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."

Comments

A little fishy to me

[winkydink]

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.

Re:A little fishy to me

[LiquidCoooled]

This guy is doing nothing more than anyone standing in front of a VC.
HE has a concept, he wants to make it, he thinks it will work.

My bet, he will make it, we will use it and it will be a success.
It looks like the kind of app that a tablet is dying out for and looks so natural and easy to use.

Re:A little fishy to me

[SirSlud]

Speaking as a games programmer, thats a lot of work for a quick buck.

I really dislike how negative people are about this kind of thing. Its certainly not a quick buck. All that work, with no garauntee of any donations. If you want to talk about making a quick buck, you're probably better served talking to management of the company he's employed at.

So, basically, its Picasa?

[patio11]

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...

Re:So, basically, its Picasa?

[winkydink]

Feature complete compared to what?

Did you even watch the demo? Because I don't recall Picasa allowing me to organize my pics in the manner shown in the demo. Also, I don't recall this guy saying that in order to use his stuff, I'll have to allow him to index all of my pics for some vaguely defined reason.

Re:So, basically, its Picasa?

[Coryoth]

From what was actually demoed he's aiming at something more interesting than a simple photo sorting application. Photo-sorting is the initial demonstration, but it's really all about the interface and ability to manipulate and sort objects with an easy to use interface in a very visual way. For instance, he talks about building a next generation file management tool out of it, which certainly could make a lot of sense. Based on what was demonstrated it certainly looks like it could provide very interesting and intuitive new file handling abilities.

The downside is what you don't get to see in the demonstration: how the interface actually works. You can see photos being grouped, changing layout schemes, being zoomed and rotated etc. which is great, but the real question of exactly what the interface to all those things is: how do you use keyboard and mouse to tell the computer to perform all those actions? How do you zoom instead of dragging the photo? How do you manipulate a group instead of an individual item from the group (and vice versa)? If it's an exclusive modal system switched by keyboard commands then it's clunky, but if it's based on modifier keys and buttons then, given the rnge of actions demonstrated, it may become equally clunky.

None the less it looks like an interesting idea, and if the demo actually shows fully implemented work (as opposed to being rendered and edited together) then it is indeed a promising project.

Jedidiah.

I have already done this (sort of)

[Psionicist]

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

The code is god awful, but it works. Some screenshots here: http://forum.sweclockers.com/showthread.php?s=&thr eadid=504073

Natural Is Overrated

[GlassHeart]

The human way of dealing with the real world is limited by many factors, including the size and strength of our hands and arms, and the inability of our eyes to see through opaque things. This makes, for example, finding a picture in a pile of 1,000 a difficult task. In the same way, finding a picture in a computer-simulated pile of 1,000 is a difficult task. I'm generally fond of novel user interface ideas, but this one just smells like a lot of manual work (both sorting the pictures according to your personal criteria, and remember that criteria later). Is this really an improvement over iPhoto's "primitive" folders, for instance? I don't see how this solution would not degenerate into several piles of pictures called "vacation 2005", "dog", "birthday 2003", and so on once you are organizing hundreds or thousands of shots.

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.

Re:ideal way to manage photos (cool video)

[biglig2]

It's called "gorilla arms".

Want to test it yourself? Easy. Wash your hands, then take your exisiting laptop screen and draw, with your fingertip, a smiley face or a letter A or something. OK, easy enough. Now keep drawing things. Spell out your name, play tic-tac-toe; basically imagine you are using a touch screen interface. Every 5 minutes, make a mental note of how your arms feel.

I reckon a man like you might make it as far as 20 minutes before you start to cry with the pain.

Scaling to 10,000+ objects?

[rlk]

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.

Re:ideal way to manage photos (cool video)

[biglig2]

It's not moving your arms that is the problem, it's holding them out up in front of you for sustained periods of time. Seriously, try it and you'll see what I mean.