2011-04-18
Photosynth for iPhone- quick thoughts
Microsoft Research have been working on Photosynth for ages. If you’ve not heard of it, here’s the Wikipedia cheat sheet:
Photosynth is a software application from Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington that analyzes digital photographs and generates a three-dimensional model of the photos and a point cloud of a photographed object.
Today saw the launch of an iPhone app building on that research.
It’s not the first stitcher (Autostitch has been available for a couple of years at least), nor is it the first live stitcher (360 and Panoramatic both came out last year, I think), but it is notable for being free (unlike the three previously mentioned apps), and for having a particularly slick UI.
When taking a panorama with Photosynth, after taking the first shot (by simply tapping the screen), any movement of the phone/camera is reflected on screen. Once the centre of the image (represented by a green dot) gets outside the dotted line marking the edge of the panorama, a new shot is taken, extending it outwards. This continues until you mark the stitch as done.
Then there’s a short wait while the final image is rendered (and saved to the camera roll, although there’s no notification of this). While that’s happening, you can edit a title, but not description, let alone tags. Oddly, you can “add nearby businesses”. Once it’s complete, you can share to Facebook, Photosynth or Bing. Sadly, email, Flickr and Twitter are missing- but then there is a copy you can work with.
Generally, this is very good for a version one. Although I had one crash while stitching, the image was saved anyway. I miss the option that 360 offers of stitching to a white (rather than black) background, and more share options would be nice. I also suspect I take better source photographs when I’m shooting individual photos, but a bit of patience would fix that. Overall, it’s definitely worth downloading and playing with.
2010-02-04
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Dick Brass in an editorial for the New York Times:Microsoft’s Creative Destruction.
After my post about possible iPad competitors, it was suggested that I was premature in ruling out Microsoft, with a link to a Gizmodo story about the Courier tablet project. However, years of experience have led me to dismiss anything Microsoft produces as a mere demo; for example, WinFS never shipped. Even if Courier does form the basis for a device’s OS, I don’t see the company being able to abandon the well-worn Windows metaphors.
Meanwhile, this editorial is a good summary of the problems Microsoft has. Sure, it’s still profitable (on the back of Windows/Office), but even their one undeniable hit of the last decade, the Xbox, isn’t dominant in the same way, and they have plenty of failures to point to. Perhaps the most telling quote is just after the one I’ve used above:
“Despite the certainty that an Apple tablet was coming this year, the tablet group at Microsoft was eliminated.”
2010-01-29
Competing with iPad
Everyone’s talking about the iPad, so I started thinking a little further down the road. After all, if windows and mice really aren’t the future of computing, and touch screens are, you’d hope there’d be more than one manufacturer of devices in Our Glorious Computing Future. At least, I hope there is.
So, who’d make them? I can tell you who won’t: anyone relying on Windows. Microsoft’s done very well out of the last twenty years of computing, but the last decade has shown their inability to move with the times. Windows Vista was an obvious mis-step, but so is their series of Tablet Editions, because they failed to do what the iPhone OS did: rethink the interface. Instead, they expect a thin film of touch interactions to be enough, and it’s not.
Similarly, Windows Mobile’s reliance on a stylus and vestigial metaphors - the Start button, for example - hardly shows any signs of being the foundations for a usable device. Dan pointed out there’s a chance that the Xbox division might manage, and I suppose the Zune folks might have a chance, but I’d not hold my breath.
Of course, since almost every PC manufacturer relies on Microsoft for their OS, that rules out the likes of Dell, HP, Asus and Sony. So who’s left?
Nokia have dabbled with tablets before, and with the N900, they seem to have a fairly decent handheld device. Maemo might just make a good enough layer on top of Linux, but do they have the vision to make the hardware? Unfortunately, my gut feeling is that they don’t. Two or three years ago they might have been able to get away with a grand visionary play, but now, with the iPhone and Android going after their most profitable market segment, they look a bit like a wounded giant, trying to make sure they’re still going.
So that leaves Google. Their biggest issue, as far as I can tell, is that they have two OSes which overlap uncomfortably right at the point the iPad exists: the (announced but unreleased) Chrome OS, and the aforementioned Android. I don’t know enough to tell which fits better, but I expect one of them would be fine.
The company has other problems, too. So far Android hasn’t included multi-touch in the core OS or apps, because of the fear of patent litigation from Apple. It’s possible there’ll be a deal to resolve that, one way or another. In fact, I really hope there is: otherwise the monopoly I alluded to earlier will become a reality. The other issue is that they’re still not an experienced hardware manufacturer. Their first consumer product, the Nexus One, is built for them by HTC, and they’ve had teething troubles with customer relations, especially to do with getting phones working with telecoms companies. Maybe a licensee will make a tablet first, but you could argue the potential of the phone OS didn’t really surface until there was an in-house design; maybe the same would be true of a pad.
However, of all the people listed here, I suspect Google are by far the best placed to compete with Apple. Now all I have to do is wait a few years and see how wrong this post was.
2009-06-29
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2009-06-24
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At first, I didn’t really care about fixoutlook.org. Then I was slightly annoyed by Dave Cross tilting at the old windmills. Then I actually read Joe Clark’s evisceration of the campaign (via), and I realised I’m an old-timer who can be persuade to tilt at windmills too.
I mean, is it really coincidence that the time that email stopped being useful is the same as the time that hordes of users via Outlook (and Outlook Express, or whatever the cut-down consumer version that Microsoft deign to include in some Windows versions is branded as this year) started using it? Maybe. But it’s fun to think it’s not.
Meanwhile, I looked at the site itself, and as well as noticing that what seemed like half the usericons haven’t got off the last bandwagon yet, it was impossible to miss that it’s JavaScript is written badly enough to make Safari cry (see screenshot). Oh, and any campaign that tries to communicate with Microsoft via the medium of, er, Twitter? Right. OK. Well, I post privately there, so I suppose I’m not allowed to be part of your club. Never mind. Didn’t fancy joining.
(This post was brought to you by the ghost of 2lmc spool past.)
2008-09-19
JavaScript Engines and the IE Hegemony
Another day, another JavaScript performance increase. This time, it’s the WebKit team, with the somewhat ludicrously named SquirrelFish Extreme, which manages a tenfold speed increase on Safari 3’s JSKit engine, apparently.
Oddly, it seems as if most of the work involved has been done under the auspices of the Summer of Code, Google’s programme to get college students involved in open source projects. Of course, the other newcomer on the JS engine block is their own V8.
However, good as all the competition between these two (and Mozilla’s TraceMonkey, due to be released in Firefox 3.1 and, like the others, available in pre-release form) is, it ignores the elephant in the room. As I commented on a PC Pro blog post about Chrome and Firefox (after the V8 talk at Google Developer Day), this progress is pretty much passing IE by.
John Resig’s recent benchmarks of JavaScript engines show that Internet Explorer 7 is awful, and IE8, although better, is nowhere near the performance of the released competing browsers, let alone the improved versions currently under development. Indeed, after one chart he has to note:
No results for IE were provided as the browser crashes when running the tests, unfortunately.
(To be fair, he does go on to say that Safari nightlies also failed on Windows.)
So, what’s the outlook? Clearly JS-intensive applications are here to stay, and I think we’ll increasingly see interfaces to them on the server side and possibly the desktop too. However, the developers of the most cutting-edge of these apps will either be held back by, or have to explicitly exclude, the most common browser in the world. Maybe that’ll be enough to keep Microsoft focussed on improving, and from the notes to a recent interview, it looks like they know it. Here’s hoping it works out.
