It has been quite a while since the last mention of the Thread Art application I wrote for GISH 2021! All of my code was shared on GitHub a few years ago. The user interface was updated with additional options and hardened against invalid data. Optimizations reduced image processing time to at most a minute or two. That is not ideal, but far better than the 20+ minutes I had to wait with the original.
All documentation about using the app and its internal logic were hosted on a website for my old team, BetaBlue. I recently closed that account since GISH is no longer active. This necessitated moving that information to a new location. I decided to take advantage of GitHub’s Wiki feature so everything can be found in a single place.
The application itself has not changed in the last few years. Here is a screenshot of the current version.
The preview in that screenshot was generated from the following photo of Supernatural character Castiel keeping on theme with the original GISH item description.
I was quite pleased with that result. So much so that I proceeded with creating a physical version with thread on a wood frame. It is about half complete at this time. The circular frame is 24 inches across.
One alteration to the code was made in an attempt to produce some thread art for use in the online documentation. Since the app was created for use with GISH, I wanted to have a graphic with that text. All of that work was performed on a local only copy. They were rather quick and dirty changes not suitable for release. I did get a decent image in the end.
There are some improvements I may attempt at some point in the future. My original approach was a blunt, brute force implementation. Incorporating image processing to identify lines and shapes could lead to a much smarter algorithm. Hopefully that would also better preserve negative white space. None of this is a priority since I have no deadline, but taking another pass is definitely in the back of my mind.