobody decides to optimize their entire photo archive library over winter break or something.

Look out for more updates in the coming weeks.  Your feedback and feature requests are invaluable to making PunyPNG the awesome compression tool available.   Keep it coming.

Merry Christmas!!