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PlaidMaker has been updated again. New features include:

• New logo. The old one was too busy. Now it’s just the machine Arial font beside a small plaid.
• New favicon. I really like this guy. And what’s cool about the favicon is that I made it using the PlaidMaker.
• Added a plain English description of the hex color value on the plaid pages. I’m hoping this will help with SEO so that people searching for plaids of different colors can find what they’re looking for.
• Fixed a logical bug where unused colors were being saved.

Still to do, amongst many other things:

• Add a color picker. This is essential. All my non-nerd friends can’t make plaids because they don’t know the hex codes. I keep procrastinating on this.
• Gallery search. Right now it’s a dumb list ordered chronologically.
• Comments
• Users

The PlaidMaker had been getting some random search engine traffic and it was featured on the Spoonflower blog. I’m glad to see people successfully using it, especially because I think it’s still a little confusing. I just pushed a small update. The most important change is that I moved it to its own domain at PlaidMaker.org. (Don’t worry, all the old links will still take you there). All the changes are:

• new domain name!
• friendly urls
• “about” page with help, history, roadmap and changelog
• added html images (they were all CSS background images–not search engine friendly)
• added 960 grid CSS

There’s still a ton of things that I want to do check out the roadmap for details. Enjoy!

I’ve updated PlaidMaker to include a saving function and a gallery. It’s now officially “2.0″ with user-generated content. Also, a new logo. Check it out.

There’s still a lot that needs to be done. This is what will be in the works next:

• Color-picker: You still need to know your hex values for now
• Gallery search: Right now the display is random, eventually there will be a search based on color, name, etc.

There’s one bug. If you save the images to your computer, they look all effed up, but they’re fine when you upload them to whatever website and view them in a browser. I’m still looking into why this is.

After attempting to make a rather complicated pattern with the 0.1 version. I found myself copy-and-pasting hex values all over the place. It worked but it was tedious. It also made for extremely long URLs which have a finite character limit.

The new 0.2 version features a color pallet and separate inputs for each color chunk. This makes it easier to add chunks in the middle of an existing pattern. It also lets you change up the color scheme without having to muck with a gigantic string.

Up next: YUI color picker and saving.

PlaidMaker is an easy way to make images of different plaid patterns. Looking at my shirt, I got the notion that threads are like pixels. I tested my theory in Photoshop, but the process was tedious and manual, while the logic is basic. Here are some of my first patterns.

For 4 years, I’ve wanted to write a program where I could automatically create the images outside of Photoshop but I hadn’t the know-how or time up until now. In fact, this site uses the same effect for the header and sidebars.

I did it using the PHP GD library. The algorithm is quite simple: if x+y (coordinates) is odd then use the x color, else use the y color. It’s slightly more complicated to mirror the design. I’ll probably open source the code when I get it to my liking.

I plan on adding a saving function, a viewing gallery and a color picker in later versions.

Make a plaid!