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Couple Wearing Rabbit Ears by iofoto

Last Thursday was Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival as it is literally called. The Chinese are serious about celebrating the new year, and the whole festival takes 15 days. The last day is the classical lantern festivals, when people light candles and send small lanterns into the sky.

The year of the Rabbit is traditionally associated with home and family, artistic pursuits and peace. It is also easier to make a good income in the Year of the Rabbit, than in the ferocious Year of the Tiger, which just ended.

At YAY the Chinese New Year brings a welcoming vacation to our employees in China.

过年好! (Happy New Year!)

Jan.

“Parasol” by Ivonnewierink

Hi everyone

We are currently working hard on the search experience here at Yay Micro. We have some pretty cool stuff coming up in the near future, and today we’re introducing color search – the Yay Way.

We are big fans of the “keep it simple – stupid” philosophy. When we were thinking about how to implement color search, there was a lot of really interesting ideas that arose. In the end we wanted to create something that was easy enough for everyone to use, but at the same time providing a powerful tool that would be useful.

We ended up with what I would call Google Image Search on steroids. If you are familiar with Google Image Search, you might have noticed that you can easily choose a color for your images, but only one. We wanted to take it a step further and give users the same user interface, but allow them to choose multiple colors that might want in an image. Also, we wanted to give them the option to exclude certain colors. We are quite happy with what we ended up, and now we want to know what you think about it. It’s our first version, and we will defenitly keep improving it to our users’ needs.

Some examples of what you can search for:
Blue and Yellow “Flowers”
Red and Brown, but not White “Woman”

So what do you think, leave a comment

Regards,
Bjorn

L:)

Today’s image captures the magic of a Christmas tree, and the anticipation for Christmas Eve! Photo by Sandralise

Linda

This photo by ibphoto gave a perfect example of how the light and temperature was this morning. Cold, clear and crisp.

Jan

Linda

In vector graphics information is stored as a collection of geometrical shapes. That means that you can open a vector graphics file and render it as large as you want. You can also change geometrical values without distorting the image or loose quality.

At YAY we have both EPS and SVG vector files. EPS stands for Encapsulated PostScript and is the filetype that the Adobe program suite mostly support. EPS-files can be opened in Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, as well as CorelDraw, GIMP and InkScape. All these programs can also save convert the EPS into JPEGs or your preferred format. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics and is the preferred vector  file for web-applications. All major browsers support SVG. However, SVG is not supported in Photoshop. Though CorelDraw, Illustrator and Inkscape has native support.

InkScape is a program you should look into if you’re working with vectors and are in need of a free program. It is distributed under a free software license and is quite capable of doing almost everything you need to do with vector files.

So, I’ve picked a few examples to give you an idea of how vector files look:

Merry Christmas!

Jan

If you’re having trouble finding the Christmas Spirit this year, we at YAY can help you! Install our FREE  screensaver with beautiful Christmas images. Our screensaver features a selection of 100 great images from our database. The images selected are our personal favourites, which will give you a pinpoint to the images we appreciate.

Get your free screensaver now!

Our screensaver is compatible with both PC and Mac. It’s also very easy to install. Seriously, it couldn’t be better.

Jan

The talented guys over at Worldwide Panoramas AS, which share the same office as YAY, have been invited over, so this will indeed be a happening. If you’re looking into advanced photographic solution, you should check them out. They’re gigapixel photographies are very impressive!

A Julebord is kind of like the Scandinavian version of Thanksgiving, except for the turkey.

Merry Christmas!

Jan

Anyhow, going to the US in November gives you a reminder of how infatuated Americans are with Thanksgiving celebration. The morning after I gave the presentation, I was watching morning TV at the hotel and saw Mike Huckabee explain how to deep-fry a turkey for thanksgiving. I believe he was serious when he told the audience “Not only is it good, but it’s healthy too!”.

A short discussion about this at the office when I returned, and Linda showed me this rather fascinating cooking lady at YouTube:

So, have you ever deep-fried a turkey for thanksgiving?

Deep-fried or not, we at YAY wish you all the best for thanksgiving!

Jan

Entrepreneur gave a list of great apps for your smart phone. For personal use, my favorite apps are:

Spotify – let you stream music, legal and almost free! Not available in the U.S.
Shazam – I love music, and with Shazam I know what music is playing.
Pzizz – when working long hours power napping and a good night sleep is important. Pzizz is great for calming down a busy mind!
Shopper – a simple solution to a simple problem: organizing the shopping.

Also, I love the map with GPS – I used to get lost all the time, now I don’t

It’s always fun with new apps, so if you have any recommendations I’d love to hear them!

Linda

Photo by leaf.

Linda

Image by: gunnar3000. Now you get live chat support on stock photo site yaymicro.com