Category: Design

Brickshow reviewed my book “The Star Wars LEGO Minifigure Catalog“. It is nice to receive such encouraging feedback.

I am proud to announce the availability of three new Minifigure Catalogs. The books are available from CreateSpace, Amazon and as a eBooks from Lulu. I am in particular happy to be able to offer the 2011 Minifigures as a new companion book. You do not need to purchase another big book, but you can simply update you reference with this series of annual catalogs. The Harry Potter and Star Wars catalogs are specifically targeted to collectors that focus their collections and who have no need for a complete overview.

The three new catalogs use a new and improved design that shows multiple photographs and the associated meta data right next to each other. A price guide will offer you insights into the rarity of the Minifigures.

• The 2011 LEGO Minifigure Catalog | Inlcudes all Minifigures of 2011
• The Star Wars LEGO Minifigure Catalog | Includes all Star Wars Minifigures between 1999 and 2011
• The Harry Potter LEGO Minifigure Catalog | Includes all Harry Potter Minifigures between 2001 and 2011

The App will also soon be updated to include the 2011 Minifigures. Stay tuned.

We are proud to announce that we released the Facetree software. Facetree enables you to cross-reference genealogical data with people in photographs. It helps identifying faces in photographs through a context filter based on genealogical data. The results of the identification are then stored in the meta data of the image using the XMP standard. Continue reading “Facetree”

I like Microsoft’s Photosynth for the iPhone. It is a really quick way of creating and sharing panoramic photography. This was the first reason I ever had to install Silverlight. I posted several panoramas from our recent trip in New Zealand.

For some time I have been looking for a way to visualize my complete family tree. Not just the usual ancestor/descendent charts, but really all of them together in one big chart. Until now I could only get yEd to do this job, since it imports GEDCOM. Here is a screenshot of what yEd can do:

The problem was that yEd cannot deal with UTF-8 and it also does not include photographs or dates. It just prints the network of people. It does also not respect the generations or gender.

The latest version of Mac Family Tree introduced a new “Tree” visualization which is pretty close to what I want. It plots every person in the tree and does show meta data. It included photographs and respects the concept of generations. To be able to get everybody onto one sheet that can possibly be printed, Mac Family Tree breaks the tree into smaller sections and links them by lines or reference numbers. This might be a necessary, but in my case it produces many small “left over” branches at the bottom. So close, but still not perfect. Maybe the next version will have an improved layout algorithm.