Show HN: I make my family postcards every year. Here's this year's. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I make my family postcards every year. Here's this year's.

postcards.lekevicius.com

109 pointsflixic27 comments

It's interesting how a simple symmetry instantly transforms what would otherwise be a bunch of random ugly lines into something beautiful.

Kaleidoscopic IFS fractals are also based on this concept. (8 axis symmetry + some simple transformations), and look at the result: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=renxaQZfsdk

Yes, we see beauty in symmetry, so any junk becomes beautiful when arrayed in a pattern, and the junk creator can feel proud of creating a work of art, when in fact the aesthetic is mostly provided by the symmetry engine.

See also MacPaint->Goodies->Brush Mirrors

Very nice. You should either open-source it or do a write up on how you made it. As a newbie to web development, I'd love to read it.

It's open source! Use, remix, study and criticise!

https://bitbucket.org/lekevicius/christmas-2013/

Pretty fun :)

It's after clicking on "Gallery" that I understood you could draw on the postcard, maybe a hint on the landing page would be nice

edit: oh, I get it. On my FF, the "family postcard draw it" thingie flashes too fast.

edit: also, line breaks are not saved.

This is excellent. Extremely simple and fairly intuitive, I wish I had heard about it days sooner.

It's somewhat surprising to continuously encounter such (seemingly) simple projects/proof-of-concepts like this that fulfill a need many of us didn't realize we had. If you haven't yet, consider writing about how you came to the idea for this particularly iteration and the process of creating it. I know I'd enjoy reading something like that.

Thanks!

I do this every year. Last year, I experimented with Meteor.js and made a Christmas forest: http://kaledos.lekevicius.lt (sorry, in Lithuanian). Made that in about 10 hours - idea, design, development. It's a fun thing.

This year I did the same. You couldn't have heard about it days sooner, because it did not exist yesterday, just yesterday I wrote "rails new christmas_2013". And I have no intention of maintaining it: next year it will be another thing made in a day (:

Very nice idea. Linksmų šventų kalėdų!

This reminds me so much of a toy I had when I was a kid, with a catchy commercial...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph

commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoSECiRl-pI&t=8m49s

Doesn't work in Chrome on a tablet. Start drawing zoomed to some a flipped view of the backside and there is no space bar to tap without a text field.

Hacks for desktop only is understandable but increasingly a niche area to target first.

"to target" and "first" (:

Well, it's a hack - for pretty much one day, mostly for our family friends. If something doesn't work, really, I would have no problem saying "Oh, sorry, just use Chrome on desktop. Merry Christmas!"

Really, tablets don't matter much here (:

Isn't this a family Christmas card, rather than a postcard? Isn't a postcard something you send back from a vacation?

No, a postcard is a very specific type of mail, which can have any image you desire on the other side (vacation, Christmas, save the date, etc). The key characteristics of a postcard is that you don't put them in an envelope and you can send them using cheaper postcard stamps instead of more expensive standard stamps.

Nice site! It seems like the initial instructions don't show up in Firefox though. The drawing still works.

Same here, in Firefox the instructions disappeared on load. Had to experiment to see what it did. Cool otherwise.

The gallery has my chuckling really hard

My pre-click expectations were fully met.

Glad I wasn't the only one with that idea...

It works on mobile, but please add an on page button to clear card, since I don't have a space bar.

Drops mouse=up event sometimes...IE 11.0.9600

beautiful work! would love a breakdown on how you built this (I made a postcard app a few years back picsicle.com)

You can check the source: https://bitbucket.org/lekevicius/christmas-2013

Basically, it's just a Rails app. No front-end framework, just jQuery. Canvas is converted to base64, sent to server, server uploads to S3, user gets URL. Very simply, one day hack.

Very nice.

Hello, this is dog.

what is with all the dog ones?

This is how to upload custom images to the gallery:

Using Google Chrome Inspector, you can find out the line that is triggered in the Javascript code when the "SAVE" button is pressed (inspect the "SAVE" button element, and it will tell you what part of the code is executed when it's clicked). By looking at the code, you see that what happens is: the previous HTML5 Canvas where you draw the snowflake is rendered into JPEG and encoded in base64 (.toDataURL("image/jpeg")), then the data is appended to the <form> element inside the "value" attribute of an <input> tag. Then, the form is submitted via POST.

So if you set a DOM Breakpoint (using Chrome's Inspector) to watch for subtree modifications of the <form>, you will catch it when the <input> tag is appended. Then, you go take your own custom .jpeg, encode it into base64 (for example here: http://base64.wutils.com/encoding-online/image-to-base64/), and then paste your custom image data inside the the "value" attribute. Then you resume the script, and the server will receive your custom image data, instead of the original one.

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