Stupeflix – API Enabled Online Video

Online video is something that helps to make a product or website standout from the rest. Whether it is a screencast tutorial or a promotional video for a product, the presence of video can help your offering stand-out from the crowd.

Stupeflix is a site that enables you to automatically generate video from a series of images, and apply text and a backing track to make a video that is quite compelling. In the past I have used Animoto and recommended it to friends as a great and simple way to put together a great video from existing static images. Honestly, I will continue to recommend Animoto as an excellent tool for generating video online – the effects and overall feel of the video coming out of Animoto has an edge over the end product Stupeflix creates (you can do a side-by-side comparison of their demo videos and you’ll see what I mean).

What makes Stupeflix different, however, is that it exposes a RESTful API for generating the videos. This in turn opens up some amazing opportunities for websites that already have a large amount of static imagery they would like to present in a more compelling way. Mike Butcher in his techcrunch post suggests a few application possibilities around generic eCommerce sites which includes some potential uses of the generated videos to assist with monetization of your own sites.

One of the most useful real-world examples I can think of would be on property sales / real estate websites. Nothing would showcase a property better than a video of the still images taken by the property photographer. It would certainly be more compelling than the clunking slideshow mechanisms most of these sites currently offer. The same of course could apply to car sales sites and the like.

Image hosting and stock image sites are another obvious big area that could put Stupeflix to good use. So the next thing to do is to get some time get mashing with their API (I’ll post any updates on this post).

Python versus Groovy in Google App Engine

Really struggling at the moment to make a choice between whether to go with Java or Python in the GAE. Either seem like a pretty solid choice from the reading I’ve done, and I’m comfortable with but not deeply skilled in either language. My great fear is (being distractable and all) is that I will start to implement a project in one, and then realise I really should have been working with the other.

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Using GIMP to create Tileable Textures

There are a lot of good texture libraries currently available online at the moment. Some which are absolutely top-notch. One of my personal favourites is Lost and Taken but there are numerous list posts (like this one at Web Design Ledger) which point to more.

Now these textures are great but you are probably going to have to use some really large images if you want to use them on your site, and I really didn’t want to have to. Thankfully the GIMP includes a filter to make an object seamless, which means you can tile it effectively as the page background of your site.

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