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Wearing many hats, including dumb question predictor.
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Dry Goods (for Web Developers)
In anticipation of the alkalineapp.com launch, here’s a sampling of the goods that some of your favorite Web sites are running:
- Content management: Movable Type ($395), ExpressionEngine ($150-300)
- eCommerce: Many options, very expensive
- Message boards: vBulletin ($195), Invision Board ($150), XenForo ($140)
- Image management: 4images ($130), Pixaria ($250), Alkaline ($TBA)
- Statistics: Mint ($30)
There are hundreds of commercial Web applications from ad serving to sweepstakes management, so this is just a snapshot of the most popular. You can also peruse a run-down of Alkaline’s competition over at Wikipedia. It’s been nearly a year in the making (Alkaline’s birthday is February 11), but I’m almost there, I promise.
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Alkaline still needs a “It works!” default photo. This won’t be it.
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One in 16.7 Million
As I approach the midpoint in the development of Alkaline, the time has come to develop some of its more awesome (or superfluous) features. One of those features is Alkaline’s proprietary color analysis algorithm, Colorcode.
With the surge in popularity of services like Adobe’s Kuler and Colour Lovers, I wanted Alkaline to not only recognize generic colors (for say, searching) but also generate palettes. Colorcode does just that. It finds and groups a photo’s core colors while giving preference to the most vibrant shade and organizing by color dominance.
Alkaline users will be able to select how many colors are in a palette and the level of color likeness (similar, core colors v. dissimilar, peripheral colors). Results are stored as RGB values1 along with their respective percentage values.
The two examples below were generated by the latest build of the Colorcode algorithm. Processing took <1 second per photo on import. I used Illustrator and Photoshop to generate palettes from the results, but Alkaline will produce CSS output.
(Photo by Thomas Hawk.)
(Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt.)
1 The RGB color model supports 16.7 million colors, hence the title.
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