Simon Hammond Blog

A while ago I recommended pxn8 for your online photo-editing needs. Now, via Facebook, I’ve come across picnik. Wow.

To simply call this an online photo editor seems a little mean. It has revised my idea of what an online photo editor can and should do. It seems to have all the key features of Picasa - plus a few more. This includes doodling, lomo, rounded corners and gooify. It will seamlessly integrate into Facebook, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums. Now there’s no excuse for red-eye in Facebook party pics or sloppy cropping in Flickr.

The only question is: why doesn’t Flickr have something like this already? I was going to suggest someone buy this but, of course, no-one needs to; it’s already integrated into their services! This smells like the shape of things to come.

Tags: review, web by si
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I’ve been looking into 3D printers for work (aka rapid prototyping machines). I remember seeing one demonstrated on Tomorrow’s World yonks ago and was interested to see how they had moved on.

The good (but dull) business solutions: For $40k, Z Corp can supply you with an machine that will sit happily in your office and knock out full-colour models without getting your hands dirty. The upstart, Desktop Factory, aims to well undercut them with a cheap and cheerful version at $5-7k.

However, the really interesting stuff comes from the academic hackers doing crazy, speculative stuff with head-spinning implications. For starters, they want to put these machines into homes with the Fab@Home project.  They’ve reported printing 3D models out of cheese and chocolate.  Even more startlingly, the RapRep project wants to get these machines manufacturing their own, possibly superior, components aiming for a clearly insanely suicidal self-replicating process.  They have a video showing how easy it is (look out for the funny guy at 1:18).  Both these projects totally open-sourced designs with estimated costs of just a few hundred quid.

Tags: techie by si
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I looked at Google Reader for my feed-reading needs some time back but didn’t fancy the interface much. Since then it has been revised, tweaked and I’ve heard a few good things about it. So I’m going to give it another spin and neglect my trusty Bloglines for a week or two.

Transition is a pretty easy thing to do. Export OPML file with all my feeds and then import them into Reader. Twenty seconds, job done.

So, why the itchy feet? One glitch with Bloglines is the way it handles high-volume feeds. If I click on a folder with 100 unread items then it loads them and marks them read which commits me to reading them or risk missing them. If I don’t read them I’ll lose them as soon as I go elsewhere. So they stay unread, like an ominous stack of washing, until I either put aside half an hour to chew through them or just ditch the lot. Reader lets me dip in and skim a few off the top, marking them read only as I scroll past them.

Also, while Bloglines orders feeds into folders, Reader uses tags. This is another big deal for me when I have feeds that are ‘essential reading’ and by ‘friends’ and ‘funny’. I don’t want to have to make a decision where to put something and then try to recall that decision if I want to find it. I think this will be more important than the tagging in Gmail which I only rarely need to use.

I’ll report back when I’ve made up my mind about whether I’m sticking or switching. There are, of course, others I could also try but these seem like the biggies.

What do you use?

Tags: unfiled by si
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You know when you have a great idea, you tell a bunch of people who are vaguely skeptical but some time later a weak version of that idea comes out and everyone thinks it’s bloody fantastic?

Maybe you don’t.

I had such an idea just over two years ago. I was noticing how people on MS messenger were changing their screen name to say what they were up to and using a community tagboard to make personal mini-announcements. I was getting into MySQL/PHP at the time and so knocked up a working prototype. I didn’t have time to do major development but did a lot of thinking and observing of how it was being used.
I was also watching, waiting for someone to jump into the evolutionary niche that was staring me in the face.

There was a site called buddyping based on location with SMS and then last year something called twttr came out. It gained a few disambiguating vowels and became a big hit in the blogging community. Initially, I was irked by this but then I realised:

1. It’s proved my original motivation. There is a basic need to be met. However…
2. It’s still not as good as my app. I have extra features but I also have a fundamentally different underlying model. This comes from…
3. Having sorted out my ideas with little precedent, I have a clear, independent vision of how it should work. It’s very hard to be original when you have already adopted an existing model. Any twitter-clones that come along are likely to be twitter++ rather than anything really innovative.

I think Facebook could still flatten the field and I think they know it. They have the large network and a decent mobile interface. Scan their developers group and the API and you’ll see they are careful not to let any third-party run away with their networks. I’ll probably get more worried when they lose the ‘is’ (if you know what I mean).

So, anyway, this is where I declare that I’m going to stop obsessing about this stuff to friends and actually do it. I’m doing it because if I don’t I’m going to have to wait for another couple of years for the twitter-clones to get round to recognising the issues that I already have elegant solutions for. And that would be even more frustrating than the last couple of years have been already.

My Cercia contract expires at the end of June by which time I’ll have my corrections done and a few quid in the bank. Interested parties are encouraged to get in touch.

Tags: rant, social software, web by si
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