Memos from February 2006

Box.net Relaunches

· Comment

I was for­tu­nate enough to get invited by Aaron Levie to test Box.net’s “Early Adap­tor Pre­view” this past week­end. I couldn’t blurt any­thing till after the 22nd about it. But yah, I almost for­got as I’ve been busy enjoy­ing my Mon­day off from work.

Any­ways, so far so good. Here’s a cou­ple of my find­ings from the getgo:

  • Sooth­ing and attrac­tive color palette
  • UI upgraded to be 2.0-friendly
  • Right-click (after log­ging in) pops up a Box.net menu. A dis­ad­van­tage I guess, at least for me. Your browser’s right-click menu options won’t work. For exam­ple, Screen­grab FF exten­sion to take a cou­ple of screen­shots. Note: I men­tioned this to Aaron, he said that they might give an option to have it enabled/disabled later on.
  • Upload­ing. At first, I thought the Upload-tab was going to change the actual page (com­ing from the Browse-section). It actu­ally just pops up a layer onto the view­port with its con­tent. If you are com­ing from any­where else other than the Browse-section and clicked on Upload-tab, you are actu­ally redi­rected to the Browse-section first and need to click on Upload-tab again to do the actual upoad. Note: As Aaron pointed out through email, this is more of a “usabil­ity” thing and should be addressed later on.

    Sec­ond, I thought the “drag-and-drop” was actu­ally func­tional so I tested an image file and dragged it to the browser win­dow, only to be greeted by the pre­view of the image itself. That is, the browser chang­ing its URL to the local files. “Oops.” Didn’t know the “drag-and-drop” text was a link which pops up a win­dow (Java applet) for the actual drag-and-drop.

    Besides the above, I found that rel­a­tively easy and intu­itive to upload your files. Granted it ain’t there ain’t no Win­dows file-transfer ani­ma­tion, but its direct to the point—to get your files as fast and as safe as pos­si­ble from your hard-drive to their server(s).

I’ll post some screen­shots later today. It’s so purty believe me. As for now, you may get a glimpse through this Box.net shared-folder, or via Box.net’s blog entry about the relaunch.

Note: Here are some pod­cast inter­views with Aaron Levie: a) by Gear Live, and b) Ven­tu­rus.

Who Said Yahoo Doesn’t Share for Free?

· Comment

Just last week, pre-Valentine’s Day, Yahoo! shows it love to the pub­lic by launch­ing User Inter­face Library and Design Pat­terns Library. Not to men­tion, the crazy cats over at the Yahoo! UI depart­ment have started a blog as well. Dang, they seem to be grind­ing and shar­ing great tools with every­one. I like that. You may read more about inter­est­ing tech­nol­ogy via Yahoo! Devel­oper Net­work.

Spe­cial thanks goes out to Blingo.com, that I came across Peter Freitag’s blog entry about it. It’s just too bad I didn’t win anything =|

The New Canon 30D

· Comment
Canon 30D

As I was doing my late-night news roundup, I stum­bled upon some inter­est­ing new Web 2.0 apps. The top two that are on my list to beta-test are Fold­era and Fly­spy. I can’t wait to see how Fold­era works, it seems that it’ll be use­ful at work and at home. As for Fly­spy, this thing should make it eas­ier for those of us “remotely” work­ing from home. I hope it saves me a ton of cash so I may have some left for some other good­ies later this year. Not to men­tion, a cou­ple of expenses dur­ing my big trips (Hawaii, Japan and P.I.).

Any­ways, a lit­tle birdie that a new toy has just been unveiled, Canon’s 30D. It seems that it is using the same sen­sor as the 20D. But a cou­ple of more intrigu­ing changes can be high­lighted as stated by Rob Gail­braith:

a 2.5-inch (diag­o­nal) rear LCD, increased burst depth, Pic­ture Styles, a shut­ter with a higher duty cycle rat­ing and a long list of other cam­era usabil­ity changes.

A cou­ple of things that I did like with the new 30D fea­tures are:

  • Canon’s more flex­i­ble Pic­ture Style menu, which replaces the Para­me­ters menu of the 20D
  • ISO 100‑1600 is now selec­table in 1/3 stop increments
  • Increased burst depth: 11 frames for RAW CR2 shoot­ing, 30 for Large Fine JPEG and 9 for RAW+JPEG
  • Switch­able High-Speed Con­tin­u­ous (5 fps) and Low-Speed Con­tin­u­ous (3 fps) frame rate set­tings are now included
  • An Auto set­ting in the Long Expo­sure Noise Reduc­tion Cus­tom Function
  • The abil­ity, like sev­eral more-pricey Canon dig­i­tal SLRs, to simul­ta­ne­ously apply long expo­sure noise pro­cess­ing to one pic­ture while cap­tur­ing another
  • The addi­tion of a 3.5% spot meter­ing mode
  • A more-precise 4-increment bat­tery charge indicator
  • No more new fold­ers cre­ated every 100 pho­tos; in the 30D, a folder can hold 9999 pho­tos (this one is a 50/50 like/dislike to me)
  • Dur­ing play­back, the image+shooting data screen will dis­play either an RGB or Bright­ness his­togram, file size and will option­ally dis­play AF markings
  • The Jump fea­ture dur­ing image play­back can now leap back and forth 10 pic­tures at a time, 100 pic­tures at a time or by the date shot

So yah, “nothin’ seri­ous.” It looks like it’ll be ship­ping mid-March (US) with an MSRP of $1399. $1399? That was how much I got my 20D for back in Decem­ber through Costco.com. Oh well, you can’t beat a rebate of $300 for it. Any­ways, I might have to take Costco up on their 100% return/warranty pol­icy later this year. Good times.

Interchangeable Shadow Reflection

· Comment

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stechico/101497598/
Golden Pur­ple Thai by stechico.

Had the oppor­tu­nity to go to the City and do some errands. Also grabbed a cou­ple of things from URBN with some gift cards I finally found. After, I got hun­gry and headed up the hill to King Thai aka. “Pur­ple Thai” as we refer to it.

So, while look­ing at the photo more, it got me think­ing deep. It’s kind of like “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey” shorts. A reflec­tion can be a shadow(?). But can a shadow be a reflec­tion, or is it merely just itself—a shadow? “Things that make you go… hmmm.” What say you?

123