Year: 2012

Weekly digest – 2012-05-13

Instagram – compulsive photographer’s heaven

Instagram is a very well known service in the iPhone world.  But recently an Android application was released as  well, so I had to try it.  Instagram is basically like Flickr, but for the mobile.  With an Instagram app you take a picture and then apply one of a few predefined filters to make that picture look way better than it originally did.  Then you upload the picture to Instagram, where other people can see it, comment on it, favorite it, and do all the usual social networking stuff with it.

What makes Instagram awesome a combination of simplicity and and great resulting pictures.  I’m not much of a photographer myself, but I am somewhat familiar with image editing in Photoshop and Gimp.  And yet if I’d be asked to produce the same results using those powerful programs, I’d be at a loss.  It’ll take me days or even weeks to find all the options, plugins, and tweaking necessary.  With Instagram, it’s literally just a single click.  Of course, Photoshop and Gimp provide for a complete artistic freedom, where Instagram does not, but for mere mortals who just want to snap a quick shot and have it look good – Instagram gives plenty of choice.

The first few days that I tried the app, I didn’t think much of it.  But all of a sudden I realized that I’m using it a lot, both for taking pictures and for browsing them.  Interestingly, Flickr app for Android has very similar functionality – predefined filters that can be applied right after shooting.  The Filters themselves are very similar as well.  And yet I find myself using Instagram, even though I have a Flickr account for years now.

I think that’s because Instagram is simpler, faster, and still produces better images.   Flickr app has other things in it as well – recent activity, sets, etc.  Instagram is very straight-forward.  Instagram is also much faster than Flickr.  It takes me about half a second to get to the camera with Instagram, and almost three seconds with Flickr.  Also, when the images are uploaded, Instagram enforces a smaller size, while Flickr gives user a choice between small, medium, and large.  For me, it’s difficult to say “smaller” when a larger option is available (compensating for something?).  So I keep choosing “large” and then swearing while waiting for the upload to finish on a slow 3G network.

So, for now, I decided that I’ll be using Instagram a lot with my mobile.  Once in a while, I’ll upload all images to my Instagram set on Flickr, since I’m using Flickr as my main storage and backup.  But as for Flickr mobile app – it needs to get faster and better before I will switch from Instagram.  (Unless, of course, Facebook, which recently acquired Instagram, will screw up the services.)

I’ve also added a widget to the sidebar of this blog, that will cycle through the last 20 or so Instagram pictures of mine.  Enjoy!

Foursquare’s adorable puppy

One thing I like about people who love what they do is that they usually don’t take themselves too seriously.  They can smile and joke about the things they passionately love.  Today I came across an example from Foursquare.  In the Settings screen about the notifications that Foursquare sends to you, there is an option to “Also include an adorable picture of a puppy in my weekly update“.  Here is a screenshot in case this will disappear with time.

Easy Forex, here I come

For the last few month I’ve been consulting Easy Forex on one of their migration projects.  Recently, when the consulting contract ran out, I’ve been offered a full time position of web developer and team leader.  I’ve accepted that position and today all the paperwork has been finalized.

I’m looking forward to working with the young and enthusiastic team, and getting my hands into a few more project pies.  My job is an interesting mixture of things I’ve done before, things that I’ve done before but not to the same extent, and things that I haven’t done before.  For my career, it’s a rare combination of hard earned confidence with a humbling opportunity to learn.  Much more often I had either one or the other.

In addition to all the upcoming technical challenges, there is something else that I want to understand and learn – company culture.  As I’ve mentioned a few times previously, Easy Forex has the friendliest office atmosphere of all the companies that I’ve worked for – and I’ve worked in some really friendly environments, cause I’m picky that way – especially considering the size of the company.  I want to understand how Easy Forex managed to keep and improve the attitude of a small company, and how one could re-create such culture in other companies.

With that, wish luck and I’ll keep you posted.

RFC 6585 – Additional HTTP Status Codes

If you’ve missed it like I did, RFC 6885 has been published recently.  It introduces four additional status codes for the HTTP protocol.  The codes are:

  • 428 Precondition Required
  • 429 Too Many Requests
  • 431 Request Header Fields Too Large
  • 511 Network Authentication Required

Here is a blog post that gives a nice summary of purpose for each of the new status codes.