Scriblio 2.3 v4 is out. See it. Download it. Install it. Join the mail list.

What’s new?

• Lots of small bug fixes.
• Implemented wp_cache support.
• Revamped SQL query logic for better memory efficiency.
• New widget options.
• Search suggest/autocomplete support (implemented in the new theme).
• New theme. New Theme! By Jon Link.

I’ve been using DoubleTake to stitch panoramas for a while, but when I discovered p0ps Harlow’s photos and learned he was using Calico Panorama, I figured it was worth taking a look.

DoubleTake has done a great job for a number of my photos (Mt. Moriah, San Francisco Motorcycles, Mt. Mondadnock), and when the automatic stitch failed, I could manually reposition (or re-order) the photos. I could also adjust the individual images to make them better match each other. It worked well with landscape panoramas, but also left me frustrated with a number of other images. The motorcycles I noted above, the Prelinger Library, and the view from my roof all took a lot more work than I expected. And DoubleTake can only work with a single row of images.

Calico, on the other hand, seemed to allow a photographer to shoot photos like a drunk with a shotgun. And my first test surprised me with how it bent the geometry of the two photos to magically align them despite lens the distortions and slightly different angles.

But my second test revealed some frustrations. Calico’s ability to automatically align photos was amazing, but not perfect. There was Corey, but nothing I could find in the UI would allow me to reposition that frame.

Not that DoubleTake could do any better. The automatic stitching failed to even get the frames in the right order, and my best efforts couldn’t make the geometry work.

Unfortunately, now I can’t use either of them. DoubleTake allows me to tweak the image, but I now know it takes too long to get the results I now expect. And Calico will get me almost everything I expect, but won’t let me tweak it to make it perfect. I wish these two could work together, because the product I want has the best features of each.

panorama, stitching, software, Calico Panorama, DoubleTake, comparison, photograpy

Brian’s comment at RemainingRelevant should resonate with many of us:

Something to consider about why libraries end up with bad interfaces (at least as far as catalogs go) is that it might be that the people who use the interface (and help the public use it) are not the people who decide which interface to use.

When it comes to demanding better from vendors [...] consortiums like mine seem to place more emphasis on “cheap and reliable” than in “useful to the patrons.”

More than identifying individual vendors, I’d like this to be a discussion about our decision making processes. Let’s look carefully at how we got here — not to point fingers (for we are all responsible), but to plot a path out and try to make sure we never find ourselves here again.

As Karen points out: it’s not enough to nod our heads in a knowing sigh, “the genius moment for you or anyone else will be figuring out what to do with it!”

It’s corny, but I’m serious. If you’ve taken the pledge, you’ll know to look skeptically at every product. You’ll ask yourself and a mix of likely users how it could be better. And you won’t buy anything or renew any contract on anything that sucks. There is no consortium, no institution that can afford to throw away money on products that can’t deliver the ease of use and quality of experience that users expect from competing (and more familiar) tools elsewhere on the internet.

The real challenge, of course, is making sure everybody involved with every decision-making process understands this.

compare, decision, decision making, market, market forces, process, software, suck, sucks, sucky, the pledge, training, usability, vendors

A: Because we compare them to the wrong things.

I’m in training today for a piece of software used in libraries. It’s the second of three days of training and things aren’t going well. Some stuff doesn’t work, some things don’t work the first (second, third…ninth) time, and other things just don’t make sense. At lunch, one of the other participants mentioned to the trainer that some of the activities in the software seemed to have too many steps, too many places to go wrong, too many turns between beginning and end.

The answer began by explaining that the most analogous activity would be the acquisition of books for the collection. Adding a book to the collection requires first identifying the book, reading the reviews, choosing to purchase, identifying a vendor and cost, identifying funding, ordering, receiving, cataloging…

The list went on, perhaps with too much detail, but it landed on the following: “there are at least 12 steps to just putting a book on the shelf. When you think about it like that, our software is easy.”

I bit my tongue at that moment, but I’ve been grinding my teeth about it since.

Here’s what’s eating me: You can compare one unlikable thing to any other unlikable thing and come out ahead, but what about “real-world” comparisons?

Paul Graham explains in his “Hardest Lessons For Startups To Learn” essay that developers often compare themselves to the wrong things, misunderstanding who their competition is:

A lot of startups worry “what if Google builds something like us?”

What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players, but other startups you don’t know exist yet. They’re way more dangerous than Google because, like you, they’re cornered animals.

Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of security. You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing. A corollary is that you shouldn’t relax just because you have no visible competitors yet. No matter what your idea, there’s someone else out there working on the same thing. (emphasis added)

Graham is talking to startups, but switch some words around and you’ll get my message: if you compare yourself to something that sucks, you’ll only be able to say you’re more or less sucky.

A better comparison for this product would have been against flickr, where activities that are closely analogous to those in the software we’re being trained on often require only one step. And taking Graham’s advice, the best way to approach it would be constantly ask “can we do this better?” “Could a competitor we don’t yet know about do this better?”

(Aside: social software is that which gets spammed, that which gets you laid, and that which you’ll need no training on.)

Please, stand with me now and repeat:

When something sucks I will say so. When vendors spout crap I will call them on it. My staff deserve good tools, my users need good tools, and I can’t afford to buy stuff that sucks.

Together, we’ll fix the world one product at a time.

bad answers, compare, comparison, competition, crap, developers, development, failure, future libraries, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, software, startups, suck, sucks, sucky, training, vendors

They say “Zimbra is a community for building and maintaining next generation collaboration technology.” What I’d like to know, however, is whether Zmbra is a community driven, social software answer to the problems of groupware — typically driven by management’s needs.

tags: collaboration, collaboration technology, community needs, community, groupware, management needs, open source, oss, social software, software, zimbra, zimbra collaboration suite

I actually like the look of a broken panorama, where the borders of each photo are clearly visible — even emphasized. But last night I got the notion of doing a seamless pano and found DoubleTake, a $12 shareware app that makes the process pretty darn easy. The sunrise shot above (larger sizes) was my first crack at it, but I was so sure I’d use it again (and again) that I’ve already registered it.

I’ve got more panoramas at Flickr. I still like the broken panorama effect, but I see a few compositions that I might re-do as seamless.

tags: borders, doubletake, edges, mac os x, pano, panorama, panoramic, panoramic photos, photography, seamless, seamless panorama, seamless stitching, shareware, software, sunrise

I was never a very good graphic designer, but the part of me that thought I was still pays attention when I see software like Linotype’s free FontExplorer, described somewhere as “the iTunes for fonts.”

tags: design, font, fonts, graphic design, graphic designer, graphics, linotype, software, type, typefaces

I’m off visiting the good folks at Pepper today. I’ll update this post with photos as soon as they’re available, then look for a pair of posts about how the hardware/software works and what I’d like to do with it later.

Until then, here are some related posts: Ultra Portable Computing, Pepper Pad 2, and Portable Computing.

UPDATE: the picture above is blurry because of my poor photography skills. Better pictures can be found at the Pepper site. Look for more about the Pepper Pad in the next few days.

tags: computer, computing platform, hardware, internet, pepper, software, ultra portable, web, web computing