Other Uses for Daydreamer
As I tell people about the program, it seems to
me that Daydreamer is like the Elephant and the Blind Men.
It's interesting what happens when I tell people
about Daydreamer. They always say how cool they think
it is, and then they tell me about some use or other that they have thought for
it. The interesting thing is that they always tell me something different.
It's like the Elephant and the Blind Men.
For example, when I told a friend who is heavily involved with defense matters about it, he thought Daydreamer would make a dandy part of a home security system. Truth to tell, I had already thought about this. I included a rudimentary script in the Daydreamer distribution to send an email when a picture changed.
More recently, I was speaking to a couple of people who worked for schools. They immediately declared Daydreamer to be educational, in particular with regard to its ability to make tim-lapse movies. In fact,m they are right, once I thought about it. There are many webcams out there which provide an opportunity to make educational tim-lapse movies. For example, you can learn a lot about storms by watching a time-lapse of the doppler radar maps available on certain weather web sites. To get Daydreamer to make such a movie, you just need to drag the image (the large version of that map, for preference) on to a Daydreamer window. Set the settings of that window so that the picture is only downloaded as often as the map is updated (usually 30 minutes) and set it to make a movie. The result is, I think, much better than the time-lapse movies usually available on the sites, and can run much longer than those animated maps.
As I thought about both of these applications, however, it seemed to me that they would both be enhanced by the ability to monitor a local camera, say, an iSight. This would be especially useful given Apple's inclusion of the iSight as standard equipment in the iMac, the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. But how to capture the iSight's image as a still and put it in a place where Daydreamer could read it? That's the subject of my next entry.
For example, when I told a friend who is heavily involved with defense matters about it, he thought Daydreamer would make a dandy part of a home security system. Truth to tell, I had already thought about this. I included a rudimentary script in the Daydreamer distribution to send an email when a picture changed.
More recently, I was speaking to a couple of people who worked for schools. They immediately declared Daydreamer to be educational, in particular with regard to its ability to make tim-lapse movies. In fact,m they are right, once I thought about it. There are many webcams out there which provide an opportunity to make educational tim-lapse movies. For example, you can learn a lot about storms by watching a time-lapse of the doppler radar maps available on certain weather web sites. To get Daydreamer to make such a movie, you just need to drag the image (the large version of that map, for preference) on to a Daydreamer window. Set the settings of that window so that the picture is only downloaded as often as the map is updated (usually 30 minutes) and set it to make a movie. The result is, I think, much better than the time-lapse movies usually available on the sites, and can run much longer than those animated maps.
As I thought about both of these applications, however, it seemed to me that they would both be enhanced by the ability to monitor a local camera, say, an iSight. This would be especially useful given Apple's inclusion of the iSight as standard equipment in the iMac, the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. But how to capture the iSight's image as a still and put it in a place where Daydreamer could read it? That's the subject of my next entry.
Posted: Sat - June 10, 2006 at 05:04 PM
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Published On: Jun 10, 2006 09:57 PM
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Published On: Jun 10, 2006 09:57 PM