The Big Dumb Developer

We saw in part 1 that we can build a more efficient skimming implementation by using a "film strip" image instead of a bunch of single images. For my example, I built the filmstrip by hand - it sucked. So, I whipped up a quick ruby script for creating a filmstrip of all the jpg's in a directory. If you don't already have RMagick installed, you can find instructions for installing it on the .

The script first crops the images to 160x160, then creates a vertical strip using RMagick's montage functionality.

require 'rubygems'
require 'RMagick'

files = Dir['*.jpg']
imageList = Magick::ImageList.new
numImages = 0
files.each do |file|
  unless file == 'filmStrip.jpg'
    puts "adding #{file}"
    img = Magick::Image.read(file)[0]
    img.crop_resized!(160,160)
    imageList << img
    numImages = numImages + 1
  end
end  

filmStrip = imageList.montage do
  self.geometry = "160x160+0+0"
  self.tile = "1x#{numImages}"
end
  
filmStrip.write('filmStrip.jpg')