Twitter

Now days I tell people that my life is an open book. I document the happenings in my life on my blog, Non breaking Space and I just give the blog url to people who ask what’s happening in my life. Before I used to send long mails about what’s happening in my life to all my friends and family, but now I blog and they read it and put in comments.

I had also said here previously that I have become an avid reader of other’s blogs, thanks to Google Reader. The community which I created using my blog gave me links to other’s blogs to read what they write. And thus we all stay in the loop. Now my friends seldom ask me what’s happening… coz they all know what’s happening.

Even though sometimes I write long posts on my blog, I personally like to read short posts and snippets. When I browse through the feeds in Google Reader daily, the first priority I give are for the short ones. I somehow tend to lose interest in reading long posts unless they are really captivating. I also advice my friends who blog to try splitting up their long posts into different stories and post separately to make it more interesting.

Twitter is a web application which is build upon the simple theory of micro blog posts. Using Twitter you don’t have to wait for a week to consolidate the happening in your life into one long post and make it uninteresting to your readers, but can post micro posts any time and every time you are doing something. You can add in your group of friends and let them know about your new twitter and constantly stay in loop. Twitter asks you one simple question “What are you doing?” for which you have to answer how many ever times you want and they will all be available on your twitter time line sorted by time. It marries two hot things on the web now, blogs and social networking. That’s why Twitter is red hot.

Susheel and I were talking about twitter the other day and the user evangelisms happening on it. Many people make use of Twitter for many different reasons. If I like twitter coz of its micro posts and the ability of posting my status message on my blog, Susheel likes it for other reasons. He says that Twitter makes you condense what ever in your head into a small sentence. It makes you focus. That’s an interesting view too. It’s very tough to make people understand about this service who are unaware of blogging and social networking and the experience it gives but once you are in it, I’m sure you will be addicted to it. If you really don’t know what to do with it, you can probably just look at their public timeline at regular intervals and kill your time. Its real time pass. I also made a friend there.

The other best thing of Twitter is that its not just web. As the whole idea is to send short posts, the use of mobile text messaging comes into the picture and yes you can also send in twitters using your mobile phone and receive from others. For people like me who are always online, there is an IM integration too which allows me to add the Twitter agent to my Google Talk and send messages which will be posted on my Twitter time line. A web badge also allows me to post my current Twitter message on my website.

My love for Twitter has made me vote for Twitter for The 10th Annual SXSW People's Choice Award. Vote for it if you are a Twitter fan.

RAW is RAW

I Love RAW...

Yeah, I know what you're thinking... WWE! But no, we're talking about Digital Photography today, and 'RAW' is the RAW image format!

Welcome to the world of Digital Photography, a world where Negatives have been swapped for sensors, film grain has been swapped for noise, where ISO and Colour balance are no longer difficult to deal with, and where the photographer processes his own photographs! It's a great place to be in, and photography has never been as exciting as it is today!

So where does RAW fit into all of this? To explain that, I'm going to have to get into some of the basics...

Sensors and things like that

Digital Cameras capture light using either a CCD or a CMOS sensor. Sensors are made up of tiny photo-receptors that are sensitive to either Red , Green, or Blue light. The images that we see are a combination of different intensities of these three basic colours.

The information from these photo-receptors are processed by an image processor microchip and are encoded into JPG or TIFF format files that we can see on the LCD of the camera or on a computer. There are some disadvantages to this method of obtaining 'finished' image files ... let me list them for you.

• Further tweaking of the image after it is saved as a JPG or TIFF results in some loss in the tonal range of the image and increased noise levels in some cases.
• If your white balance mode is not set correctly, you could have one hell of a time trying to correct it and when you do, you'll have a relatively noisy image ... bad, bad thing to do!
• Highlights that are blown (overexposed without much detail) can never be recovered.
• Any edits on the file are destructive edits. Meaning that once the file is modified and saved, the change to the pixel data is permanent and cannot be reverted. This, coupled with saving JPG files is a designer's recipe for bad image quality!

RAW to the rescue!

Now, how does RAW help you overcome this?

The smart people among you would have realised by now, that the 'RAW' file format gives you the raw, unprocessed data thats recorded on the camera's sensor. This enables you to forego the camera's built in image processing algorithms (also called de-mosaicing algorithms) and use one that you prefer. Personally, I prefer Adobe's Camera Raw plugin and Phase One's Capture One Pro software... They give me more control over the white balance, the amount of sharpening applied, access to the "curves" and "levels" tools, and the option to use different colour spaces and bit depths.

Even more impressive than this list of +points, is the fact that all the changes that I make are not directly to the actual RAW file, but to a settings file or database... This means that if, at a later date, I decide that I don't like the way that I've processed the file, I can go back to the file, revert to the original image and process it all over again (believe me, this will happen to you...). It also means that I can get different looks by processing the same image in different software.

Think of it as a Digital Negative! In fact, that's what Adobe is calling their standardised RAW format, the DNG format... There are some issues about the standardisation of raw formats at the moment because different manufacturers use different standards to define raw files... but that is something that we can discuss at a later date... for now, lets talk about RAW's problems.

One of the major setbacks that photographers will face with the RAW format is the large size of RAW files. JPG files on my Canon 5D come to about 4MB while RAW files come to about 12-13MB with their automatic compression enabled. This means that it will end up eating away at those megabytes on your CF cards and Hard Discs much faster than JPGs and storage and archival will eventually become an issue.

I swear by RAW


However, the benefits far outweigh the problems when it comes to RAW, and as an advanced amateur and a professional photographer there are immense benefits to the creative workflow... click on the images to see what I mean...

Try out RAW today if you have it on your Digital Camera... photography becomes all fun, and no work...

Have fun!

Yahoo is better than sex?

Raymond's (The Old New Thing) post on why Yahoo is the most searched-for term on Google and Yahoo’s latest post Google user’s confirm, Yahoo better than sex made me think. This is actually a very interesting piece of information in terms of user experience design.

Raymond explains how most people put in the word Yahoo into the search field of the Google Tool Bar instead of the browser’s address bar. He says that the explanation given by the users is that they always get the Page not found error whenever they type in a wrong url into the address bar. Instead it is easy for them to type in things to the search field and let google figure out what is right and wrong. They have got used to this practice so badly that they even type the word Yahoo in the Google search bar and let Google come up with the search result for it or if they are feeling lucky, Google will take them to Yahoo directly. It’s true that people around the world use Yahoo services more than Google’s. So there are many people searching for Yahoo on Google. There are two sides of this fact. Google might be embarrassed by this result, and Yahoo happy. But if we think in another angle, there is scope for Google to be happy as well as Google is not the most searched term in Yahoo. This is because everyone considers Google as the first word for Search. Google can be happy that even if people are searching for Yahoo they are doing it on Google.

The user experience angle

The issue here is that the browser is giving error page when the url is wrong. If the browse knows that it’s an error why doesn’t it try to correct the error by taking the user to the right site or may be showing him a search result. Actually this is happening in the browsers now also but there are exceptions. If you type a word, say Yahoo into the address bar of any browser it does take you to search results but if we type the whole url, it wont. Some more thought into this behavior can really solve a big problem which is faced by many people and which is what making Yahoo as the most searched word in Google. I really like Google for this matter. Whenever I search for some word which is wrongly spelt, it helps me to correct my spelling and search for the right word in my mind. I even use Google Search to get the right spellings most of the time. If I’m not sure of how a word is spelt, I type the wrong spelling into the search and wait for Google to give me the right spelling.

Let’s bring this idea into other areas of product/service design. What if we let the user type his any phone number into our registration fields, and let the system figure out whether it’s a mobile number or a land line? What if we let the system figure out what’s the code and what’s the phone number? Let us type a date and time in any known format and let the system recognise that. What if we start typing a mail and the application help us to type the right spellings; not let us make the mistake and then marking it and asking us to correct it. The new touch screen keypad of iPhone is supposed to be done in that way, which reduces the amount of errors you type in the first place. I would love to use something like that.

Vuvox

Vuvox
Originally uploaded by ooomz.

Getting excited by Scoble's post on Vuvox I decided to try it out. I landed on Vuvox home page and put in my email id to get a beta invite. Just after submitting the email an alert popped up like the way it is shown in the picture. I didnt understand what they are saying but it did scare the Jesus out of me. I promptly clicked on Cancel and chose to be out of the beta. I dont know if Vuvox was right in warning the user about what they are going to do, but the language does shoo off the user.

Update: According to Quasimondo, its a standard security warning by IE when you send an email via "mailto'. Anyway the glitch has been fixed. Read the conversation we had in flickr.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

The elegant Flickr test post