Mosnaps is Picking up Speed Thursday 2008-05-15
So finally Mosnaps is launched albeit in beta. This is not to deter you, as all web 2.0 sites are in beta, seemingly for ever. What you can do at this nice community site is really fun. From your mobile smartphone, you can upload images from its directories or directly from the camera. The images are immediately accessible by your friends and family, or for anyone if you make them public.
They are automatically presented at you Mosnaps public page - mine is http://mosnaps.com/petit.
You can also copy and paste code form your account to include one of the Flash based Mosnaps viewers on you own site or on Myspace or FaceBook.
You can have a look at the FaceBook viewer right here. So go to the Mosnaps site and sign up. If you have a supported phone, you download a small Java application directly to you phone and start mosnapping.
If your phone is not yet supported, you can upload images through a web interface. On your account you can also reorganize your images, edit your descriptions and get comments from other members of the community.
Using a nifty drag and drop applications, you can create slide shows by dragging and dropping images from your different albums. The slideshow is saved and can be shown at any time at any site using a Flash based slide show viewer.
Join and make your friends know what you are doing right now.
Mosnaps Presented at AT&T Fast Pitch Thursday 2008-04-03
Harish and Amit presented the Mosnaps applications and community at AT&T Fast Pitch session at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas. The Fast Pitch is a way for AT&T not to miss any new good inventions in the mobile arena. Above all, it is a way for small innovative companies to get their applications shown to the world, using the muscles of a giant. “Standing on the shoulders of giants”, is an expression that comes to mind. Some hundred companies get five minutes to present their technical idea and business model before a panel of AT&T experts, and some few get rewarded with some money and a promotion vehicle. The the great job to get it working starts.
Hopefully the presentation went well and hopefully the jury was impressed. All that could be said from the mobile snapshots uploaded to Mosnaps so far, is that the guys ar good looking.
Mosnaps on the run Monday 2008-03-31
I’m working hard with Harish, Amit, Alexandre, Brandon and others to get the Mosnaps site afloat. Hopefully it will happen soon now.
Not everything will work and it will still be beta, but the site is getting nicer and cooler for each day. Some nice flash viewers, which is my contribution, will be ready to present your mobile snapshots. Work is done by the Indian group to get Java uploaders for different Java enabled phones, but they are not ready yet. Until that works, people with other phones than the Blackbarry’s can upload images over the web. It is also possible to organize already uploaded images over a web interface and to view and comment your friend’s images.
It will be a lot of fun on this new social site. Is that web 2.0? You bet 
The Virtual Sweden Saturday 2007-06-16
Hello my eventual readers. Thanks for reading me! I must say I have been a bit absent lately.
And it doesn’t add anything to my credibility, that I’m not sober at all at this time, when I feel obliged to bring to you my first real experience of the unreal world of Second Life. I know it is truly amazing, but this went far behind my imagination. Really amazing things do 
I heard on teve, that Sweden made some serious efforts to join the modern world of 3D cyberspace, by building a Sweden Second House, sort of a Swedish embassy in Second Life. The TV news said that the Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt was there to open it.
I thought: Wow! You are free to think that’s stupid, but that’s what I thought. Honestly
Not only was the minister there to cut something, but there was a selected few to join in on the ceremony, just like art any other important opening. Amazing and maybe even good. I heard of this fact a little late, and had no opportunity to join in or disturb the ceremony. I do applaud the initiative though. It shows that our government takes the cyber matters seriously, which I regard as mandatory if we want to survive as a state of of honor and prosperity.
Being late, I decided to visit the “embassy” later the same day, and I was astonished by the the events going on, as well as by the architecture and the environment. I’ll show you images in just a while.
Let me give you a first impression!
The architecture is blondish northern and very light and open. It brings into mind the “Northern light” exhibition that toured the world a little more than a decade ago. Apart form the lack of furniture and ( really ) use of the beautiful rooms, I felt really at home. This will be something.
I also took some time strolling around outside the “Second House of Sweden”, and what I saw added to my admiration. It is a really good job they have done. The creators of this “Swedish Pavilion” if you will. The nature is the really blond and lovable nature of southern Sweden at its very best. I feel at home, and visitors from other countries will certainly get to know the woods and sees of Sweden. You have done a great job guys!
[ Images here soon ]
Futurist Programming? Monday 2006-12-04
In clear disagreement with the dogmatic way programming is taught to would-like-to-be programmers today, Paul Haeberli and Bruce Karsh wrote the “Manifesto of Futurist Programming“
Let me just cite a bit from the “Futurist Programming Notes“, that accompanies the manifest:
How would you wash a window?
Suppose we were asked to wash a window and we chose to do it the same way that software is developed. We’d get things like:
- How to make really nice customizable buckets and squeegees.
- A system for classifying window shapes. and materials, including of course, window materials and shapes that might be developed in the future.
- An analysis of how well a window washing technique scales from windows the size of a bee’s wing to the stain-glass windows in the largest cathedral.
- A commitment for a full design review BEFORE starting any implementation.
- A consultant to write a user’s manual.
- A promise of compatibility with the new Window Washing Standard from MIT.
- Plans for a set of meetings to discuss a schedule for developing user training to teach users to wash windows the modern way.
Who would you rather have “solving” this problem for you, a computer “scientist” or a professional
It’s said that information wants to be free. But how free? I’ll leave the judgement to you, dear reader.
Edit Your Photos Online Monday 2006-11-13
One of the characteristics of the Web 2.0 era, is the fast emergence of net top applications. Making good on the old SUN slogan, “The Net it the computer”, these applications run on some server anywhere on the globe, and only its user interface shows up on the client machine. No need for installation and immediate access from any personal computer or workstation.
One of the more nifty net top applications I’ve run across lately is the pixer.us On Line Photo editor.
It works like this: You upload an image to the server through their client GUI, and when it shows up, you can start editing away to your hearts content. You may crop and resize your image, and you can adjust its color balance, contrast and lightness. You can make it B&W if you like, and you can apply some artistic filtering to make it look like marble or an oil painting.
You can undo your last change or revert to the original, if you do mistakes. Once you are satisfied with your changes, you click the Save button and download the resulting image. You can choose the image format by clicking a button for JPEG, GIF, PNG or BMP.
The application GUI is beautiful and very intuitive, so the learning is shot to none. Before you join pixer.us, you can work with a test image. Go ahead and test the pixar.us Online Photo Editor. I had great fun testing the application. From the test image I cropped out one of the girls, saturated the colors a bit and applied the oil painting filter.
The original photo
Have You Upgraded to web 2.0? Tuesday 2006-09-05
I had a really good laugh, reading Lincoln Spector’s article in BYTE. At first I selfishly felt that I wanted to keep it to myself. But then Web 2.0 is all about social networking and syndication, and you are my readers, so I finally decided that I couldn’t withhold this important information.
Lincoln writes about web 2.0 and especially on the 0 in 2.0. Before I send you away, I cannot help but give you some citations, so you get a feeling for what it’s all about.
He writes about upgrading to version 2.0:
The questions are many. Is there a smooth upgrade, or do you have to uninstall Web 1.0 before installing the new version? What about backward compatibility? Should you wait for the bugs to be out in Web 2.1?
To give you some examples of the bright new world, he reviews some of the more significant new sites. On Oddcast, a site aimed at syndicating podcasts, he writes:
Oddcast is one of many sites that provides links to podcasts from all over the world, but this site distinguishes itself by sticking to one very important and unique criteria: It will not link to anything that might exhibit taste or talent. You need never worry about visiting Oddcast and hearing an intelligent argument with which you might disagree, as you will find no intelligent arguments.
Enough now! Go get the real stuff in “The 0 in 2.0” and prolong your mouth and your life
Graffiti for the Web
Among all wonderful things, that pops up on the web, as a result of new standards and standards compliance, my latest stumble find is amazing. Virtual Street Art - Graffiti for the Web presented by Draw Here, is an application, that allows you to draw images on top of any web page and save it in the Draw Here repository. Anyone can go to the Draw Here site to look at the graffiti comments of others. Look at my first attempt to draw on my own site, to get an idea of how it looks.[Edit: Someone killed my image :/]
The application, using javascript and the canvas has all you need to make beautiful graffiti. You can vary the pen size and chose and tune colors from a palette, and set color transparency. You can create and draw on stacked layer and even set the overall transparency of any layer. To easily work on one layer at a time, you can hide and show any layer.
You launch the Draw Here application directly from their site or using a bookmarklet sitting on bookmarks toolbar. You can even include a launch button on you web page, to let visitors draw on any page you want.
If you want to save your work at the Draw Here web site and get it rated, you have to sign up for an account. They have the fastest sign up form I’ve seen. Just type in the user name and password you want in a slick little login form. If accepted, you are already logged in and ready to paint and save your first graffiti comment on any web page on the Net. Ajaxian wise, the page doesn’t even reload.
Sign up/log in and paint my world!
A Flash Browser On the Horizon? Monday 2006-08-21
Is the next browser generation based on on a Flash platform. This article by Matthew David at InformIT, may lead you to think so.
Here is a slightly modified version of his “Lorem Ipsum” demo case for presenting HTML or rather any XML content markup, styled by CSS. Both the XML and CSS are external files, brought together by a short Actionscript in the Flash movie. Both can easily be changed, wihtout touching the SWF. Read the article and draw your own conclusions!
Working Online Thursday 2006-07-20
Are you planning to through away your desktop tools and make the move to net based programs and storage. Byte’s David Em has the story for you. In “Gliding Into the future” he presents an effort by TransMedia to start doing just that. David writes
“Several of Glide’s components, such as device-independent online email and media sharing, are already in common use. Glide takes these capabilities, including storing images, photos, and videos, and adds simple image editing (cropping, inversion, and the like), slide shows, emailing, calendaring, and personal web site and blogging software.
A sophisticated multimedia-savvy word processor called Glide Write that exports Word, HTML, PDF, and ZIP files. A presentation tool called Glide Presenter is on the way. You can set Glide to automatically sync and back up your images, contacts, and calendar from your personal computer. It sends upcoming calendar date reminders to your email. I suspect the Microsoft Office team is following these developments with great interest.”
The company addresses the complexity of different stationary and mobile platforms in more than one way. The goal is that whatever device you use, you should be able to transparently load your documents and continue the work.
As David points out, there are great advantages in server based storage. For example if you want to send an image by email to someone, you just send the link. The reciever decides when and where to download the actual image. In my opinion though, the beautiful thing with online tools and storage, is that you can leave your office or home, and connect to your desktop from anywhere, even using a mobile device, and continue the work.
You get the service for free or for a small fee, depending on how much disk space you need.
Finally SUN’s slogan and vision “The Net Is The Computer” seems to start rolling out. Is that Web 2.0?
From their mission statement we read
“Our goal is to provide you with a place to design your life, where you can share unlimited media and information with unprecedented compatibility, flexibility and peace of mind. This is Glide Effortless.”
That may not sound completely new to me - say Flickr par example However, they have just launched a photo sharing system, and there is more to come, they promise.
I’ll get back to you as soon as have made some preliminary tests.
In the mean time go figure!
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