ShrimpWorks

More a curiosity than an actual useful project, I just had an Idea I wanted to try out, and this is the result.

This Java application (or library, if you want to include it in your own project) simply takes a source image, a couple of optional parameters, and outputs a new image with a halftone- like effect.

Briefly, works by stepping through the pixels of the source image at an interval defined by the dot size specified, samples the brightness of that pixel, and draws a circle onto the destination image, scaled according to the source pixel brightness.

For reference, take a look at the java.awt Graphics2D, Image and BufferenImage classes. It’s really nice to half a whole bunch of image processing and drawing capabilities available within the standard library, rather than needing to rely on external things (as I recently discovered to be the case with Ruby - pretty much all image processing is done via an ImageMagick dependency).

The source, documentation and a download are available from the image-halftone GitHub project page.

Here’s a small Java class I’ve been using in loads of applications and things for a few years (it’s evolved a little over the years).

It simply exposes a few very basic HTTP methods (for HEAD, GET and POST) which all just return strings containing the web server’s response. It’s seemed pretty useful and reliable in applications large and small, so maybe it’s of some use to someone else as well.

Download HttpUtils