Digital Imaging and Video Camp

iPhoneUsabilityReview

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 09:31:18 Z

iPhone Usability Review

At this session we looked at Nancy Frishberg's iPhone and considered several aspects of its usability (where usefulness and aesthetics or enjoyment were considered along with its utility and user-learnable or user-intuited aspects).

Industrial Design

Size/Shape/Weight

We noted, as many reviews have already, the light weight and large proportion of the face of the device devoted to the screen. For those who did not recall Apple's Newton® devices we reviewed the contrast in size (larger), weight (heavier) and shape (larger in all dimensions).

Interaction Design meets Industrial Design

It's striking how many soft buttons this machine has, and how few hard buttons.

There's the single tactilely obvious button on the screen
There's the slightly less obvious audio output device (for the ear).
There are three buttons on the narrow edges of the device
- power on/off
- volume - a rocker which has several levels shown onscreen with tick marks
- mute - very handy for meetings and the movies

These buttons are still accommodated with the addition of the cushioning cover I felt compelled to buy. (I recall my Handspring device falling several times until the face cracked. Ugly.) The interesting difficulty of using the rubber cover is that the device can't stand in the cradle, but can still connect to the cord.

Earphones

California will soon have a new law in place: Drivers must use hands-free methods of cellphone use. Thus, I am motivated to become habitual in my use of the ear buds. I also feel pretty geeky when I just keep the earbuds on when communicating face-to-face. How to have the ear piece(s) in place for quick access to the phone, or for easy access to podcasts and music, while not appearing rude, distracted or quirky in face-to-face encounters? I have an idea or two here, but we can wait. I expect that around MacWorld time in January 2008 there will be many new accessories for the iPhone, including interesting treatments of the earpiece.

Multifunction Device

The iPhone, like a Treo or a Blackberry and several other similar tools, is a multifunction device including phone functions of making and receiving voice calls, but also has email, calendar, contact list, SMS and camera capabilities. I recall at least one UX person I respect arguing for single function devices with quite reasonable arguments, but for myself, I'm enjoying having the several functions inhabit the same device.

Device qua phone and device qua computer

I reported noticing a recent conflict between the mobile telephone device and the functionality of a computer. The phone functions as an independent device in most instances, however, it syncs with a base station laptop or desktop computer. In this exchange of information, updating each machine, with calendar corrections and additions, photos, contacts, and the like. Still the phone takes its software updates from the relationship with the base station.

Computers get updates

My previous mobile phone updated itself when you power-cycled it off and on. If it started to act odd, slow or if I needed to be on an airplane, I would powercycle the phone.

The iPhone uses iTunes (an Apple software program for cataloguing audio on the base station and related devices, for connecting to the iTunes store to buy music or spoken word recordings, or update subscriptions to periodicals, such as podcasts. The iPhone gets its software updates through iTunes.

Here's the problem I had:

Start update download from iTunes Store to iTunes application on base station
When complete, the update will apply itself to the iPhone

So far so good, right? But what happens when a call comes in between these two steps? It's hard to know (as a user) how big an update package is, and therefore how to estimate the time needed to download and then apply the update. From my recent experience, apparently what happens is that the call is interrupted and the phone software update takes precedence. Recommendation: The software should check for an ongoing voice call and ask to interrupt, or wait until the call is completed, before beginning the update.

Phone qua phone
- it's easy to accept "call waiting": you're notified that second call is coming in and (if the number is in the address book) who is calling. Choice to disconnect from current call and accept the new one is a well labeled (soft) button. But the choice to have a brief interaction with new caller ("Sure, noon is fine. See you there.") and return to first call WITHOUT hanging up on first call is hard, because the sequence of highest frequency for this scenario is in my estimation is

accept second call by putting first on hold (one button well labeled but I forget with what wording)
have brief conversation with second caller and agree to hang up;
push "return to first call" button (well labeled again
have the second caller hang up before the button in the previous step can take effect
thus, you've closed the second conversation and (ooops) hung up on the first

Interaction Design positives

being able to look up something while staying on the phone, and realizing that you can get back to the call interface with a single touch at the top of the screen. This capability may have been there on my previous phone, but I was so concerned I'd drop the call I barely tried it. I think my favorite college student can save numbers on the phone as a note while talking, but don't know if she can enter a new number while talking to someone.
the phone "knows" that a number is identified with two people (e.g. a husband and wife, both of whom are in my contacts list, with the same home number) and when that number rang me, the phone said "A or B calling".
I'm enjoying the two-finger gesture for increasing the image size, enlarging the screen for a particular area (and the reverse). Lots of promise here for additional uses of this gesture (optical zoom in the camera?), and for additional gestures

iPhone as camera

For DIVCamp I would be remiss if I didn't comment on the camera in the iPhone.

So far I've found it handy to have the camera available, but haven't added automatic upload to flickr or Kodak Easy Share or any of the other, similar sites. The camera, while certainly adequate, does not have flash or any zoom capability, both of which I'm accustomed to and use (the latter more than the former). But we might expect future models to have a more capable camera.

As I use the phone and show images, I'm realizing how much of a photo editor I need to be. "Our remodeling project" can't be a collection of even 50% of the images I've taken of this project, for most people. A dozen or two nice contrasts and details of old and new would suffice most viewers. This is my challenge, but it's not new to the iPhone. It's just that now you can carry so many images and stories in pictures, where it would have been prohibitive (space, weight, cost) in physical media.

iPhone for email

I have two email accounts that I use most often. Do I want to receive and send email for either of those on the iPhone? I am aware of other people who use their iPhones for email. If I could figure out an easy way to filter my mail, so that only certain senders could reach me (e.g. individuals in my contact list of some 500+ "cards"), but not mailing lists or spam or unknown folks (who can wait until I'm sitting still), I'd be more willing to get and respond to email. I guess these are issues that are very familiar to Blackberry users, which I now reveal myself to be ignorant about.

iPhone as web-browser

I have been surprised to see how often I refer to the web, seek information, confirm answers, find routes, and the like with the added cost of a flat fee for web browsing that comes with the service from AT&T for the iPhone. As I was already a Cingular ("the new AT&T") customer, and reasonably satisfied with the service, I was familiar with the provider. We had a wide ranging discussion about various providers and agreements between providers and other retailers.

OpenGridSchedule

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 08:21:43 Z

Open Grid Schedule

Friday, October 12, 2007

Time	Area A	Area B
5:30 - 6:00pm	Pizza & Sign In	--
6:00 - 6:30pm	Introductions & Scheduling	--
6:45 - 7:45pm	MyDesktopAlbum David Xi	iPhone Usability Review Nancy F DIV and Social Networks Emilio Mercado
8:00 - 9:00pm	DEMOS	--
9:00 - 10:00pm	Networking	--

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Time	Area A	Area B
9:00 - 10:00am	Sign In & Continental Breakfast	--
10:00 - 10:30am	Introductions & Scheduling	--
10:30 - 11:30am	Metadata and Tags (next generation) Dave Hunkins & Vincent Jurgens	Tell us about Video! Al Nevarez
11:45 am - 1:15pm	Lunch	--
1:30 - 2:30 pm	Mashup Tools Stacie Hibino	DIV and Location Emilio Mercado
2:30 - 3:00 pm	Clean-up & Closing Session	--

MyDesktopAlbum

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:28:52 Z

Demo & walkthough of application. See www.MyDesktopAlbum.com

What are the common uses of desktop photo softwares?

Organize, Share, Copy out of Camera, Crop, Lighting, Red Eye Reduction, Special Effect

Available Software:

Kodak Easy Share, iPhoto, Picasa, Photoshop, Sony Camera

What does myDesktopAlbum provide:

Photo Editing such as Photoshop and Picasa
Photo Book creation such as myPublisher, Blurb
Navigation and toolbar like MS PowerPoint

MashupToolsSessionNotes

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 18:34:28 Z

Mashup Tools

Stacie Hibino first gave a little background -- describing what mashups are and describing and showing housingmaps, one of the first mashups created. Mashups are becoming more popular and MashupCamp is a great place to learn what's new in this space.

Stacie showed the simple DIVcamp Flickr slide show mashup she created using Microsoft Popfly tools before DIVcamp and then created a carousel photo mashup in real-time during the session.

Sessions

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 23:23:49 Z

Basic Schedule

See details about actual sessions and notes in the Open Grid Schedule.

Friday, October 12, 2007

5:30 - 6:00pm	Pizza & Sign In
6:00 - 6:30pm	Introductions & Scheduling
6:45 - 7:45pm	Parallel Sessions
8:00 - 9:00pm	Demos
9:00 - 10:00pm	Networking

Saturday, October 13, 2007

9:00 - 9:30am	Sign In & Continental Breakfast
9:30 - 10:00am	Introductions & Scheduling
10:00 - 11:00am	Parallel Sessions
11:00 - 11:15am	Break
11:15am - 12noon	Parallel sessions
12-1pm	Lunch
1:00 - 2:00pm	Parallel Sessions
2:15 - 3:15pm	Demos
3:15 - 3:30pm	Break
3:30 - 4:30pm	Parallel Sessions
4:30 - 5:00pm	Closing Session
5:00pm	Clean-up

Session Schedule

Session scheduling will take place at DIVcamp. Go to Proposed Topics to suggest a session you would like to lead or a topic that you would like to hear about.

Notes from sessions:

Media Organization: Tagging and Voting

Media Organization: Tagging and Voting
User goals
Common story: take a decent picture, crop and balance, send to mom in email, upload to flickr in order to blog it from there, go to blog and write the attending story
chatting
inject the tag, and then use the tag
gofish.com: user-generated video, tag at the point of upload, site about stuff, editorial voice, pulling video from Gofish.com, digg use case, composite state, channel of videos
Tag according to trip, location and time, video snippets, email hyperlink to friend of 'rome trip'
Tag themes of content as well as: content that is across time: anti-events: 'hangin with daddy'
Fulfill obligation to share
Archive
Personal and social tagging
Important attending features / Problems to solve
Desktop to Web seamlessness
Tagging 1.0 versus 2.0: 2.0 has tagging hierarchy
facebook hierarchy
facial recognition
google can use this
shozu broadcast images: tag it when you take the picture or you can tag it later
click through and see the rooftop of every friends' house
wide facebook network of friends: can we do that?
personal tags versus public tags: current tagging is flat, but categorize according to location, browse according to neighborhood and still allow users to search among flat tag universe
problems to solve: tags need to propagate with media
Upstream tagging versus downstream tagging
fanfare is a fee-based sharing service that does not do advertising
Cognitive dissonance: where did I put it? how far downstream did it go?
Voting: HotorNot has been around since 1997
Likebetter.com
In social networks
MySpace and Photobucket
google image labeler
Facebook
WRUW
Photo Collage (event, person, group)
Family tree
What am I doing? / Status a la Twitter (photo that goes along with status)
Minifeed
need tagging for future stuff
tag using voice
tags should follow media: MRSS as possible solution (used by GoFish)
support hierarchy of tags as well as flat tagging
public versus private tags
1% of videos will be tagged, 75% of the tags will be from sources other than the producer (dave prediction)
chris: median video length is 1:15, with 100MB cap
onetruemedia: no cap on video: 5-10 minutes
distributed tagging effort to friends and family
adap.tv uses metadata
truveo is video hosting, no ads on site

Session Suggestions

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 23:23:13 Z

Proposed Topics

Do you have a talk or demo that you already know you want to present at DIVcamp? Is there something you would like to hear about at DIVcamp? Add your suggestions to the list below! If you have a demo to give, sign up on the DIVcamp Demos page.

(NOTE: you have to login in order to be able to edit this page.)

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Proposed Topics for DIVcamp
Topic Suggestion	Possible Presenter	Suggested by:
The social photo 3-way: photographer, subject and tagger	Doug Beaver, Facebook Photos	Dave Hunkins
Draining the social media swamp: enabling technologies	Wei-Ling Chu, Autonomy	Dave Hunkins
Transparent tagging: first steps in location aware-capture	Nick Brachet, Skyhook Wireless	Dave Hunkins
a PC client photo app that supports all SN sites, myDesktopAlbum	David Xi	David Xi
Organizing pictures - Albums, sets, streams, events, tags, new ideas?		Vincent Jurgens
Advance of video as a memory capture medium (over the use of stills)		Emilio Mercado
An iPhone photo gallery prototype; creating prototypes and mashups with good APIs, bad APIs, or no API at all	Eric Oesterle	Eric Oesterle
Efficient and/or effective markup for video-editing of large amounts (10s-100s of hours) of video data (interviews, observations)		Nancy Frishberg

Notes from sessions:

DIVandSocialNetworks

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 23:04:47 Z

DIV and Social Networks

Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Picasa Albums
- Private 1-to-many DIV publishing services
Flickr
- Activity is prompted by theme or content
- Examples done by content tag(example: pugs) or groups (example: armenian)
Facebook (albums)
- Activity is prompted by social circle or sociality
- Interesting opinion on advertising and social networks at this week's Facebook platform conference
YouTube
- Discovery by theme or content.
- However, YouTube is considered by many in the groups as more of a media publishing platform than a social platform.
- Check out the use of YouTube by ASL people as a pen-pal tool. Here's an example:

TellUsAboutVideo

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:55:08 Z

Tell Us About Video

These are just some of my notes from the session. Al or anyone else, feel free to modify as needed. - emilio

Streaming video

provides immediate video start
requires special media server (e.g. Windows Media server, VLZ, Real Networks)
User doesn't end up with a local copy of the file. This makes it appealing to protect DRM
Simulcast- adaptive technology where the video content is preprocessed and different quality levels, saved to different files, and the appropriate file is streamed to the client depending on its available bandwidth

Download video

User ends up with local copy.
not adaptive (only a single copy of the content to be served)
may create the effect of streaming (start playback before it has completed downloading), but it's not warranted
much easier for a regular user to copy the content file and use without permission

Pseudo-streaming (extending bullet 3 above)
- Provides immediate video start
- Only http server (any will do: apache, lighttpd, iis) required.
- User may or may not end up with a local copy of the video (depending on the player)
- Most video sharing sites use this technique (youtube, gofish, metacafe, etc.)
- flv format works well with this
- Usually requires lower bit rate/quality video files

The art of delivering video
- It will get very complex very quickly.
- Recommend going to a video service provider (not just a storage like Amazon’s S3) for a first run because there are too many details that could result in non-optimal solutions
- This includes not only technical aspects like image quality/size, compression; but also user experience issues (e.g. delivering a 2 hr video training session will likely best broken up in chapters for online training)

File Formats

Bit Rate
Frame Rate
Size
Audio
Video Container

Protect yourself

Emilio Mercado

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:58:58 Z

My name is Emilio Mercado and I work for Kodak Gallery in the Technology Office. I'm particularly interested in the sociology of photography, storytelling, and human computer interface.

You can contact me at <%= email 'emilio@kodakgallery.com' %> or AIM: emiliomusaic.

I talked at DIVcamp about:

DIVcamp Demos

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:52:25 Z

DIVcamp Demos Line-Up

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Have a demo to give? Sign up here. Five-minute demos are tentatively scheduled for 8-9pm on Friday, Oct 12. We may schedule another set of demo sessions on Saturday, Oct 13, if we need more slots. NOTE: this is for live demos only, if you only have slides, you should sign up for a proposed topic.

Time	Description	Presenter	Notes
8:00	DIVcamp	Staff	Intro to Demos
8:05	myDesktopAlbum.com	David Xi	Client App for Album Creation and Photo Management
8:15	Facial Smoothing	Emilio	Automatic removal of blemishes and whitening teeth and eyes. Sandbox@Kodak
8:50	Layerstream Demo	Leon van Zantvoort	QoS for VoD, based on available bandwidth, etc.
8:25	Shozu demo	Bob Morgan
8:35	Zoomable UI for Windows XP device	Han Kim	from BZWeb
9:00	NEC Demo	Akira Kitamura	auto photo enhancement

Chris Greacen

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:09:09 Z

Hello!

I had a great time at the October 2007 DIVCamp. I hope I can attend future events.

Some url stuffs:

LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/greacen
My personal project site: http://www.netscrap.com
Some photo-action: http://photo.greacen.com
My current employer: http://www.gofish.com
Previous employers
- Meez http://www.meez.com
- KESG http://www.kodakgallery.com

Thanks for checking!

DIVandLocation

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 18:57:13 Z

DIV and Location

Example of sites

Media based
- Flickr
- Larry the Llama
Location tools
- Google Maps and Google Earth
Other hacks
- Al Nevarez's personal hacks

Geocoding media (obtaining GPS coordinates for each asset)

GPS sensors
- In cameras at time of capture (e.g. Ricoh's
- GPS-enabled cellphones (e.g. Hipoqih)
- Synchronized from an additional device (e.g. Sony's GPS-CS1, Navman iCN750)
Triangulation from other signals
- Wi-Fi (e.g. Skyhook Wireless and Eye-Fi)
- Cell phone towers (e.g.Yahoo's ZoneTag research project)
User provided
- Map integration (e.g. Flickr, Zooomr, Tagzania)
Repurposing online content/tools
- Using online tools to scavenge coordinates (e.g. Google Maps API)

Gallery

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 01:48:00 Z

Gallery of Photos and Videos Taken at DIVcamp

www.kodakgallery.com/divcamp (Kodak Gallery Premier account)

To upload additional images
- username: <%= email 'emilio@ofoto.com' %>
- password: divcamp

Pictures tagged on Flickr (tag=divcamp) [see slideshow mashup]

Videos tagged on YouTube (tag=divcamp)

Contribute to the DIVcamp Video by StudioNow!

StudioNow will be making a DIVcamp video summary, similar to the BarCamp Nashville video. If you want to contribute photos or video to the DIVcamp video, you can drop your items into the StudioNow drop box for DIVcamp. Please drop off any media by Tuesday, October 16, 2007. Thanks!

Digital Imaging and Video Camp

iPhoneUsabilityReview

OpenGridSchedule

Open Grid Schedule

Friday, October 12, 2007

Saturday, October 13, 2007

MyDesktopAlbum

MashupToolsSessionNotes

Mashup Tools

Sessions

Basic Schedule

Friday, October 12, 2007

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Session Schedule

Session Suggestions

Proposed Topics

DIVandSocialNetworks

DIV and Social Networks

TellUsAboutVideo

Tell Us About Video

File Formats

Protect yourself

Emilio Mercado

DIVcamp Demos

DIVcamp Demos Line-Up

Chris Greacen

DIVandLocation

DIV and Location

Gallery

Gallery of Photos and Videos Taken at DIVcamp

Contribute to the DIVcamp Video by StudioNow!

DIVcampCarousel

Mashup Created Live during DIVcamp

MashupTest