Finally, more sophisticated software is making its way onto cameras. This is going to be huge, I think. When you look at the camera usage stats on Flickr, it’s two smartphones - the iPhone 4 and 4S - that take the two top spots amongst all cameras.
Personally, I think having a full Android OS running on a camera, seems to be too distracting. And - unsurprisingly - battery life is greatly diminished.
But WiFi connectivity, great apps for editing and organisation, plus the ability to upload your photos straight to a website and/or your computer/tablet is a huge win and something I miss with “real” cameras.
I open-sourced the small photo overlay class I wrote for NZ Walks. It’s a custom overlay for the Google Maps API v3 that can display small photo thumbnails on the map.
“When I meet people who run design at other organizations, they’re always like, ‘Design is one of the most political areas of the company. This designer likes green and that one likes purple, and whose design gets picked? The one who buddies up to the boss.’
Some companies think of design as an art. We think of design as a science. It doesn’t matter who is the favorite or how much you like this aesthetic versus that aesthetic. It all comes down to data. Run a 1% test [on 1% of the audience] and whichever design does best against the user-happiness metrics over a two-week period is the one we launch. We have a very academic environment where we’re looking at data all the time.
We probably have somewhere between 50 and 100 experiments running on live traffic, everything from the default number of results to underlined links to how big an arrow should be. We’re trying all those different things.”
We’ve made loads of apps for clients at Karbon, but this is the first app we’ve made for ourselves. I’m excited to announce the immediate availability of Scratch. We hope it will become your favorite quick-input notepad. It’s crammed full of features like customizable and Markdown toolbars, Dropbox support for appending to existing files or creating new ones, built-in sharing to Twitter and more. It launches lightning-fast, too, and it always jumps right into edit mode so you can start typing right away.
The great thing is Scratch allows you to quickly clear your existing note, but stores all cleared notes in a searchable history so you never have to worry about losing anything. There’s no silly file management to deal with.
