Just a Thought...: Tag usability

Does Digitial Truly Make You a Better Photographer?

Berin Loritsch — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:29:00 +0000

I’ve been playing with the Adobe Lightroom tool lately, mainly because I have a lot of pictures to manage. When it comes to sports photography, you end up taking hundreds of pictures a game. Even with 6 fps you get close to that critical moment, but many times just a bit off. A typical high school basketball season lasts for three months with roughly two games a week, rarely with a night off. Some of you are doing the math right now, let me save you some time: the season isn’t over yet and I have 1,872 pictures. That’s a lot to go through. I thought that in order to help me out I needed a system to weed out the not quite good enough and get a top 10 for each game, and then from there further refine to the top however many I decide. That task proved ridiculous when I used Photoshop Elements, but to be fair it really wasn’t designed for the purpose.

I’m happy to report that Adobe Lightroom is a very powerful and useful tool for your digital photography needs. I really don’t need a full Photoshop package, and at $650 US it’s a little out of reach anyways. Lightroom is a more manageable $299 US, which is still on the expensive side but it does everything I need—including the light touch ups I do for color correction and cropping. Aperture is equally powerful from what I hear, and based on whatever you get comfortable with first you tend to like. O’Reilly sponsored a week long review of an Aperture user learning and using Lightroom and vice versa. The result is both authors had legitimate reasons for their preferences, and neither was wanting to switch… Even though they gave the other app mad props and even recognized when things were done better. Bottom line is that whatever fits the way you do things, that’s what you want. Both have free 30 day evaluations, so take advantage of it and properly decide.

The main point wasn’t a comparison of Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop Elements, or Picassa. The point was whether the claims of digital camera salesmen hold up. It also affects how we design user interfaces, but more on that later. The salesman will tell you how digital provides “instant feedback”, “lots more room than a roll of film”, “you can always fix it later”, etc. Sure, my DSLR provides instant feedback but I find that annoying, so I turn that feature off. I have to concentrate on what’s going on around me, not the toy in my hand. I need to be ready for a fast break, a drive to the basket, a beautiful no-look pass. I’ll miss it if I’m constantly distracted by that screen shining off of my cheekbone. Sure, it’s convenient to not have to change rolls in the middle of a game, but I tend to take too many pictures—most of which are good, but not great. I found that when I was using film I would budget 36 pictures per quarter (one roll per quarter), and that worked. Of course, scanning them to manage them was a pain. Now I have anywhere between 175 to 300 pictures in a game. I’m more wasteful instead of better. Of course, fixing it later is a major pain. I’d rather get it right, or at least really close at the time I take the picture.

Lastly, we have to really think about what the purpose of photography is. It’s to have pictures. You know these images on hard paper with a nice finish… I find that when you have 90% of the pictures you take never see paper, you have to wonder if you really need to manage the pictures. If it really wasn’t memorable, then why hold on to it? I’m sure you can tell me many reasons why, but these are legitimate questions you have to answer. The big one, of course, is what is the purpose of what I’m doing? Why is it that I have so many pictures to manage, but there’s no actual picture? Who’s going to look at these and actually enjoy them? People only have so much attention span, so a top 20 might be the limit of someone’s attention span for a slide show.

The bottom line is that better disciplines make you a better photographer, not better gadgets. If you can’t appreciate what a feature can do for you, you don’t need it. Far too much attention has been placed on the gadgets on not on helping someone do what they really want to do. If the idea is to focus on photography, then get out of the user’s way and let them do what they want to do—and no more.

In the analog world, the focus has always been on the hard picture. If you have to print the pictures yourself, you’ll be a lot more conservative about what you believe is worth taking. There’s a fair amount of work involved in getting a good print. It’s rewarding work, but work nonetheless. People have discovered that they are more drastic with their adjustments in the analog world than they are in the digital world, and the picture is better for it. I think a large part of that has to do with the delayed feedback. As we make changes in the digital world, we see every little thing and intermediate step immediately, and the more drastic changes scare us, so we don’t complete what we were originally thinking. In the analog world, you make the changes and prepare everything you need at once without seeing it appear in front of you. When you develop the print, you are pretty happy with the work you did. In a way, the instant feedback hurts more than it helps.

Safari Take 2: Call for Testing

Berin Loritsch — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:59:00 +0000

Now that I have a Mac at home, I’ve had a little more experience with Safari. For the short review: I had to install Firefox as well. Safari is a nice little browser, and for most things it looks and works quite well. However, it does have a major failing if it wants to unseat Internet Explorer and Firefox from browser dominance as Jobs desired. Not all sites work with it—even those that work in both IE and Mozilla based browsers. That’s not good, because sites that don’t work include the likes of WikiSpaces and Aurora Loans. WikiSpaces gives you reduced functionality, so you have to know Wiki markup to format the page properly. However, Aurora Loans won’t even let you log in. How can you pay a bill if you can’t get in the site?

What’s the cause of this failure? More than likely it has to do with some JavaScript that isn’t supported in Safari but it is in the other two browsers. Perhaps the DOM is not consistent? I can’t be sure. However, I’m almost positive (without popping up ‘View Source’) that Aurora Loans has some JavaScript evoked on form submission. If Safari is going to unseat its competitors, it should at least match what Firefox’s JavaScript support can do.

I’ve installed Firefox so that I can use some of the sites that I can’t use properly on a Mac. But here’s the rub, some sites apparently don’t work properly with Firefox. I’d have to look more into it, but my wife was more than frustrated at the time so it just wasn’t going to happen. The site she was using sends e-invites for jewelry parties and such. For now we have to use two browsers, but that’s just not fair to us the users.

First, Apple needs to test and fix its browser against sites that work in Mozilla and IE—giving more attention to sites that seriously impact users such as banking and loan sites. Perhaps the ECMA Script and DOM standards should have test suites to validate the JavaScript implementations on all browsers. I don’t know, but something needs to be done.

Second, for the rest of us designing sites to be consumed on the internet, we need to include Safari in our cross browser testing. It’s easier to build upon cross-platform support from the ground up, rather than retrofitting libraries to include browser support. However, by the same token, there needs to be a way to test the libraries in the browsers. That way you can know what does and doesn’t work simply by running those tests. Simple things like Prototype work without any problems, so I’m unsure what Aurora Loans is doing that doesn’t work.

I don’t have anything against Safari, and it’s a decent browser. I personally still prefer Firefox, but then again I am used to it. When I put my user hat on, I just want things to work. I’m pretty confident in Firefox’s ability to work, but not so much for Safari. Let’s just make things work—whatever it takes.

How Many People Know How to Tag?

Berin Loritsch — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 14:42:00 +0000

I’m sure it seems odd for me to question this after I’ve doted on its merits and how easy it is to do. How many people use the bookmark tools like Ma.gnolia.com or del.icio.us? How many people have used something like Flickr, etc? When you think about it, the number of sites like this are surprisingly small. Even though there are a number of users, few are there because of the tagging. It’s because they get some value out of the site that they don’t get somewhere else. Flickr works because of the communities, where you can find groups to shoot the breeze or perfect your craft—whatever you want.

Even now, the only thing I use Ma.gnolia.com for is to manage the list of links on my blog. I don’t participate in the groups or anything like that. Quite frankly, I don’t have enough time to read a whole bunch of blogs or follow links like I used to. Tagging the links are less important in that case. Sometimes I want to find an old link, and I can use the tags to get back to the article I wanted. However, after you’ve applied the knowledge in the article a few times, there’s no real value in keeping it around. Yet, there’s effort required to go back and remove it. Since I only list the most recent X number of links on my blog, that’s usually enough for me.

There are some places where I really think that tagging would be the right solution to find things again. One example would be iTunes, or whatever you use to manage your music. Setting up play lists based on tags is a great feature, so I’ve kind of forced that model on iTunes. Of course, I fear such a feature would go wasted on a great number of people because they don’t really see the value in it. Once you get over a certain number of songs you are managing, you really do need a better way to sort and organize your music than just the artist, genre, album type information.

There are some common elements of tagging software such as all the tags are displayed on the right. Sometimes they are shown in clouds, and sometimes they can be combined to narrow the selection more. However, things can become messy when you have the common left side navigation elements along with right side tag information. What’s the right thing to do? Should you mix the functionality of bookmarking sites and information providers?

Honestly, since bookmarking sites make it relatively easy to integrate with other sites, I think that they should handle the bookmarking features, and what you are doing should work on the content. It can get messy quick. Really quick. Should you allow multiple identical tags on an object from different users? How do you display them? If someone deletes a tag, and it’s just their version that goes away and someone else’s tag is there, what should the app do?

Truth be told, tagging is still the realm of power users. I wish it weren’t, but there’s still a lot to be discovered about how people use tags, and the types of things you can do with them.

Oportunity? Ruby still playing catch up in one area

bloritsch — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 13:27:00 +0000

Let me say right off the bat that I am a Ruby fan, and I love Ruby on Rails. In so many ways the API just feels right for the type of applications I write. However, there is one area that Ruby and Rails is still playing catch up in, and it has to do with the relative size of the community. Let‘s face it, for all its benefits, Ruby on Rails is still a small player in the world of web application development and it enjoys a very enthusiastic, yet small, community of developers. In a way it is my continuation on the rants on M$ development. The main problem is that there still isn‘t enough people who like to share how they did things. I don‘t believe that it has to do with the same motivation as Micro$oft, because both Ruby and Ruby on Rails are open source efforts and don‘t seek monetary reward. I‘m sure they wouldn‘t refuse it if it was offered though….

In a way I believe that because there is this general feeling of the fact that everything is “so easy a caveman can do it” (apologies to any cavemen reading this). Why should I write about something that everyone and their brother can do? To answer that question I have to ask a counter-question, why is my article on role based authorization my most popular article I‘ve ever written? The problem with Ruby is that there are so many ways to do something that sometimes you get stuck trying to figure out what is the best way for your project. I applaud the efforts for writing plugins and “acts_as” filters, but how do we use them or write them?

I‘m not saying that there is no documentation, because the people who maintain Ruby on Rails have done a wonderful job in this area. The problem is that it is only them writing any decent documentation. I‘m glad that they set up a Wiki, as it contains some key information such as how to connect to SQL Server (not that I would ever recommend using that) or deploy on different servers. The problem is that it suffers the same fate of most Wikis (with Wikipedia the shining exception), disorganized mess with articals of varying quality and completeness. Ironically, some of the better introductory guides or howtos come from curious Java guys.

Perhaps if there was some outlet to stroke people‘s ego or let them become de facto gurus in a publication the world may change a bit. So far the only thing that resembles a regular (English) publication in the Ruby world I am aware of is the Ruby on Rails Podcast. As great as that is, there is still a dearth of spreading knowlege about how to solve some pretty cool problems. As a result, it‘s easy to get stuck.

I would seriously consider setting up some sort of publication, even if it is strictly online, if I could be reasonably sure that I could have recurring articles of decent quality. Perhaps you can consider this a feeler for the level of interest here. I can‘t give remuneration for article submissions at this time, but I would seriously like to do something like this. It would be even better if the host site was implemented in Rails. If you are interested, post a comment here. If I get underwelming silence then the idea fades away. If I get an overwelming response, then I would move forward. I would have a need for recurring articles as well as one-off how-tos and reviews.