Photogather for Palm

Friday, June 23, 2006

I have been looking for ages for a program which would allow me to resize photos on my Palm, so that I can post photos taken with my camera phone, adjusted to fit my blog format. There are countless (well, lots anyway) of programs which allow you to view, categorise, display and zoom photos - Palm's built-in software on the LifeDrive isn't bad, and SplashPhoto and RescoView (my favourite) are both fully featured alternatives. However, although many of these allow you to rename and move photos, to adjust the contrast and colours, none, as far as I know, allow you to resize. Photogather does. However, Photogather is one weird piece of software. To be absolutely fair, it seems it was written mainly for Sony Clie devices with built-in cameras, but even so... First, Photgather does not let you browse photos in the conventional way. You have to import them, although exactly where to is not 100% clear. But it seems it makes a copy of a photo in a database within the internal memory, which is absurd, especially on the LifeDrive. So, before you can do anything, you have to import the photo(s) you want to work with, using this dialog: The amazing thing about this dialog is the "DELETE" button. What the hell is that doing there ? I want to load photos, or cancel. I most certainly do not want to delete friom this dialog. Ok, so Windows lets you do something like this. But Windows is (a) crap, and (b) not intended for handhelds with stylus entry where tapping the wrong place is all too easy, especially when sitting on a Zurich tram. Unfortunately things don't get better... Actually, they didn't start off terribly well. When you start Photogather, you are presented with a row of extremely inscrutable icons along the top of the screen. Since they're not documented anywhere, all you can do is tap & pray. This is how I discovered the import feature. You can see this in the screenshot below, which also shows the icon for the image I have loaded, and towards the top right, two drop-downs. The rightmost is a standard category selector, but the other one is the ultimate in Photogather's GUI weirdness. Here, you select an action, such as "Edit", "Delete", "Save", and THEN click on the icon to apply the action. So, to edit a photo, select Edit, then click on the icon. The photo loads in the edit window, and here things are relatively straightforward. One thing to note is that in these drop-down actions, the Delete action, unlike in the Import dialog, deletes the image from Photogather's "worklist", rather than the original. It might appear from this that I don't like Photogather. Actually I do, and I will resgister it. It solves a problem for me, which is what good software is supposed to do. It does have a weird GUI and even weirder interaction design, but you soon get used to it. I suspect that Photogather is no longer actively developed, but this would be a shame. The LifeDrive, and its successors (if it has any) needs software which takes it a stage further, where it can be used completely independently of a desktop machine. The other photo applications for Palm are essentially viewers and organisers with a few adjustment features added on. Photogather is more like an editor, with limited organisation features. It would be nice to see it develop this concept further. UPDATE: sadly I have to add that the edit mode is very unstable, and crashed my LifeDrive several times. So far, I have quite a lot of 3rd party applications installed, some quite obscure, but only Photogather behaves so badly.

Palm LifeDrive

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

I think the Palm LifeDrive is fantastic. I finally upgraded after my battered old T3 was put out to retirement. I held off for a year because of the bad publicity, but I got a chance to buy one at a low price so I jumped. I'm a demanding Palm user. I use it for reading books, managing photos I take on my camera phone, all the usual stuff, but also keeping up with blogs using QuickNews and AvantGo, and also emergency web site maintenance using VSFTP and SiEd. The LifeDrive is simply excellent. The form factor is better than the T3, it sits in one hand perfectly and ther ergonomics are much better. The delays don't bother me. QuickNews and AvantGo load slowly when their databases are large, but they did that on the T3 as well. PDFs in Docs2Go are slow, but, again, this is not unique to the LifeDrive. The battery life compared to the T3 is excellent. I use Bluetooth/GPRS a lot, and WiFi when I can (so many open networks here in Zürich ). With the T3, if I was away from a power source I needed to take a Power2Go sled with me. But the LifeDrive lasts all day, no problem, with heavy use. The first few times the battery took a while to charge and ran down fast, but it soon picked up. Highly recommended.

Share your OPML

Friday, June 09, 2006

The latest craze promoted by Dave Winer is Share Your OPML. Nothing wrong with, in fact it's a good idea, and I've finally got around to participating. However, I do wonder if the tireless Mr Winer wasn't in just a bit too much of a hurry in building the site: Look at the text, then the check box. The text says "It (sharing) defaults to on". The check box label, which actually doesn't say anything about turning anything off or on, but can be assumed to do so, defaults to unchecked, indicting that sharing is off. The text also says that sharing might be undesirable (true), so it should indeed default to "off". But it also says that one should "give thought before turning it on". My core reaction to this is "huh ?"

Ajax in the real(?) world

Thursday, June 08, 2006

I've been using several web applications recently which fall into the Web 2.0 bucket, in particular Backpack and Newsgator. Both are very useful, although I'm somewhat dubious about the quality of Newsgator's web interface. But both show up a serious weakness in Ajax, which is basically it might not work at all in a managed corporate environment. Since Ajax requires ActiveX in IE6, and ActiveX is the Spawn of Satan as far as corporate IT security is concerned (one of the few areas I'm on total agreement with them on), we get this sort of thing: Actually, in IE Newsgator recovers reasonably well from this, although getting this blocking modal dialog on every screen load quickly gets tedious. However, none of the drag & drop functionality works, and Newsgator doesn't degrade gracefully. Sure, Ajax is cool, but making it essential on a paid-for service like Newsgator is just bad design and bad customer service. Unfortunately Backpack, the paragon of simplicity, fares no better. It looks like it works, but it doesn't. It seems like those very cute little "working" animations are not working in this locked down IE environment, and so making Backpack unusable for the sake of some eye candy. Hardly the 37Signals manifesto, as far as I understood it.

Trying to change the name of the page...

I'm not really sure why Backpack even needs this stuff. It really seems to be "Web 2.0 for the sake of it". It would work fine without all the little DHTML (er, sorry, Ajax) tweaks, which are indeed nice, and even enhance usability, but they should not be showstoppers. I'd like to evangelise Backpack with the Very Large International Corporation I work in. But I can't. Even in a not-exactly-allowed-but-you-can-hack it installation of Firefox 1.5.0.4, neither service works, although both have different problems to the ones in IE. It seems from discussion on Newsgator forums that this has something to do with how Firefox works with proxies, but investigating that would be considerably more than my jobsworth. These shouldn't be bleeding edge services. I'm sure that Jesse James Garrett didn't intend that basic usability principles should be sacrificed at the altar of Ajax. Hardly the point, I think.

SuperOyster - a brilliant idea

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

I've been playing with the Alpha Release of the SuperOyster.com platform. This really is an innovative application. It took me a while to really get it, but once I clicked it was obvious. SuperOyster has found a way to add value - or extract value - from waiting lists. Why didn't somebody else think of it first ?