What use are web applications?

OK, this is a bit Luddite but I am unimpressed by the news that Adobe are entering the online document processing market, according to the BBC. They’ve bought the online word processor Buzzword, that lets several people edit a document online. It sounds like a good idea, in principle, but…

Have you ever tried collaborating on a document online? It’s usually a fiasco. At least, it is on Messenger, You change something. The other person changes something else. It saves over your changes. Or the program won’t either of you save because it’s trying to synchronise two documents. And failing to get either working.

One of you is bound to have a stylesheet that defaults to comic sans 18 point every time you press the return key. One of you is guaranteed to take Word’s offer of last Tuesday’s recovered version of the document, by accident, because it sounds more convincingly like the document you should be working on than the actual thing in front of you.

The problem isn’t the tech. It’s that two separate things are two separate things. They get out of synch. If you are both working on separate chapters and can merge the complete document that’s a different matter. But, in that case, why not keep two documents until you’ve finished your own bits?

DotNetty Ramblings

Well, it has been a while since I have ranted or raved about technological topics so this is a bit overdue. Fortunately this months .net magazine has managed to provide something of interest (although I think this was actually unintentional on their behalf).

Towards the end of the magazine they have a tendency to waste two – three pages on a normally pointless section called “Big Question.” In this, .net asks a selection of .net figureheads (such as people from Adobe, Actinic, ISPs, Nielsen//NetRatings etc., as well as people like Oxblood Ruffin) a question which gives them a lot of latitude to wax lyrical about all things internety.

This month, the question is “If you could remove one thing from the internet, what would it be?” Surprisingly there are several well thought out answers and most stay away from the pointlessly obvious ones like child porn and crime. For example, Chris Barling (Actinic) earns several WhyDontYou Karma Points for his response:

It would have to be any trace of Michael Winner. He gets over 74,000 hits on Google, so there’s lots to remove. he appears to have no redeeming qualities. A quick Google search for his image is even worse, particularly the Daily Mail photo of a swimming trunk clad Winner. There should be a law against it.

Seriously, what else needs to be said? The only way this could be improved is to remove all traces of Winner from everywhere in the universe. Well done Chris Barling of Actinic fame.

Anyway, this wouldn’t be a WhyDontYou rant if there weren’t some annoyingly odd comments to complain about. Let us take a look at this snippet from Steve Burnard (Adobe):

I would remove blogs, for the following reasons: They’re personal opinions, usually by people who are unqualified to have an objective opinion. They can be out of date, yet will still be referenced as valid.

Blimey. Now as this is a blog obviously I am going to strongly disagree with the nonsense Burnard is spouting here.

Sadly, he is echoing comments which I have heard over the last few weeks from a variety of media sources and, with a lot of caveats, I agree with part of the gist myself.

There is, in recent times, a strange public approach towards blogs and internet information (at least there is in the UK). Some people work on the principle that everything on a blog is 100% scientifically proven fact, while others fall in the exact opposite camp. Obviously both are off the mark by a long way. There are lazy journalists, there are lazy researchers and there are lazy commenters – all of whom will do a quick web search, find a blog which agrees with what ever point they are trying to make and then pass the blog off as if it is peer reviewed research resulting from a double blind study.

However, as Burnard points out, these blogs are actually personal opinion. The problem is not their existence but lazy and stupid people expecting more from them. I am somewhat intrigued as to how a person can not be qualified to have an “objective opinion” when they are writing a “personal opinion” blog. It strikes me that Burnard simply dislikes blogs and has tried to throw two arguments together in his dismissal of their value.

If I read a blog which talks about Stanislaw Lem (for example), this tells me more about how the author of the blog understands the person, what he has done and so on, rather than going to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and hoping he has an entry. I do not expect every single detail to be 100% factually accurate (although I am disappointed if I find mistakes – not that I have found any in the Black Sun Journal post I mention) and I do not for one second expect editorial commentary to be impartial. I have yet to find any editorial content which is actually impartial.

As to this mysterious “objective opinion” – where does Burnard suggest we go for this? (He doesn’t make any suggestions in the article) None of the “traditional” media sources could ever hope to be considered “objective” in their coverage, especially when it comes to technology. Nearly ever piece I have ever seen on TV or in the print media turns out to be little more than a regurgitated press release, manufacturers / designers websites are no better. I have yet to see anything even hinting at being objective on the Adobe website.

With blogs you can often work out where their bias lies (if you see a penguin logo, you know MS products will get short shrift for example… 🙂 ), and the more you read the blog, the easier this becomes. While there is a risk of getting press-releases in blog forms, this too can be spotted by visiting the blog frequently. Other than the occasional high profile blogger who gets paid to comment on products, you can normally be reasonably sure that when a blog writes about a product, the manufacturer isn’t calling the shots.

What, I wonder, is the source of the mystical “objective opinion?”

One last odd comment on the “Big Question” is from Ian Pearson (slightly insane, high profile Futurologist with BT). Now, dismissing the frankly off the wall predictions he makes, this is what he thinks should be removed from the internet:

I’d remove holiday cottage agencies. The net doesn’t need them, I don’t need them, the cottage owners don’t need them and the tourist industry as a whole suffers greatly because of them. I and many other potential customers now go overseas instead, They’ve overstayed their welcome.

I get the feeling I am missing something here because this makes no sense to me at all. First off, this is a big bout of hubris by Mr Pearson. Just because “he” doesn’t need them doesn’t mean no one else needs them. I have used one to book a fantastic holiday to Hadrians Wall a few months ago and the cottage owners I have spoken to about them (admittedly only three) have had good things to say about them.

More importantly though, is the idea that the tourist industry is suffering because of online holiday cottage agencies. What madness. The idea that because of the existence of holiday cottage agencies people now decide to travel overseas instead is just too weird for words. Is Ian Pearson (and these mysterious “others”) incapable of booking a UK holiday without going through a cottage agency? Surely the final decider is the reality of economics. If these agencies really add no value, and do nothing but discourage tourists, they will go out of business and the weird happy state he seems to look for will return.

Personally, I just think all this “futureguessing” has sent him insane. (But this is just my non-objective, personal opinion…)

[tags]Technology, Blogs, Blogging, Steve Burnard, Chris Barling, Ian Pearson, BT, Adobe, Actinic, DotNet, .net, Magazine, Web Design, Web Design Magazine, Nonsense, Drivel, Rambling[/tags]

HDR Photographs

Still in a holiday mood, I have been playing with Photomatix trying to convert “normal” pictures into high dynamic range pictures (HDR – read more here and here). At the moment, I am certainly not even up to the beginner standard but I have learned a few things in the last couple of hours. Simply put, HDR is taking multiple pictures of the same scene at different exposures, then combining these exposures to make a single image.

For simple HDR type images, the most common methods (on windows, Linux users get a different set of joy and I have no idea about Macs) are to use Photoshop or Photomatix. In newer versions of Photoshop you have the option to either play with layers and blend your images (can get fantastic results but can also be very hit and miss) or use the Merge to HDR option (File -> Automate -> Merge to HDR in CS3). Sadly, personally, I have never had much success with the automatic option but you might manage it.

Alternatively there is a bit of software called Photomatix (Pro costs $99, Basic is Free) which does a similar job but includes “Tone Mapping.” Peter Hasitschka’s page gives more details (along with some fantastic images) so I wont go into detail here. Needless to say, the tone mapping can give you some amazing results, although I have only been playing with this for the last 30 minutes or so. So far it is worth every penny. Continue reading

Photoshopping Bodium Castle

It seems that I cant help but stay up late at night seeing what can (and can’t) be done with photoshop. If you are reading this on Planet Atheism looking for Atheist / free thinking content – sorry nothing to see here. I will keep this short and sweet though.

For those who still resit the wonders of photoshop, this is an example of what it can do to an other wise dreary picture taken in poor weather. The source photo was, it must be said, pretty uninspiring. However after a total of 14 minutes in photo shop (most of that was waiting for the disk thrashings to stop, the source image was massive so the file was about 90mb) it now looks a lot more dramatic and is something people would actually want to look at.

Original Picture - Bodium Castle, 5 May 07 Photoshopped Picture - Bodium Castle 05 May 07

Yes, the effects are a bit over the top, I did get carried away with myself, and the low quality used to resize them into something you can download and view has impacted it a bit, but I am sure you get the gist of the point I am trying to make.

Digital photo editing rocks.

[tags]adobe, digital-photographs, digital-camera, digital-culture, Castles, Bodium, National Trust, Sussex, pictures, photoshop, photos, photography, photographs, photo-software, photo-effects, technology[/tags]

Value of Camera Processing

Taking some snapshots today led me to thinking about the “value” of using the on-camera processing options to take pictures as Black and White or Sepia (or even low colour), rather than taking every shot as high colour and doing any processing in Photoshop. Now for clarification purposes, I do not have a “real” DSLR (Kodak Z650) so taking the pictures in RAW is not an option and therefore some camera processing is inevitable.

Today, as I was snapping some pictures of country houses and landscapes, I realised I was often switching between Black and White, Sepia and High Colour. Not a massively difficult task but time consuming – in some instances I was taking three pictures of each “shot” rather than a single high colour one.

Common sense was screaming out to me that I should just take the high colour, but the residual technophobe in me seems to distrust Photoshop, so I had to experiment a little. I took three shots of a fairly neutral landscape scene, black and white, sepia and high colour, then passed the high colour JPEG through photoshop and made copies in black and white and sepia. The only other PC processing these images have had is a pass through Advanced Batch Converter to resize them into something which can be shown here. Continue reading

More Photos

Playing with Lightroom a bit more (and a sunny day) has resulted in a new Flash-based photo gallery (Stourhead Gallery – needs flash player). At the moment these are the basic pictures taken earlier today with no editing. It took about 5 minutes to copy the files off the SD-Card, into Lightroom, create the gallery and upload. The first and last stages were the slowest.

Now, I think I should point out that although I like Lightroom (a lot), I have no intention of buying this when the beta runs out. As a free tool it is fantastic. I am not sure I would be willing to pay for this functionality though.

If I was a professional photographer with no IT Skills it may be worth while, but given the ease with which you can create similar sites (flash or otherwise), it strikes me this is a shrinking market. Adobe may have been better giving this away and charging for support.

Old Photos

To try and change the subject away from Religious crackpots for a little while, I thought I would upload some photos! Here are a selection from and . As you can see these are quite old photos which have been scanned in.

Stonehenge Stonehenge - different angle Houses at Stourhead Church at Stourhead

Ok, in reality, they have been run through Adobe Lightroom which is actually a wonderful bit of software. I downloaded the beta version quite some time ago but never really made any use of it. Today I had a reminder it was going to expire on 28 Feb so I thought I would try it out.

It is not a photo / picture editing package along the lines of Photoshop but it is excellent for photo management and applying quick preset filters to pictures. This one is called “Antique Grayscale” and seems to be a mix of normal greyscale and sepia tones. I quite like the effect 🙂

Where Lightroom really excells is in creating Web Sites for photo galleries. It is amazing how easily this will take a collection of picures and turn them into a functional, usable (valid XHTML!) website. There is only limited control (in the beta version) over the exact style but the look and feel is good enough that most people wont mind. If you are a graphic artist or photographer, and want a quick and easy website, this package really is the best I have seen. Before my trial version runs out, I fully intend to upload some sample sites so you can see the output. At the moment I did two quick sites (one flash gallery and one html gallery) which are now online. Remember, you need ActiveX and flash player to view the flash site in IE.

As a rule of thumb, a site with 28 pictures takes about 30 seconds to select the pictures, a few mins to type in some basic details and then another 30 seconds to build the site. It really is that quick. The longest part is uploading the images!

This is pretty much software that anyone who can actually copy a image to their computer, can use to create photo galleries in seconds.