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Unique and Productive or Just More Eye-Candy?
4ndys writes "A guy who goes by the name MacSlow is currently working on a project he calls LowFat. This is a photomanager with a twist. Rather than just viewing you pictures one at a time, you spread the pictures out over your desktop and can manage them in a much more natural way. He is hoping to release this on multiple platforms inc. Linux, Mac and Windows."
1. Write blog entry about cool product
2. Do demo of cool product
3. Get cool product and blog mentioned on Slashdot
4. Just happen to have tip jars at bottom of blog page.
5. Profit.
I'm not against throwing a few bucks in the direction of something useful,
but I usually wait until said useful thing is in my possession before
deciding.
For all you know, this guy has no intention of finishing this thing and is
just looking for a way to make a quick buck.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
... but are there any photo editors or filters that can make my not f*cking ugly?!
I hate to discourage folks from trying to be innovative, but competing head to head with a company backed by Gooooooooooooogle when they're releasing their product free isn't likely to be very successful. And Picasa is actually feature-complete...
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
To sort my (ehm) porn, I hacked togheter this 8 kb python program using wxPython and pyGame a couple of months ago. Here it is: http://psionicist.online.fr/pile.py.txt
r eadid=504073
The code is god awful, but it works. Some screenshots here: http://forum.sweclockers.com/showthread.php?s=&th
This is how you manage photos:
Crazy Multi-Input Touch Screen
Althought likely vaporware, it would be cool to have a multi touch screen...
"Here's hoping that the /. effect will spur him on to get this finished in record time!" ...or blow his monthly bandwidth limit to the moon. Hope he's ready.
"For all you know, this guy has no intention of finishing this thing and is
just looking for a way to make a quick buck."
Well it could be worse. He could publish something. Lots of people find it useful and not send him any money. Then complain that it doesn't do things exactly the way photoshop does.
Or you can use an existing free mature project that lays out all your photos at once, groups them by whatever metadata you have, and adds smooth zooming to the mix.
Try PhotoMesa - www.photomesa.com
- Ben Bederson Professor Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction Lab University of Maryland
OMG, I will totally buy this upon release, keep up the good work, *pat on back* let me check my wallet for change, good sir, if you need something to eat while you develop. How did this make it to /. exactly?
He's got some videos on his site
/ lowfat/preview-1.ogg/ lowfat/preview-1.avi/ lowfat/preview-1.swf/ lowfat/preview-1_h264.mov
Use the coral cache or any money left in the tip jar is going to end up being spent on his bandwidth bill.
http://macslow.thepimp.net.nyud.net:8090/projects
http://macslow.thepimp.net.nyud.net:8090/projects
http://macslow.thepimp.net.nyud.net:8090/projects
http://macslow.thepimp.net.nyud.net:8090/projects
^the mov link doesn't seem to be working^
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Technically, it should be possible to view your tiny datasets in pretty much realtime.
I manage it with terrabytes of data covering thousands of real mile data - over the internet.
You might not make thumbnails, but with efficient caching you won't need to.
liqbase
It appears that the /. affect has already hit him
Admiral Trigger Happy
"This is a photomanager with a twist. Rather than just viewing you pictures one at a time, you spread the pictures out over your desktop and can manage them in a much more natural way."
How's this any different than PhotoMesa?
I managed to get the .avi and .wav files off the server before it blew up/melted.
http://www.cribot.com/preview-1.avi
http://www.cribot.com/preview-1.wav
It's called Apeture. That's one of it's big features so it's hardly a new idea. To an old school photographer Apeture is pretty stunning and amazingly powerful. The real power though is in working with RAW files.
You build it ... then I'll consider paying you for it.
Everyone seems to gear this towards photo's, but it can be used for much more than that. You can soom in on an file and sort through them in a visual manner as opposed to a file structure, just like they said above about laying things out and orgainzing them. It's pretty cool and if it matures, I'd be interested.
What's new? Look at more than one picture at a time? OK ... even Windows Explorer has a filmstrip slide show. And in Thumbnail view you can set them to any size you want (with a little TweakUI setting).
I'm not getting it.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
And these are the obligatory coral cached pictures of that guy whirling in mid air, in case if anyone is interested:
i ct0136.jpgi ct0125.jpge stpark_30102005-1.jpge stpark_30102005-2.jpgm all_kopfueber-1.png
http://macslow.thepimp.net.nyud.net:8090/images/p
http://macslow.thepimp.net.nyud.net:8090/images/p
http://macslow.thepimp.net.nyud.net:8090/images/W
http://macslow.thepimp.net.nyud.net:8090/images/W
http://macslow.thepimp.net.nyud.net:8090/images/s
I once had a signature.
A lot of you guys including the Original Poster missed the point of his program (Could be that his server was ./ed so fast).
He is wanting this to be more of a file-manager than a photo program, or even integrated with the file manager. Like explorer, nautilus, or konqueror.
I think it's a great idea to moving to a new UI. I am bored with the current thumbnails way of management. I wonder how resource intensive it will be though, because that doesn't interest me in a file-manager.
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/index.html The concept is really really cool with the potential to completely change the UI as we know it. I am surprised that this has not been covered on slashdot
.. but it is probably cheaper than Apple's offering
http://www.apple.com/aperture/
Somebody please tell Tomahawk, looks like they are very much interested in eye-candy.
Handwriting is a very natural way of entering text, but the keyboard is a far more efficient one. Real world mail from your friends would not be naturally threaded, or sorted by date. Real world spreadsheets don't recompute when you change a value. Real world typewriters can't correct a typo as if it never happened. Real world metaphors (like folders, for example) can be very useful, but they don't belong everywhere. I can find a picture in iPhoto quite a bit faster than I can from the shoebox that Lowfat seems to simulate.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your sig is actually Mitch Hedberg paraphrased. Get into it.
The demo video showed a very interesting way to sort a lot of photos quickly. I have a lot of photos, and somehow there always seems to be one or two out of place, or they could be broken down granularly/better etc. The trouble is making file folder trees and using a browser of some sort(like the picture view folder option in winxp) always seems clunky. I like the idea of dragging and dropping into piles... with a toggle option for a grid that -unpiles- and shows in more structured way what you've accumulated. It looked faster and easier than anything else out there. Problem is, I can't get the code to try it out, because lo and behold it doesn't exist -yet-. It does seem a touch suspect. I want an announcement when its ready, not before... Still, too many people above this post are spending more time trying to sound cerebral than they are actually LOOKING at what the product seems to d0. Its pretty dern neat!
blablablablablabla
Gimme 5 bucks
wow, i wish my window manager could do that..
metacity? compiz?
it is me
"I mean, really. This is a family forum, for chrissakes."
Proving the power of test tubes.
---
And the "are you a script" word for today is tubing.
This is just the top feature of Aperture, isn't it?
*scratching his head*
Not that innovative, I'm afraid. Can he handle raw files? If not, well, it's Aperture for "normal" users.
...but there's some pretty hot stuff there for odonatanists everywhere.
You are assuming I have a soul to steal...
I sold mine for a donut.
Incidentally, the datasets I meant were google earth, panning and zooming and rotating on tiled images downloaded as required from the net.
If your graphics are storeed in raw format, extracting the cached thumbnails is much simpler than for compressed large format images.
liqbase
I wonder how he recorded a demonstraion on the screen to a movie. any ideas?
I'd really like to have a demo of that in my hands. No matter if it's beta. I'll even forgive it crashing every now and then, but it looks interesting enough to make me want to play with it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I think I will send him a $20 bill torn in half with a note that says half now, half when the product is available for public consumption.
It's a neat idea, but how well is it going to scale to 10,000 or more objects (say, 6-16 megapixel images)? A lot of interfaces of this kind seem to work very well on small sets of images (or whatever), but founder when they scale up.
I only have about 12000 images, but professionals might easily accumulate 50,000 or more images per year, in some cases using medium format backs with 35 megapixels and 16 bit color depth. While the storage requirements for something like that might still be a bit daunting (each image of that size would be 200 MB if stored in uncompressed TIFF format, so this would be 5 TB/year), any good image management tool has to handle large scale.
I like KPhotoAlbum (formerly KimDaBa) myself. While not particularly elegant visually, it's fast and has excellent search capabilities and metadata organization.
Sounds a little like photomesa with drag-n-drop....
using that code, he'd be over halfway there before he started!
It seems to me that PhotoMesa has nearly the exact same layout as, and many common features of, Canon's Zoom Browser program that they include with their digital cameras. CZB is a pretty decent program - decent enough that I don't even bother loading Picasa or anything else when importing pics from my camera. I think it's freely available through Canon's website. Another decent photo-browsing / lite editing program I like is FastStone Image Viewer. It's got a pretty cool interface, tons of options, and best of all, it's free as in beer.
All your sig are belong to us.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Am I missing something? Maybe I'm mistaken, but it appears it be the same as Apple's Aperture Lightbox, Adobe's Lightbox or the new iview media 3 lightbox.
>> finding a photo by drawing a rough sketch of it.
>> THAT would be really cool
It is really cool, albeit this implementation is not perfect, check out retrievr.
OS X, Linux, Tivo, Amiga, my fascination with cult-like technologies would intrigue any psychiatrist.
I mean, this concept isn't even original. A few months ago a company displayed technology allowing up to 8 points of contact on a touch screen display. One of the demo videos shows a bunch of photo images scattered on the background where the user could drag photos around, scale them, rotate them, etc, all in a simple environment using 2 fingers.
Apple even has a patent on multipoint touch displays, I am sure some future version of iPhoto is already patented with this concept in mind.
If your going to hype about some new concept or idea, make sure you thought of it first, otherwise you look like an ass. Anybody that sponsor's one penny to this crack will deserve the feeling of being duped.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.