2010-12-13
Choosing Your Market
I was taken by this section from Tim Bray’s post about Android, the iPhone, and the US Department of Defense:
the total DoD head-count is estimated at around 2.5 million. If you pick demographics that you might want to pitch mobile devices to, here are a few that are similar or larger in size:
Korean teenagers
Euro-zone business travelers
Canadian retirees
World of Warcraft players
Indian cricket fans
This whole consumer-device business is oddly pure.
I’ve always been annoyed at the amount of bending over backwards that the UK government does for military manufacturing, not only because making things whose primary purpose is destructive is pretty rubbish, but also because it seemed better to me to have a market of millions of people buying small things than a tiny market of maybe twenty sovereign states (maybe) buying a few score million-pound things.
2010-08-25
post/1009199176
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.
2010-06-28
post/745026198
“Like most Nikons, the iPhone 4 tends toward slight over-exposure and over-saturation. Picky pros might find it objectionable, as sometimes highlights or large areas of bright colors lose all detail, but this type of rendering is what an average consumer would say really ‘pops.’”
Jacqui Cheng and Chris Foresman, in iPhone 4: the Ars Technica review.
post/745016484
“The colors pop. Pleasantly, but almost unnaturally, super saturated and contrasty, the kind of processing I love in Nikons, taken to the extreme. That’s the iPhone 4’s secret sauce. Color and contrast. Apple’s not going for accuracy, they’re going for your eyeballs.”
Matt Buchanan & Woody Allen Jang, in Test Notes: iPhone 4 Camera for Gizmodo.
2010-06-11
post/687206320
2010-06-07
post/674318748
post/674313583
2010-05-31
post/650215382
2010-04-12
post/515322758
Tom Insam: Offline web apps. Not a bad idea, that.
