ColorSplash by Hendrick Kueck

When Apple launched the App Store back in July of 2008, there was only a handful of applications to browse through including Sega’s Super Monkey Ball, Loopt, TypePad, and eBay. Since then, tens of thousands more have been made and now flood the App Store. Unfortunately among these new applications fewer and fewer are actually worth installing. So it’s a real pleasure when I come across an good application like Hendrick Kueck’s ColorSplash.

ColorSplash can take a color image from your camera roll, or any image uploaded to your iPhone/iPod touch, and desaturate the photo selectively. You can have the photo all grayscale, except for a face, or take they sky to grayscale while leaving the rest of the landscape in color.

You can zoom into the photo using the usual finger controls, and paint color selectively on an image, leaving a very striking effect. You do all this with your finger on the touch screen, and with a bit of practice and judicious zooming you can really be very accurate. We’re used to seeing images like this come out of high end photo programs, but doing it on the iPhone is a bit of a stunner.

The app allows unlimited undo, and brushes can be semi-transparent, so the amount of color can be varied. A palette gives you the option of hard edge or soft edge brushes, and you can save your work at any stage and go back to intermediate versions of your image if you want to. You can work in portrait or landscape mode, and there is detailed, built in help. [via]

Someday all this mess will make me laugh

Song: Phoenix – If I Ever Feel Better…

A few days ago Calvin and I were doing our usual conference calls when we started taking a look through our past. We’ve gone through and looked at our past projects and experiments dozens of times before. But this time we ventured into our online blogs hidden in the depths of the archived internet, Xanga, LiveJournal, and MoveableType. It’s really amazing how long we’ve been keeping these non-formal public diaries, available for the world to see. Calvin started using LiveJournal before it was even public, when you still had to get an invite code to register. I was blogging all the way back when checking AIM profiles was as popular as checking Facebook. Whether you’d like to admit it or not, we were blogging before blogging really existed. One of these days, we’re going to put out our own The Average American Male-style books. (It’s a great read, if you don’t mind utter primal vulgarity).

I don’t know if Calvin would want me posting up some of his stuff, so I’ve come up with a few select entries from my own dbg days. どうぞ：

i got my haircut today at my regular place. i told the lady what adi told me…but she’s like “fade or mushroom?”, and i was all, “not a fade, not a mushroom”, and she was like “fade? mushroom?”, and i was like “uhhh, no”, and she was like “huh?”, and i was all “yeah, fade.” 😦 
– 04.14.02 @ 8:42pm PST

i learned this past weekend to not forget about your old friends. it’s something that calvin taught me last year. and again, last night…i was reminded. true friends are people that will always be there for you. and you should always be there for them. thats what composes a good relationship. through the thick and thin, they’ll be there to guide you and give you help whenever you need it. i used to think that you need to be friends with everyone. but you don’t. in fact, it’s better to share a plutonic love with one person, than to have a million fake relationships with people you don’t take the time to really get to know. this is only my opinion. find who you are… if you follow your heart, you’ll never go wrong.
04.21.02 @ 12:46pm PST

today was pretty simple. nothing much happened. i’ve been trying to cope with changes for the past while. i’m still having my doubts on my ability. i learned that i can definately change w/o hurting too much, but that’s not what i want. sometimes i can have such feelings and emotions at times, but forgot their true meaning within a matter of time. time that i felt would never break my thoughts. yesterday i had a talk with calvin about self discovery. we’re all still finding out who were are. i’m still “joe : a work in progress”. and i’ll always be that. there’s no point in our lives where we stop learning, where we have nothing else to find out. the different areas of life have so many aspects to consider. if only we could spend our lives learning, without wasting time. :: shrug ::
December 18, 2002 07:03 PM

One of the things I wanted to take note of is that I’ve been using song lyrics as post titles ever since I started (I actually didn’t realize that until just now). More importantly though, I seem to have this reoccurring theme of reflection and self discovery. But I think that’s exactly what blogging is all about. Aside from the Gawkers, Engadgets and PerezHiltons, blogging is one of the most personal times of the day when you can sit down and just think. Maybe it’s just my personality, or my lack of a life these days, but I find myself only wanting to blog when I’m feeling emo or have something I really want to say. That’s really what this latest site redesign is about. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find a way to expand soopah256.com into some huge storage bin where I could display everything in my life. But that’s just not what I want it for anymore. Soopah256.com is just a place for my daily going-ons, whatever they may be. Anyway, I’m going to go through and make all these old blogs available for you guys to browse. So when it’s ready, feel free to explore me in my “younger and more vulnerable years”.

UPDATE: So I decided to go ahead and publish my first set of archived blogs. It’ll open up in a new window shown in a faux AIM Profile, the way it was originally meant to be viewed. Without further ado, the AIM Profile blogs.