Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

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.

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.

Flickr update

For a while now I’ve been on the fence in regards to the Flickr vs Google Picasa battle.  With both services constantly changing and improving, it’s difficult to make a decision and stick to it.  But I think finally I’ve decided.  Flickr it is.  They’ve caught up with the features that I wanted so much for so long, and just in the last month released two of my “most wanted” – a much improved uploading tool, and quick and easy image editor.

Both of those additions pushed me to finalize the upload of all my pictures to Flickr.  So now, all I had from my digital camera, is there.  And I’ve enjoyed making the pictures better, more attractive with the editor – all it takes is just a few clicks to convert an average picture of which I have thousands into an eye candy.

Flickr has also recently released and improved its Android app, which once again makes me think about my mobile pictures.  I will probably start pushing them into my Flickr stream as well.

And as far as Google Picasa is concerned, I think they’ve spoiled it quite a bit with such a tight integration with Google+.  And their URLs are still ugly, making it pretty much impossible to migrate links from the blog via automatic redirection. Bad Google, bad.  And while I’m sure they will improve, I don’t think I will change over any time soon – the decision process tired me down.

Microsoft tried to sell Bing to Facebook

Slashdot reports on the rumor that Microsoft tried to sell its search engine Bing to Facebook.  After all the hype around how much of a leader Microsoft is in the web industry, I find this to be quite funny. (Provided that it’s true, of course.)

Microsoft is not a web company.  It doesn’t think or behave like a web company.  Sure, they can change, but these things don’t happen so fast.  Facebook, on the other hand, is a web company.  They know the difference between Bing search engine and Google search engine.  More so, they are a social company, and they do know the difference between attempting to index the whole web, and receiving users’ Likes and Shares.

While I don’t use Bing myself, I think there is plenty of cool stuff in there.  But problems that it has to solve as a search engine, are much easier to solve with Facebook’s social graphs – things like SPAM, results gaming, relevance, etc.  So for me it’s really not a surprise that Facebook declined the offer.