Image Web Services: One That Exists and One That Should
Yesterday I read about an “involuntary web service” by google that lets you create rounded corners on the fly, such as this one:

A very neat and nice way to create rounded corners without spending too much time with the Gimp or so. (That’s probably why Google did it in the first place).
Another neat web service came to my mind later that day. It does not exist yet but I would love to find that somewhere:

A mirror effect like this one used by Apple in iTunes (underneath the actual photo). As far as I know for Mac OSX programmers there is an API that does that and therefore this effect is extensively used in some OSX applications.
That would indeed come in quite handy at times and I imagine it would look quite nice in people’s blogs. Another idea would be the auto-generation of drop shadows for images.
Does anyone volunteer to write a script? ![]()
December 13th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
For image reflection, there is Reflection.js. It is ~5KB of javascript goodness that does some pretty decent image reflection akin to the iTunes feature you mentioned.
Lickable screenshots on the website: http://cow.neondragon.net/stuff/reflection/
December 13th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
Hey Mike, that’s awesome, thanks — I like it
And I will certainly consider using that when I replace this (admittedly quite ugly) blog theme by a new one, soon!
December 13th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Darn, Michael beat me to it…
December 13th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
Snap, it seems like everybody knew about this but me!
December 13th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Don’t beat yourself up, Fred… Not like it was dugg about 7 months ago or anything.
http://digg.com/design/Javascript_Reflection_Effect )
December 13th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
The thing that’s great about Reflection.js is that the reflection is generated on the fly and adopts the background. You can also fine-tune the reflection.
March 8th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Reflection.js is a very easy script to use.
Results are great.
You can check how this script has been implemented at
http://www.featurepics.com/Editorial/Image-Reflection-Special-Effect.aspx
Very nice results…