Apple is held up as user friendly and simple. In many ways it is. However even Apple fails the test when it comes to abstracting technological underpinnings from the user. I love my iPhone, but frequently am unable to take photos with it. It tells me “There is not enough room to take additional pictures. Please delete some existing photos.”
The iPhone should free space for me. I should never know this happened. My iPhone knows that it is a cache, not a storage medium. It knows which photos I have saved to my computer and which are unique. It knows which songs I haven’t listened to in months. It could free space, but doesn’t. Apple simplicity for the loss!
In the “unforgivable sin” category: even if I delete a number of photos, my iPhone still claims there is insufficient space! Wait a minute - I know there is more space - I just deleted photos (that thing you told me to do so you would stop complaining!!!) Argh. :-(
Technology still sucks a lot. This is probably obvious to everyone, but as a technologist, I know exactly where the failings are and get more frustrated than the average person. Sure, you get annoyed when your wireless network doesn’t just work, but I actually know why it doesn’t work, see the terrible engineering decisions that lead to this outcome, and get frustrated and disappointed in humanity.
Ok so it’s not that bad. But we have far to go. An example: I can no longer get on my home wireless router, because a neighbor just added a router in their house on the same wireless channel. So the signals are competing. So I’ll have to change my router to a new channel. Which begs the question - why should I need to do this? The two routers know they’re competing, they can “see” each other, they should switch channels automatically. Little things, big headaches.
Shirley Bell Designs has hundreds of beautiful images. And Google Image search isn’t indexing them. Why not? Apparently it doesn’t like dynamically generated pages (ie with URL parameters and the like) in between the crawler and the image. No problem - I created this simple image page listing every one of Shirley’s paintings with a clear title, link to a neatly formatted image and a link to the original jpg (example: black lab). Google re-crawled the site, checked this page out (it is in the sitemap) and then decided not to index it. Why? Bizarre. Guess I’ll have to dig deeper.
This is a shame though. I imagine many gallery sites are dynamic such as this one, and if Google can’t index them it is missing out on many many images on the web. I know I use Google Image search all the time for clip-art, etc. and yet I never realized it wasn’t doing a good job on the indexing side.
Allow me to (re)introduce Shirley Bell Designs! Shirley is a longtime neighbor and family friend, and it’s been my pleasure to help appropriately showcase her beautiful artwork online. New site features include an improved image gallery, better information about the artist, and the ability to purchase her artwork online. We’re also doing some tentative marketing, to increase organic search results as well as generate paid search leads. This is actually a very interesting process - I recommend everyone try it for something.
I chose PayPal for a payment solution. The downside is the shopping cart isn’t perfectly integrated, and the prices are slightly higher than Google Checkout’s, however unlike Checkout PayPal allows purchasing without PayPal accounts, which significantly increases the number of potential customers.
My favorite bit is the “we believe ” section. A sample: “we believe in keeping our designs simple and clean, leaving room for the card giver to add a message the artwork may reflect.”
We are pressing ahead on doodleboard. Check out the blog and public alpha! Tijan and I have been working on this since the mid-summer update post below. I solved some tricky tech problems with drawing lots of things in the browser and maintaining a pleasant user experience… filing two provisional patents on that.
The doodleboard itself is pretty cool - we envision making it easier for distributed teams to actually collaborate remotely. Providing really simple collaboration, updating the whiteboard in all of our offices and cubicles for the information age, in a product that people will use. Check it out, give us feedback!
Information markets are quite interesting. (Also known as prediction markets, depending on which academic you want to make happy). The academic literature is fun to read and intellectually quite interesting. The general idea is that a diverse crowd of humans is better at aggregating information and selecting the “correct” outcome than is a group of deliberating experts.
For a quick introduction to the concept read James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of the Crowds. More in-depth literature is available on the web, a good starting point is Chris Masse’s prediction market vortal. Foresight Exchange, the oldest online information market, also provides an open source platform for generating customized solutions.
Following up on our idea for digital image management software, Francesca and I developed an alpha version in Java that allows the user to quickly rename large numbers of photos, adding keyword, title, caption, and date tags, which are then available in the filename as well as the image metadata fields. We are very excited for this, and have been working on organizing our collection of 3,500+ images, as well as scanning many more of the family treasures! Screenshots with some descriptive text as to how the program works today follow in the post body.
