just an asterisk» just an asterisk

My new Picasa account (an open letter to my wife).

ab — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:07:24 +0000

My dear wife,

You were right. It took me nearly a year, I swore up and down that my Flickr account was the bees knees, I wrote articles and explanations of how to use Flickr’s advanced tool set, and I ruined perfectly good cocktail party conversations, berating all services that did not stack up to my personal choice.

A year has gone by and now, like a dope, I have to reverse my position. Why? Because Picasa just changed the game, and I can no longer ignore the beautiful integration between Picasa and all my other apps. Before I start into the details, this isn’t to say that Flickr is a bad service – it’s just no longer for me (yes I’m trying to save face – but let’s not write off Flickr entirely… there are too many devotees).

Without any more ado, here are the top 4 reasons I’ve decided to change over.

1. I can host 80GB of files for $20 a year.

This was the clincher, so in a way, it’s normal that it be my number 1 reason. Suddenly, Flickr and Picasa are essentially evenly priced. Before this week, buying the required space for all my photos, and future photos, was simply exorbitantly expensive. My last defense crumbled, which allowed me to acknowledge the next 3 points…

2. Integration

In Flickr, when I wanted to send a photo to someone, there were three options – 1. I had already done this before and saved the email address. 2. I had to go into my email and find the email address before hitting send back in Flickr. 3. I could just copy the link and ignore the email functions because my address book wasn’t available.

In Picasa, I just click the share button below and poof – my contacts are available from Gmail.

As you can see from the picture, it even looks like a Gmail message. This is what makes the integration between these tools so powerful. You don’t have to learn anything new.

This doesn’t end with email. There is integration with other Google products too.

For example, you can specify the site of the photo on a Google Map, exactly like you did when you were looking for takeout last night.

If your camera (or cell phone camera) can geotag to your photos (a longitude and latitude value), these will appear in the familiar Google Maps interface, just to the right of you photos. This makes sorting photos by destination a very pleasant task.

As far as integration goes, using Picasa if you already use Gmail for contacts and email will save you a ton of time. If you don’t use Gmail, you might not be better off…

3. Ease of use

Gmail caught on because it was easy and fast. When I started evangelizing, often I heard “but I already have an email program” and “I just don’t get it”. These same people are nearly all Gmail users now. I have to believe that the snappy response time for searches and other tasks makes a serious difference. I won’t rant and rave about how Picasa takes things to a new level – in most ways it doesn’t. However, it does benefit from the same value created by Gmail and other Google products – a simple interface.

4. All the same features (or at least the ones I use)

Finally, it’s worth emphasizing that this is not a baby version of the other popular photos sites. There are some serious features involved. Hardcore photographers will be asking, where are the camera related details for each picture? Where are the ISO settings? Where are the exposure details? Well these are all available (if you hit more info), but are hidden to make the screen less cramped and to provide a better viewing space for your work.

Other fancy pants features exist too: We’ve mentioned geotagging above. There is also facial recognition, allowing you to tag your friends photos (using their integrated contact information from your Gmail). In addition, there are collaborative albums, fans, commenting, full tagging features, video capabilities, email upload, and mobile access…

In conclusion

Yes I was wrong, dear wife, but I’m working to fix it. This probably won’t be my last change of heart in the technology department. You do deserve credit for seeing most of this right from day one. Nice work. Feel like writing for JAA?

~ab

Cocktail Party Geek: megapixels – overblown in every way…

ab — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:45:57 +0000

I can’t seem to get away from it – whenever I hear someone has a new camera, I’m programmed to respond with “How many megapixels?” Why would I want to break this habit? Because it doesn’t matter!!!! Seriously people, we need to work together here. Megapixels are like weight for cell phones. Most phones only weigh a few ounces these days, but people still seem interested in getting a “light” phone. A recent blackberry ad on the subway even screamed “LIGHT!” as one of the three most important things you had to know about the new Curve. Should that be a reason to buy that phone? Probably not – all phones are light. Should megapixels be a reason to buy a camera? Again, probably not.

What you need to know:

A Pixel (despite its funky spelling) was named for Picture Element. These little fellas are like little light bulbs. Everyone has seen a scoreboard, lights are used in patterns to create letters. Pixels are the same concept, except that they can emit the colors Red ,Green and Blue (the RGB color model) or Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (the CMYK color model). Your screen and your camera both use combinations of either RGB or CMYK to create the many colors that you see in your pictures.

Back in the day, when digital camera makers were trying to find a foothold in the new market, some bright (like a pixel) marketing dude decided to hype the pixel count on their new camera. This quickly became a huge selling point, as digital cameras in those days were simply trying to get enough resolution to display your standard 4X6 print. As Ken Rockwell points out in his blog “For normal 4×6″ (10x15cm) prints, even VGA (640 x 480 or 0.3MP) resolution is just fine. Digital cameras did this back in 1991!” My friends – we’ve been duped.

David Pogue (the NYT technology columnist) has even done tests with several pictures blowup to a large size at 5, 8 and 13 megapixels. He asked random people in NYC to identify the 13 megapixel image. None could! (Perhaps ironically, the header image for Pogue article is rather pixilated, as it was blown up to fill the space…)

So what IS a good way to choose a camera? This might sound dumb, but choose the one that produces the pictures that you like the best… Pixels don’t really matter, but things like color and tone are important. You should be happy with images shot in any light – colors should pop (if that’s what you want) and phrases like metallic tones should be avoided (again, unless that is what you want). Read lots of reviews on CNET.com for basic choices with price ranges or die hard camera sites for more expensive tastes. Do the research and try to find photos created with the camera you’re looking at. The best way to do this is to browse Flickr’s Camera Finder – a brilliant little program that searches through the millions of pictures on Flickr and lets you browse by make and model.

As with everything in life, there is one good exception to the rule. Pixels do matter if you stink at photography and are forever cropping out only tiny fractions of your photos (say someone’s head out of a class portrait). There’s just no way that you are going to be able to get enough data for a good print if you choose a small percentage of the original.

So that’s really it – more than you wanted to know but enough to make sound brilliant while enjoying your next geeky martini party (I should copyright that drink immediately).

Best of luck with the photos!

~ab

InterfaceLift makes your workspace pretty…

ab — Thu, 21 May 2009 13:31:00 +0000

Personally, I alternate between two states for my desktop background:

Sometimes I keep only a solid color background – especially when I’m worried about my machine going slowly (this is, as I suspected and my research on the subject confirmed, completely a myth. Your background doesn’t slow down your machine directly… It may however, make it harder to switch to the desktop, as your wallpaper may take a few extra seconds to load.)

However, most of the time, I believe a good wallpaper to be the foundation of my productive workspace. Changing my wallpaper frequently provides variation, inspiration and motivation (please don’t ruin this for me if it’s all in my head :) ).

However, finding safe wallpapers for download can be a bit tricky. Many sites claim to provide free backgrounds but instead put all sorts of junk (some of which is very malicious) on your machine. I prefer to avoid these, instead opting for sites like InterfaceLift.

InterfaceLift provides some very nice wallpapers without causing potential harm to your machine. Here are some of my favorites so far:

If this site isn’t doing for you, there are other options:

MandoLux – very pretty large wallpapers
Wallpapers loaded with Color – cute stuff!
Pixel Girl – so cute it will make you vomit cuteness…
Veer Ideas – strange and interesting wallpapers

Enjoy!

~ab

Tilt Shift (Via Lifehacker.com)

ab — Thu, 21 May 2009 01:50:00 +0000

On Just an Asterisk, I try not to copy other site’s posts. Normally, there is enough fun out there to write about and it simply doesn’t need to happen. However, while reading a lifehacker this past week (a highly recommended site by the way), I noticed this article and had such a good time playing with it that I wanted to share.

TiltShift lets you fiddle with your images to make them look like models. I decided to play with an photo that I shot in London a few weeks ago.

Using TiltShift, I managed to create this image, which is now my desktop background…

I love the colors and the slight blur on the edges… I’d be curious to see what everyone else manages to do with it. Feel free to post links to your own creations in the comments!

TiltShift (Via Lifehacker)

Enjoy

~ab

For your viewing pleasure – Istanbul by Theo

ab — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:06:04 +0000

You may be wondering about the rather inconsistent timing on my blog posts… I’ve spent the last couple of months going back and forth from Turkey. This is not exactly the ideal blog writing scenario, but at the very least, I have something interesting to share – even if it’s not mine. Theo, an amateur professional photographer friend, has taken some fantastic shots of Istanbul and given me permission to share:

Theo’s Istanbul Album

Enjoy,

~ab