2012-05-03
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On April 27th the world’s biggest pop star of the moment, the New York City-born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (aka Lady Gaga) kicked off her enormous world tour with a sell-out concert —in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, followed by a date in Hong Kong, before going on to Bangkok, Singapore and Jakarta. Surprising, perhaps, as any self-respecting Western pop superstar used to begin their world tours almost exclusively in America or Britain.
Does her “Born this Way ball” tour provide yet more evidence that the economic pendulum has now made its full swing from West to East? Alan Ridgeway, the worldwide promoter for the shows, certainly seems to think so.
Americans will have to wait until next year. And what of poor old downgraded Europe? The little monsters there will have to wait until September or October to see their idol. And it looks as if someone from Standard & Poor’s might have drawn up the itinerary.
”2012-04-13
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2010-10-21
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2010-08-25
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I’ve been using Autostitch iPhone a lot this summer. It makes it easy to combine shots and so makes wide-angle panoramic photos a possibility, despite the fixed field of view of the phone’s camera. (You can see an cropped example, of Tromsø from the Hurtigruten coastal steamer, on Flickr. Above is the raw image that the phone produced.)
However, not all of my photos are with the iPhone, and so I need a desktop equivalent too. So I downloaded four Mac panorama stitchers and ran some photos I had previously stitched on the phone together.
Annoyingly, despite all costing at least ten times as much, they (with one exception) all performed far worse. Calico Panorama at least managed to get everything in the right place, and smoothed out the variations in exposure (which are unavoidable without manual controls). AutoPano Pro was also competent, but that UI is eyebleedingly awful. PTgui also did fairly well, but DoubleTake was clearly completely confused.
I also tried PhotoStitch, which was bundled with the Canon PowerShot S90 I recently bought. It needed to be told what the alignment was, and crashed after producing a version that was worse even than DoubleTake’s attempt. Poor show.
I suspect I’ll try a few more sets of images in Calico before deciding whether or not to stump up the cash, but there seems to be a wider lesson here. A piece of $2 software with barely any UI feels more able to do its job than a variety of desktop applications costing anywhere from $20 to $80, and it’s making me consider rethinking my workflow just to take advantage of it.
2010-01-19
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Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, talking about Tumblr vs Posterous (via knaveofdiamonds)
I’d take issue with the “everyone is on EC2 and RoR” part. While the EC2 bit feels right for new projects - everything I worked on at Six to Start over the last year has been hosted there - I’d argue there’s a good selection of Django and PHP+framework apps as well as Rails ones. As for the older social networks, most of them use PHP; Flickr, Facebook and Delicious, for example.
Still, I think the general point is correct: given a decent framework and a good developer, prototyping and even scaling are now much better understood, and available, than they were five (or even three) years ago. How your service works, however, is still a key selling point.
2010-01-07
“How to build an iPhone app”
According to Wired UK:
3. Prototype
Now draw your idea. Making paper models and moving things around on a table is a much simpler way to test the app than coding it up and hoping for the best. Have lots of people try out the paper prototype. Only when you’re happy with your paper design should you have it turned into code.
4. Submit, release
Now you have a working app, you’ll be wanting to submit it to the App Store. Apple says it aims to have all apps tested and, if approved, in the store within seven days. Towards the end of 2009, it was closer to a month. Don’t make any plans that depend on Apple.
As Tom points out, “I like the missing step between 3 and 4. That step only represents my entire career.”
2009-11-03
Permanant changes to London for 2012 Olympics
PDF, via bustops.
It claims that “13,300 new hotel rooms will be available throughout London by 2012”, yet it lists the Savoy Hotel, which is a bit cheeky, as that’s been there for a hundred years (although, admittedly, it is closed at the moment).
Some of the business buildings listed (oddly, under “leisure” seem a little optomistic. It also promises that Tate Modern 2 (apparently its official name; how terrible) will be “ready in time for the 2012 Olympics.”. If I were one for claim chowder, I’d be archiving a copy of this to drag out in 1000 days.
