Commentage?

10 August 2007 – 7:35 pm

Hi all,

If anyone actually reads my blog, any ideas and suggestions related to my idea (see My Idea Thus Far and Beaten Again for info. about my image editing program). Just leave ideas in the comment form and they’ll get e-mailed to me.

If there is sufficient “interest” in the idea, I’ll continue to develop and refine it. If not, it’s back to the metaphorical drawing-board – possibly a gesture based Wii app…

Some more specific questions I have currently (if you need inspiration):

  1. Do you ever post camera-phone pictures onto the web?
  2. If yes, have you ever wanted to crop an image first?
  3. Do you ever actually use the mobile-data service on your phone?
  4. Would you be interested in a mobile service to resize/crop/edit photos?

If the answer to any of these is yes, I’d be interested to hear your opinions!

Cheers

By devslashtux | Posted in DECO1200 | Comments Off

My idea thus far

10 August 2007 – 12:22 pm

Create a mobile compatible, image editing tool. Kind of analogous to Photoshop or The GIMP – but for a small screen.

Constraints

Network

Given the limitations (currently) of writing a native iPhone application, the application would be slower/less capable than if it could run natively on the hardware.

The largest problem would be the speed and reliability of the mobile network. Given the 1G iPhone’s lack of high-speed data transfer (EDGE doesn’t really cut it) the app may well be painfully slow to use. This would really affect the usability of the application and limit it to nothing more than emergency editing (i.e. you can’t use anything else). I think this would be a problem over any sort of mobile wireless access (Wifi is fine, but it’s still a LAN) since those networks have both relatively low bandwidth and rather high latency. Wether the application would still be responsive enough to be “usable” would be quite a challenge.

But for the moment, I’ll assume a 3G or 3.5G iPhone will come out for our ‘lil Southern Land – even so, the issue of 3.xG network coverage will be important.

Currently on my 3G Nokia, I find 3G deadspots in many places around Sydney, including:

  • The rail network
    • The City Circle – no mobile coverage at all
    • The Airport Line – GSM voice/SMS only. No 3G coverage
    • East Hills Line – patchy voice reception. Presumably data reception is also limited.
  • The CBD – there are alot of mobile blackspots in the inner city. Given that this is a likely area of use for any mobile technology it’s definately a pain.

Probably the best way to combat this would be an offline application (again, forcing it to run natively) which can upload content via the network when it becomes available – ideally, it can do this in the background.

Interface

The interface really makes or breaks any mobile app. Most cellphones have really crappy interfaces hiding really useful options below a set of nested menus.

Trying to create a compelling and easily usable interface is certanly a challenge on a mobile platform. To compound things, creating this application to run on any capible phone would drastically increase the potential market. But, the downside is that you then have loads of possible input devices and screen-resolutions etc…

On the upside!

There are a bunch of reasons why this at least would be theoretically possible. Technologies like:

  • Publicly accessible APIs for web sites like Flickr mean a third-party application can post images to a users account.
  • Server-side applications like Adobe Flex or the opensource GD/ImageMagick allow photos to be edited on a server environment.

Steps

Ignoring all of the problems I’ve thought of… here is a rough list of what a person would do to use the application.

  1. User takes photo
  2. User loads application
  3. User uploads their photo(s)
  4. Can be automatically set to default and uploaded to their website/blog
    OR
    • The user can crop and rotate the image
    • The user can choose to auto adjust colour and brightness (autofix) or manually adjust the image.
  5. The image can be rescaled to new dimensions ready to be posted.
By devslashtux | Posted in DECO1200, iPhone, Web 2.0 | Comments Off

Power-outage’d!

9 August 2007 – 12:03 pm

We’re sitting in the sun at the moment out the front of the Wilkinson building, which for the second time this week has no power. Rob’s lecture was very rudely plunged into darkness – after the lights flickering for a while. That was probably a sign of the impending power-failure!

Beth suggests the uni install backup solar panels. Very helpful indeed!

Oh well, at least it’s warm out here.

By devslashtux | Posted in DECO1200 | Comments Off

Moblogged

7 August 2007 – 6:03 pm

Somewhat remarkably, the normal WordPress interface mostly works through Opera Mini on my Nokia 6234! Of course, typing this using predictive text on the keypad isn’t all that quick, if i wasn’t on a capped data-plan this would cost as much as an iPhone ;-) , the browsing speed on 3g is glacial and the screen is tiny, but the important thing is that it works! If only I knew how to add paragraphs!

By devslashtux | Posted in DECO1200 | Comments Off

Opera Mini and Wii

6 August 2007 – 4:29 pm

Some of you may have come across Opera Mini before. It’s a free web-browser that will run on any cellphone that has Java support (if you can play mobile games, you probably have Java) which is good news for my trusty Nokia 6234. Although it won’t run on the iPhone.

Instead of directly requesting pages from their servers, Opera Mini runs the pages through Opera’s servers which “optimise” the code for the mobile browser (not really applicable if you write standards-compliant XHTML), re-encode images to smaller sizes/resolutions and then forward the result to your phone.

Like Safari on iPhone, Opera Mini supports CSS and XHTML and Javascript. Unlike Safari, it allows file uploads (making my photo editing app a little easier). So if anyone wants to make an application for any mobile, then looking at Opera Mini might be a good option. To experiment with it, a simulator is available to test any website with. It’s interaction style isn’t quite as cool as iPhone, but it’s useful nonetheless. The latest beta version of Opera looks like it’s stolen a few ideas from the iPhones interface too.

Changing the topic slightly, the Nintendo Wii has version of Opera 9 as it’s on-board browser which supports most of the functionality of the desktop version. But, the really cool bit is that Javascript has been extended to support additional events related to the Wiimote controller – events such as the tilt/roll angle, speed etc. So gesture based web-apps are a real possibility! It might be more interesting to make a Wii app. Wii!

By devslashtux | Posted in DECO1200, Web 2.0 | Comments Off

3rd Party native iPhone apps

5 August 2007 – 11:14 am

That was a little quicker than I expected, in fact, it’s been online since the 28th of July…

It’s nothing more than a simple “Hello World!” application, but since they have already reverse engineered the iPhone’s API someone can make an nice app – and hope Apple doesn’t sue them for doing so :)

By devslashtux | Posted in DECO1200, iPhone | Comments Off

Fauxto

3 August 2007 – 12:42 pm

Fauxto Interface
The Fauxto Interface

The Nightingale at RotoruaOriginal photo: The Nightingale at Rotorua

Modified Nightingale
The photo after being modified by Fauxto

As mentioned in an earlier post, while doing research into the viability of my project I’ve come across a service called Fauxto which implements a basic Photoshop like image editor.

Fauxto is made using a Flash 9 based interface – which automatically rules out the iPhone. I’ve visited Fauxto and played around with it a bit to find out what it can do.

It can load/save images from your PC, another website or from your Fauxto account – although they don’t provide hosting for your photos.

Features it’s implemented so far include:

  • Layers (including varying blending effects)
  • Selections
  • Internal copy/paste (i.e. not to the system clipboard)
  • Shapes (squares, circles, lines and polygons [currently only triangles])
  • Filters (sharpen, blur, find edges, noise, emboss, enrich, posterize, render clouds, invert, desaturate etc)

Currently most of the options are not configurable which limits it’s usefulness to fairly trivial tasks (which isn’t necessiarly a bad thing). Although it’s interface has been modelled on that of Photoshop, so it may not be particulary easy to pick up if you aren’t already a Photoshop user.

An iPhone variation of this application would need a very different interface to be viable and there would be some issues with the speed of the network in order to do the image processing. But I don’t think either of these are major problems.

By devslashtux | Posted in DECO1200 | Comments Off

Beaten again…

2 August 2007 – 6:47 pm

My original idea of making a Web 2.0 image editor (Photoshop-esque) turns out to not be terribly original. In 10 minutes of Google searching I found Pixer and Pixenate which both do server-side image editing. So far though there are no mobile oriented apps but I’m sure there are some available online if I keep looking.

Some of the more interesting applications I’ve found thus far are Fauxto which implements a fair bit of the functionality found in Photoshop – including layers, effects, tools etc, and Preloadr which sits between uploading pictures and them being posted on Flickr.

I then decided to look for web-based video editors (it was a logical progression) but these too already exist – Yahoo! offering one such service at Jumpcut.

Either I need to find a new idea to explore or try and develop the design for a mobile equivalent – developing an effective mobile interface would probably be the biggest challenge if I was to continue with this idea.

By devslashtux | Posted in DECO1200 | Comments (2)

Will it Blend?

2 August 2007 – 3:22 pm

Now for a nice random video of an iPhone being blended (via YouTube)

By devslashtux | Posted in DECO1200, iPhone | Comments (1)

iPhone – the Cons

2 August 2007 – 1:02 pm

I’ve already posted the pros of the iPhone (as I very quickly perceived them in relation to our project). But I have the feeling that this post may well end up being rather long as I update it over time to outline things the iPhone can’t do.

To get going:

  • You can’t install software natively on the iPhone (unless you are Apple), everything (as far as I can tell thus far) is a Web 2.0 application. Whether there will be any offline support for when your iPhone is out of an area with data coverage is something I need to find out.
  • The iPhone doesn’t support file uploads so I’m wondering if there is any way to upload photos made using the iPhones camera (I have to investigate if you can send them as e-mail attachments). If it doesn’t it becomes seriously limited…
  • No multimedia messages (MMS). Again, for a camera equipped smartphone it seems like a pretty huge omission.
  • It’s extensibility is possibly pretty limited by the fact you can only create applications through Javascript/XHTML (JS is powerful, but it works within the limitations of the browser)
  • Will 3rd party addons become available for the iPhone given the limitions on appl9ication development.
  • Apple decided to have no support for Adobe Flash – given that most other devices have a Flash client available.
  • No Java – although I don’t think this is much of a problem, but given the ubiquity of mobile Java applications (i.e. cellphone games, Opera Mini and such) it seems a little strange. Then again, Apple and Sun don’t seem to have a particularly cozy relationship [actually Sun doesn't seem to like anyone...]).

But as Rob has said, given the rumours that Apple will eventually release an iPhone SDK it’s possible to justify our applications as running natively on the iPhone.

By devslashtux | Posted in DECO1200, iPhone | Comments (1)