The Box Office - About

• The Author
• Why The Box Office?
• Features
• Current Limitations / Stuff to add
• Version History
• The Icon

The Box Office was developed by Bram Van Damme (aka Bramus!), 22 year old semi-independent freelancing webdeveloper from Deinze, Belgium next to his dayjob over at wax.be (again webdevelopment).

Bramus! his personal site can be found at http://www.bram.us/, his professional site can be found at http://www.3rds.be/

You can reach Bramus! by using the contact form over at bram.us or the contact form over at 3rds.be

The idea behind it all was conceived when analyzing a newspost at Mike Industries where Mike contoured some text around a background image like so:

The technique behind it, is to create loads of empty div's with the same height as the used line-height.

Using a handy Bookmarklet called topo with borders we can make them visible though:

Doing this all manually time after time for every new image discouraged me a bit to use this every day, so the idea to create a tool that automates this was born quite fast.

• Just test it yourself!

• Only works with .jpg images atm Kinda added in 0.4.1! Fully added in 0.4.2
• No formchecking whatsoever atm
• The draggingbit freaks out IE.
• Extra padding option (extra distance to stay away from the image) Added in 0.4!
• Manually adjust the results (in a visual way) Added in 0.4!
• The ignore color must be an exact match (so #FFFFFE won't match #FFFFFF although the human eye can't see the difference) Added in 0.3!
• Only works with images that have the content on the left hand side of the image Added in 0.3!

• The Box Office 0.4.2 - The Lazy Saturday Edition (2007-01-06)
  • Fixed the bug that got introduced in the last version.
• The Box Office 0.4.1 - fopen() vs. CURL (2006-06-01)
  • Changed internal remote file handling after servermove
  • This results in the fact that even GIF files are now valid to enter.
    Though, when having a gif with whitespace at its top (http://www.fredcrystal.com/circle.gif for example),
    the whitespace is misteriously ignored...
• The Box Office 0.4 - User Experience Improvement (2005-12-13)
  • 3 steps of separation : Define - Adjust - Result
  • Drag support for manual adjustments
  • Added extra padding option
  • New and improved website
• The Box Office 0.3 - Float your boat (2005-05-24)
  • Added support for images with the content on the right
  • Script now checks for approximations of the ignore color instead of an exact match
• The Box Office 0.2 (2005-05-18)
  • First release
  • Made in PHP
• The Box Office 0.1 (2005-05-17)
  • First coding of the idea that just popped
  • Made in C#

The icon used for "The Box Office" was taken from the freely downloadable XML Docs x-tended iconset created by Bartelme Design