Hi, I'm Colin.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - A Graphic Novel

Colin Devroe — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:34:50 +0000

Funny how just last night, lying in bed, Eliza and I were discussing this movie. Today, after going through my feed reader¹ I see a link from John Gruber’s Daring Fireball to Kevin Cornell’s blog post about his working on a graphic novel for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I had wrote about this short story of F. Scott Fitzgerald being made into a movie. I had also wrote about someone taking the short story and putting into a nice, readable, and edited PDF².

I just added this book to my Amazon Wish List. Wants!

Source: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - A Graphic Novel

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Which I’m so far behind on it isn’t even funny.
Unfortunately by chapter and not in its entirety.

Brand New: Opinions on Corporate and Brand Identity work

Colin Devroe — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 04:57:30 +0000

I’ve been trying to remember where I first heard about Brand New, a blog by Under Consideration, because I wanted to give appropriate credit. But alas, I can not.

Brand New is a blog that covers the world of corporate and brand identity as it relates to work that has been recently released. This blog is refreshing since it doesn’t look into the past, as many other blogs are doing so well already, but looks towards the future of these brands with their very latest iterations of identity.

Some of my favorite recent posts include: Popeyes Gets Jazzy, Philips gets a Nip/Tuck, and A Leaf grows in New Jersey. There are several others that are definitely worth a look.

Source: Brand New.

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The new Kyle Slattery.com

Colin Devroe — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:26:13 +0000

My friend and Viddler team member Kyle Slattery recently relaunched his Web site. He explains his thoughts on the design and development in this post, which got me to thinking. Having your own Web site is a truly awesome thing.

Especially on today’s Internet. I’ve had “my own site” for as long as I’ve ever been online. It all started on some Geocities and Tripod powered sites in the mid-90s. Then, when I switched from using AOL (read: When I finally realized AOL was not the Internet.), I used some shared space on Prodigy.net, my ISP at the time. It wasn’t long before I discovered the world of Web development and purchased a domain (then called colinspage.com) for around $70 per year.

Fast forward about a year and a few of my friends put together a Star Wars related news site called thehutt.net. I didn’t help out too much with the design and development but I did write some for the site. It wasn’t long after that when I wanted to scratch my own itch and had my own blog. Which ended up turning towards theubergeeks.net, and now I have cdevroe.com.

I think having your own Web site is a valuable thing, especially for those of us that work on the Web. It helps you stay in touch with what people are going through when they want to publish content online, edit some code, or even customize an open source project. There are countless lessons to be learned by having your own site to fiddle with.

Great work Kyle. I’ll check in on you and your site(s) in 14 years.

Source: Kyle Slattery.com.

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Completely torn over mobile photos

Colin Devroe — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 19:07:20 +0000

The above photo was posted to Flickr from my iPhone a few minutes ago. I wanted to show off, in all its glory, the new desktop picture I’m using on both my Macbook and external monitor courtesy of Mark Bixby.

But this brings up something that I’m completely torn over. Where should I post my mobile photos? I have a mobile photos category here on my blog, a Brightkite account that makes it dead-simple to post photos and remember where they were taken an in context, and a Flickr account.

It seems like every time I snap a photo with my iPhone I have a different idea of where I think it should go. I like having everything I submit to the Web here on my site. I think photos of what I’m currently eating at a restaurant is best kept on Brightkite for a lot of reasons, and perhaps an artsy mobile photo like this one would be best submitted to Flickr. Is that the answer? Should I diversify where I submit my mobile photos?

And better yet, why do I care so much? Should I care? Does anyone else care?

UGH!

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Flowers and clouds

Colin Devroe — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:10:06 +0000

While on my run. The clouds over the past few days seem to be much fluffier and far larger than I’ve seen in a long time.

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Chewing on bits, bites, and full on meals

Colin Devroe — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:21:31 +0000

Some prefer to eat three times a day. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. It seems that lately people in my country seem to skip the first meal, generally eat the second meal on-the-run or too quickly, and eat the last meal of the day far too late in the day.

Then you have the health conscious individuals that focus on eating smaller meals much more often. Proven to keep your metabolism raging throughout the day. Coupled with a good routine of exercise this is the sure-fire way to keep healthy and energetic.

But this post has nothing to do with food. It has to do with reading habits.

I love words. Reading them, writing them, seeing them crafted in ways that I can only aspire to. Because of this I read a lot. But I don’t read books (as often as I’d like). I read blogs, link lists, and tidbits of information strewn throughout the World Wide Web.

The link lists that I subscribe to are like little bits. Snacks, if you will. The really good ones will sum up entire articles in only a few sentences so that I’m not forced to read the entire linked-to-resource to find out why that person found it interesting. Really bad ones do the opposite.

The blogs that I subscribe to, in general, are well-written, hand-crafted, and consistently of high-quality, interesting information. The others are generally related to my work or things I’m interested in learning about. There are, also, the few that seem to fill in the cracks to make my subscription list more human and fun like photo blogs, blogs written by friends or family, and Web comics.

Lately I’ve been questioning my information in-take. What is better; reading these little bits of information rather than chewing on the whole meal, or maybe the other way around?

The more I think about it, the more I realize how new this dilemma is. Before the advent of the Internet the only way to get this much information at one time was to have a stack of books or magazines sitting in front of you, rifling through them as fast as your thumbs would allow, and reading a single paragraph from each page as you did it. You’d probably think someone doing that was crazy but that is exactly what it feels like I’m doing.

Have you ever spoken to someone who knows 20% about a topic? Sure they can hold their own in passing conversation about the topic so long as the conversation doesn’t last longer than 30 seconds. Once the conversation gets specific, the “20 percenter” is left standing there trying to catch up to the conversation and realizing they don’t know anything at all about the topic.

I’m beginning to think that unwittingly I’m going to end up being that person. A topic will arise at a gathering that I’ve read only four sentences about and I’ll answer the inevitable question of “Have you heard about (insert topic here)?” with a resounding “Yes!”. Then I’m caught. I’ve just stepped through the door of saying that I know something when I truly don’t. Well, yes, I’ve read four sentences about how the Mars-lander was able to take a solid, ice-like material, and turn it into water (H2O), but I know absolutely nothing more about the topic.

So what do I do? Stop reading link lists? Perhaps.

But then what about blogs? More often than not blog posts by friends, family, or even those related to the industry I work in do little more than entertain, catch me up on “the news”, or completely distract me from what I should be doing. Very, very rarely have I found a blog post to be wholly beneficial to have in my brain.

Think about it. When was the last time you remembered a blog post, in its entirety, to solve a problem you encountered. Right away you’re probably thinking about a problem you had with your iPhone, or some sort of electronic device, that you fixed because you read a blog post about it. That may be true. But couldn’t you have found that information by doing a quick Google search?

Since the Egyptians began beating up papyrus plants some 5,000+ years ago humans have used “books”¹ so why should I be any different? I really enjoy reading books. The tangibleness of a book is much better than reading on-screen, which is part of it, but the other part is the wholeness of books. It is an entire work in one spot. Blog posts, for the most part, are just pieces of ideas and opinions about a given topic rather than an explanation about an entire topic. More often than not they take for granted the fact that the reader understands the topic being discussed (perhaps due to context or just because it is something that is considered general knowledge by the audience).

So do I unsubscribe from every-single-blog, shutdown my computer, and just go to a library every time I need to learn something? I’d say absolutely not. But I do think there is a balance and I’m going to work at striking it.

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Paper based products like scrolls, books, and loose-leaf paper included.

Search Google Docs and Bookmarks with Spotlight using Precipitate

Colin Devroe — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:02:43 +0000

Even though I don’t like Spotlight’s window in Leopard as much as I did the one in Tiger, I still use Spotlight extensively to launch applications, find files and directories, and search through documents, email messages, instant messages, and much more.

However, more and more data is being stored “in the cloud” and so Spotlight sometimes needs to learn new tricks to keep up with the times. Google Docs is a perfect example of cloud computing/storage. I use it for personal documents that I need to collaborate with people on and Viddler uses it every single day.

Google’s Precipitate “… lets you search for and launch the information you have stored in the cloud from within Spotlight or Google Desktop for Mac”. Essentially it does something I’ve always wanted to do; create a simple file and link it to the Web. Spotlight indexes the file’s information, but the link opens a browser¹.

Give it a spin!

Source: precipitate - Google Code.

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Now I just need to force Spotlight to open these links in Fluid.app and I’d be all set.

Get a Brightkite sticker, Viddler Tshirt and sticker!

Colin Devroe — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:23:09 +0000

Brightkite, in their infinite generosity, sent me a few stickers that I could give away here on my site. When I got them in the mail yesterday I immediately began to think of a fun way to give them away, and I think I’ve come up with an easy and fun way.

Photo credit: Chris Tingom

And I think I can find some Viddler tshirts laying around to give away with the stickers. These people seem to like them, so maybe you will too!

How to “win” a Brightkite sticker and a Viddler tshirt!

Let’s keep this simple, shall we?

Create a Viddler account.
Friend me on Viddler!
Leave a video comment on this post stating about why you’d like a sticker and a tshirt¹.

Pretty simple. If you have a Brightkite account already, friend me up there as well, but if you don’t your sticker will also come with an invite.

There will be 8 winners! I will select the winners based on the video. If you don’t have a video camera attached to your computer, you can upload a video to Viddler first and then select it using the Viddler Wordpress plugin (just click the link by the comment box and you should be able to figure out the rest).

You can put in entries until tomorrow at noon.

Update: Rob has some Viddler stickers so we’re going to add those to the mix as well!

A note to Brightkite admins: If you have any invites you can drop into my bucket, please do and I will personally invite anyone that leaves a comment on this post.

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Bonus points if you show where you’d put the sticker. Keep it clean.

Brian Dawkins

Colin Devroe — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:40:05 +0000

Wolverine himself. I’m not a fan of the Eagles (I’m a Steelers fan), but I am a fan of Brian Dawkins.

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Brightkite’s smart “profile not found” pages

Colin Devroe — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:21:33 +0000

For the unaware, a 404 page is a page you typically see when the page you’re trying to reach simply does not exist. In geek speak, 404 literally means “Page Not Found”. Here is an example 404 page on my site.

My 404 page consists of a simple message asking you to contact me to let me know that something went wrong. There are a lot of services that do much more than simply display a typical “Page Not Found” message, and today we’re going to look at Brightkite’s “smart” “profile not found” pages.

Brightkite knows how their user’s are using the system. An example of this was brought to my attention by my coworker Kyle Slattery. He told me about Brightkite’s ability to detect when a user does not exist on Brightkite, but may exist on Twitter.

Brightkite and Twitter share the same prefix for username detection, the @ symbol¹. Since Brightkite knows that some people use their system as a geo-enabled Twitter client, like I explained the other day, sometimes you’ll find people “talking” to or about people that do not yet have a Brightkite account. Kyle gave me the example of the username @mikemangino. That username does not exist on Brightkite but it does on Twitter.

Here is what the profile page looks like on Brightkite for this user.

Rather than show their typical 404 error page, Brightkite asks if you are looking for the same username on Twitter, and even gives you the option to invite that person over to Brightkite. Kyle thought this was “brilliant”, and I do too. Kyle was wrong about one thing though; Brightkite’s “profile not found” page isn’t as smart as he might have thought. Here is what Kyle said:

“Brilliant, if you go to a user on BrightKite that exists on Twitter, but not on BK, there’s a link to invite them, not a 404.”

I don’t think Kyle actually meant to say that Brightkite detects the user on Twitter, because they definitely do not. But I just wanted to be sure it was clearly stated.

Brightkite’s “profile not found” page is smart enough to know that people are probably on that page because they clicked an @username to a Twitter account and not a Brightkite account. And that is indeed brilliant. It is a great example of how Brightkite is continuously showing themselves to be “in touch” with how people use their system which makes Brightkite a joy to use.

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Other services, like Pownce, use the ! exclamation point.

Seneca Harbor Wine Center

Colin Devroe — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:06:24 +0000

Date taken: July 18, 2008 | The windows at the Seneca Harbor Wine Center.

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The way Brightkite fits

Colin Devroe — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:38:52 +0000

A few months ago I was invited to join Brightkite. At the time I wasn’t too keen on giving up my exact location all the time, nor did I want to switch from Twitter to Brightkite and start all over again. For any of you reading this, the way Brightkite fits into my daily routine means that I don’t have to do either of those things.

Specific, non-specific, and everything in between

One of the beauties of Brightkite is the layers of options you have with just about everything you do on the service. When I “check in” at any given location, I can be as specific about where I am as I want to be. For example, when I check in at home I simply check into the city in which I live. I do not check into my exact address. When I’m at a cafe, at work, or another public location I generally check in with as specific location details as I have available to me at the time.

My ‘Visited Places’ on Brightkite.

Also of note is that if you’re scared to give out your exact address don’t be naive to the fact that if someone really wants to find out where you live, they can - whether you use any of these location based social services or not.

Perhaps you’ll only want to check into Brightkite when your geography changes dramatically. Maybe going to the grocery store down the road doesn’t warrant you switching your location before you share 140 characters with the world the way you do now. Perhaps if you went on vacation to an island in the Bahamas, you’d like to check in so that your messages are properly stored based on your current location.

I’m a little more anal than that. I want my locations to be stored as granularly as possible. Not for everyone else, but for the possibilities that arise because of it. Not only am I able to keep track of where/when/how and what for myself, but you never know when you might meet up with a fellow Brightkite user at a given location.

I’ve been poking around my history on Brightkite and I see that I’ve crossed paths a few times¹ with other Brightkite users. My friend and follow Viddler team member Brandice (who talked me into really kicking the tires at Brightkite) recently met up with a Brightkite user at her local Panera Bread. I’m hoping, like it has happened on Twitter so many times, that Brightkite makes this even easier for me to experience as well.

Using Brightkite as a Twitter client

Brightkite will update Twitter with any of your activity on Brightkite, but again, there are layers upon layers of options. Remember I said that you don’t have to switch away from Twitter if you use Brightkite the way I do? Here is how I have Brightkite set up to notify Twitter.

One of the most annoying things, I thought, about the way that Brightkite updated Twitter was all of the bkite.com/whatever URLs. Every time you saw a message from a Brightkite user on Twitter you saw this link and I found it irritating. It turns out that the Brightkite team has already thought of this. Not only can you specify which activities on Brightkite update your Twitter status (including check ins, note, and photo posts), but you can also specify the information that Brightkite posts to Twitter. I have customized the output of my notifications to Twitter so that my notes do not contain a link back to Brightkite. This means that if I use Brightkite to post a note and it updates Twitter, those that follow me on Twitter are none-the-wiser. However, when I post a photo to Brightkite there is a link from Twitter so that you can see that photo. There is also a link when I check in at a location, though I’m considering removing this update notification from my list because some on Twitter may find it annoying².

So instead of posting to Twitter I post to Brightkite which, in turn, posts to Twitter for me. No extra work on my part. Some of the people I follow use services like Ping.fm to post to every single social network at once. I’ve not gotten that deep yet but it is certainly an option.

Conclusion

Brightkite is a very promising service being developed by a team that obviously pays close attention to detail. I like that. I feel that the teams at both Brightkite and FriendFeed pay far more attention to detail than the team at Twitter, but then again all three services have very different challenges and goals. When I see a service being as well crafted as Brightkite is, I’m going to stick around and see if I can make it fit.

I have a few invites to Brightkite. So if you want one drop a comment and use an email address that I can send the invite too.

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Sometimes within only a few miles or even at the same location but only a day or so apart.
Which I can totally understand.

iPhone camera oddity

Colin Devroe — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:20:03 +0000

Not sure exactly what caused this, but a quick snap of my wine glass with my iPhone and this is what happened. Somehow, I found it fitting with my current state when taking the photo though.

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Lights reflected in water

Colin Devroe — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:29:48 +0000

Date taken: July 18, 2008 | Lights reflecting in the harbor waters.

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Seneca Lake Marina

Colin Devroe — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:25:52 +0000

Date taken: July 18, 2008 | Seneca Lake Marina in Watkins Glen, New York at night.

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A new perspective on billboards

Colin Devroe — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:41:20 +0000

There are examples of well and poorly designed billboards all over highways and high-traffic roads in the United States and other countries. However, Branislav Kropilak has a slightly different perspective on billboards that turns every-single-one into a work of art.

Also worth checking out are his photo exhibitions of Garages, Landings, Trains, Factories, and Lobbies.

Source: Branislav Kropilak: Billboards.

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About a million little things

Colin Devroe — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:13:06 +0000

I have been slowly making small adjustments to this site’s theme locally on my computer for weeks. Every now and then, as I’d find a bug or something that bugged me on the live site, I’d open Coda, make some adjustments, check them locally and save them for publishing later¹.

These changes are really, really small. Unless you come to this site on a daily basis (you do, don’t you?) you may not notice any of them. A pixel here, a color adjustment there, an array sorting issue here, a speed improvement there. But these changes were mounting up. Even browsing my site myself, looking for old entries, I became annoyed with some of the existing bugs because I knew I had already fixed them on my local install.

So today, while I’m running out to spend the weekend in The Finger Lakes region of New York for a wine festival, I published these “little things” to the live site. I wish there was a way I could calculate the changes (perhaps I should be using Subversion or something), but my guess would be somewhere in the hundreds. I still have some things that I’d love to get around to adjusting, but they’ll have to wait for the next update.

So, if you’re feeling adventurous, go ahead and poke around.

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I’m a publish once and fix a ton of things kinda guy.

Moscow as the bird flies

Colin Devroe — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:38:57 +0000

EnglishRussia.com recently published a photoset of Russia from a birds-eye view.

The photos are pretty stunning. The most amazing thing to me is to see how much Moscow has changed when I compare it to the book I read about Moscow that was published in 1978. Thirty years can make a very big difference in a city.

Source: Moscow from the Bird’s Sight.

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Benjamin Wilken’s Australian adventure

Colin Devroe — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:22:03 +0000

A nine year old boy in my area recently won a trip to Australia with National Geographic.

“For Benjamin Wilken, it was the chance of a lifetime. He wrote a 300-word essay on how he became a young explorer, attached a photograph he took, put it in the mail and now, months later, he is packing his bags for an all-expense-paid trip down under with National Geographic.”

When I was younger I remember my grandparent’s library holding hundreds of copies of National Geographic Magazine. They had a subscription to the magazine for, what had to be, decades. The best part about it was that they shared this subscription with my father, who would take an edition home after my grandfather was done reading it. I would, in turn, read (or at the very least look at the photos) the editions after he was done.

At the time I didn’t really realize how great an opportunity I had, being exposed to such incredible journalism and information from around the world at my finger-tips, long before I ever signed onto the Internet.

Benjamin Wilken, who started playing with a digital camera around the age of 6, went a step further than I ever did. He read the magazines and even entered a contest in it. To be fair, he has a subscription to National Geographic Kids - perhaps the reading is a tad-bit lighter.

His love for photography, the subscription to the magazine, and his attention to the material is now paying dividends. He and his father have an all-expense paid trip to Tazmania. Based on the experience Leo Laporte had (which I loosely linked to in April of this year), I’m sure he’s in for an incredible Australian adventure.

Source: Wayne County Student on Aussie Adventure.

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Why so serious?

Colin Devroe — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:30:04 +0000

My friend Sameer. At the midnight premier for The Dark Knight.

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My homemade Batman shirt

Colin Devroe — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:24:24 +0000

Eliza and I, along with a few friends, are going to the midnight premier of Batman: The Dark Knight tonight. As we’ve done in the past, we’re making our own tshirts. This time, instead of the handwritten shirts, we’re going to do iron-ons.

We’ve used iron-ons in the past, for the Star Wars prequel premiers, so we had some laying around (yes, from that long ago!). Here is my tshirt design that I quickly did in Adobe Illustrator. If you like it, you may download it here.

Eliza really likes the “Why So Serious” campaign that they’ve done for The Dark Knight. So her tshirt is made from the top portion of the poster from it.

Update: Here is what the shirt ended up looking like, taken by Eliza.

We’re really excited, especially based on all of the good reviews and press this movie has gotten, to see The Dark Knight tonight. Are you going?

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A quick tour of Wine Library

Colin Devroe — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:18:23 +0000

For anyone who hasn’t been to Wine Library, here is a quick tour in under a minute. If you’d like to see more of Wine Library, Gary did his own tour in Episode 64.

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Wordpress 2.6 ignores upload preferences

Colin Devroe — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:04:43 +0000

Wordpress 2.6 was released only a few days ago, so it isn’t too suprising that there are some bugs. But this bug seems like it would have been very easy to catch.

From my investigation, it appears that Wordpress 2.6 ignores the upload preferences that I have set. By default Wordpress likes to upload files, such as images, into a directory commonly located in /wp-content/uploads/. From there it creates a hierarchy based on the date you upload a piece of media.

For some reason, I had changed my preferences a while ago to be /wp-content/mobile/photos/¹. The only problem is now that this setting is ignored, when I want to upload a photo through Wordpress’ “Add media” upload tool, it results in a broken image.

This is fairly easy to fix even while I write a post, since I’m able to edit the HTML of the post. However, Wordpress handles each piece of media the same as it would a post to your site. So there is all types of data stored in the database for each media file uploaded. Title, description, caption, thumbnail URL, original URL, being some of the metadata that is being stored. Most of these I can edit through Wordpress, some of them I can’t.

Take a look at my photos page. There is a broken image there, not because the file does not exist, but because Wordpress is looking in the wrong spot. Unless I edit my database manually I will not be able to get that image to display properly.

I’ll do that soon, but I’m hoping someone sees this post that can address the problem for the next release.

Addendum: As db pointed out in the comments, the files are going to the correct locations. It just seems that the reference to the file, being written to the database, is in correct.

Update on July 18: As Simon points out in the comments, this is not necessarily a bug but it is unexpected behavior. Read his comment for details on how to fix this in your 2.6 install, but it appears it will be “taken care of” in 2.6.1.

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Presumably because I thought the only photos I’d uploading using Wordpress would have been from my mobile phone.

Gary Vaynerchuk, “Genius”

Colin Devroe — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:46:29 +0000

Date taken: July 15, 2008 | Gary Vaynerchuk at his desk in Springfield, New Jersey.

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I’m a vayniac

Colin Devroe — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:30:05 +0000

If you watch WLTV, you know this chalk board.

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The Wine Library

Colin Devroe — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:10:13 +0000

There is a lot of wine at Wine Library.

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Tap Tap Tap

Colin Devroe — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:54:04 +0000

“Tasty bits for your iPhone”. Ok, I’ll bite. I’m linking to this site for a few reasons. The first, is that it is a site that combines iPhone applications with sushi. Any site that can do that, gets a link from me (so pay attention iPhone application vendors).

Second, is that I wanted to say that there are a few very well designed applications out there, and these are among that list. I don’t want to confuse anyone with my last post on the matter.

Last, I wanted to try out Wordpress 2.6’s “Press This” bookmarklet. I like it, but I need to add excerpt and “slug”. Both of these fields are must-haves for me.

Source: tap tap tap ~ tasty bits for your iPhone.

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Third-party iPhone applications: Take one.

Colin Devroe — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:59:48 +0000

So it has begun, the next-generation in mobile computing. Did you miss it? On Friday, officially, Apple released its updates for both iTunes and the iPhone making it possible for those who owned iPhones, or who purchased the brand-new iPhone 3G on Friday, to install 3rd party applications on the iPhone.

The most notable take-away from this first weekend of my using third-party applications on my iPhone is how very different the applications I’ve downloaded from the store feel from the applications I’ve been using for over a year. It is something I didn’t think about as I was anticipating the release of this update. Nearly all of the iPhone applications that are currently available are, in my opinion, beta-level 1.0 applications. Add to it that they’ve not been built by Apple, and we’re talking about a lot of poorly designed applications.

This isn’t to say that the applications that were release on day-one aren’t valuable, good applications to have, worth the money they’re asking for, or even that they’re bad applications in any sense. It is just that they don’t feel nearly as refined as the applications that Apple has released themselves.

Some of the most glaring examples of this are Facebook’s application, Connected Flow’s Exposure, and the Mobile AIM (this is an iTunes link) client by AOL.

First, Facebook’s iPhone application, while built natively for the iPhone - is not nearly as refined or aesthetically pleasing as their Web application for the iPhone. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great application, and I think it works well. But at the moment I prefer their Web app.

Exposure.

Second, Connected Flow’s Exposure application, the one I linked to the other day, is a pretty good way to browse through Flickr. If I had to guess at the UI of this application prior to launch I would have been dead wrong. The application feels very much like the Contact app on the iPhone. Click a menu item, slide to the right, see that information, then slide back. But, clicking on the photo and clicking on the arrow give you two different information panes. One is the photo, full-screen, another is the photo’s metadata (ie. number of views, comments, tags, etc.). I think all of this information should be on the same panel, inline, and the ability to leave a comment on a photo should not be 3 or 4 clicks into the application. I think this application should look like the iPhone’s built-in photo browser, with added metadata on touch. But it isn’t. It went a completely different direction than I would have assumed. It isn’t all bad, Exposure is free!

Mobile AIM

Last, at least in this post, is the Mobile AIM client. This application feels like someone built it that never built for the Macintosh before - but they tried really hard and nearly pulled it off. Some of the UIs largest faults is that there is no way to sign out from the application unless you go into your iPhone’s settings panel first, there is no way to close an IM “tab” without first clicking edit on the active IMs list and then clicking the minus button, and that Mobile AIM does not use your iPhone’s contacts. There are many, many things wrong with this application but the fact that it works and you can be on AIM anywhere in the world makes this one a must-have-installed application.

Let me be clear, I’ve chosen these applications not because they are the worst user interfaces, but because they are among some of the better ones. These are some of the applications that I think are going to dramatically improve over time. I think most iPhone application UIs will improve overtime, just as some of our favorite applications on the Macintosh have. I think more applications will be released that are better than these and as they do, everyone will benefit from the competition.

Kudos to all of the developers that locked themselves in their closets and tried their best to provide good, stable applications for the launch of the App Store. And I’m looking forward to the future versions of your applications.

Now, if I could just find time to go through the hundreds of applications in the App Store.

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Sunset

Colin Devroe — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:00:04 +0000

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Video: The iPhone’s geo-enabled camera

Colin Devroe — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:14:14 +0000

The iPhone’s geo-enabled camera, whether you’ve upgraded to an iPhone 3G with built-in GPS or not, now records the location¹ that the photo was taken.

I have a few problems with the way this has been implemented on the iPhone and also how it works on my Macintosh. But before I begin bashing Apple - I do want to say that I’m fairly optimistic that other applications will use this feature much better than Apple has.

A few quick notes and then you can watch the video below. First, the iPhone asks (though I didn’t manage to capture this on “film”) if you’d like to record the location the photo was taken. It doesn’t say why, how, or where to view this information. It just asks, you hit ok, and you’re never told about anything ever again. Second, the iPhone stores the latitude and longitude inside of the file’s meta-data. There is no way to visualize this information on your iPhone. In fact, photos that are geo-encoded look exactly the same on your iPhone as the photos that are not. Third, when you import them onto your computer - there is no real way to tell the difference on there either. I use Image Capture to import, but I also tested iPhoto, and neither application lets me know that the location was recorded (without a little digging).

Here is a quick video demonstration, and I threw in my opinions for those that don’t like to read, of how the iPhone handles things with the camera now.

So there you have it. Yes the iPhone records this information properly. But I think the iPhone needs to take advantage of this information in some way to make it valuable to the lay-person, and I also think that iPhoto needs to be updated to support geo-location so that these photos are fun to play with on your computer too.

Anyone know of any iPhone / Macintosh applications that would be fun to play with these photos now?

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A rough latitude and longitude.

Pagination in Facebook applications with PHP

Colin Devroe — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:56:03 +0000

Kyle Slattery, Viddler’s Lead Social Developer, recently released a nice little PHP-snippet for Facebook application developers:

“While building the Viddler Facebook application, I needed to create a pagination tool that worked just like Facebook’s. After looking at their HTML and their logic of what pages to display, I came up with one, which I’m releasing for anyone to use.”

Simple. Straight forward.

Source: PHP Facebook Paginator.

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Exposure; the unofficial Flickr iPhone application

Colin Devroe — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:14:30 +0000

Scott McNulty, friend and fellow-Pennsylvanian, is reporting on The Unofficial Apple Weblog that Connected Flow is going to release a free iPhone application called Exposure that allows you to browse and interact with Flickr.

Connected Flow, founded by Fraser Speirs, is very well acquanted with the Flickr API. Fraser developed both the iPhoto and Aperture plugins for Flickr. He also toyed around with a full Mac application that utilized Flickr, which was also called Exposure, but it was never publicly released.¹.

So Connected Flow is well-suited and in the perfect position to release an iPhone application for Flickr. I said it was free above, but there will be a pay-version for $9.99 that will eliminate the ads. This is very much the same model that I expect Twitterrific’s iPhone application to take, especially since Twitterrific itself does already.

Let me also say that I think this application is going to be extremely popular. The fact that it will be a full-featured free application, with the option to buy, is going to make it a no-brainer for any Flickr + iPhone users.

Source: Exposure: two billion photos, in your pocket.
Connected Flow: Announcing Exposure.

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Though this application was never released, you can see screenshots here.