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

[Mr. Underbridge]

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.

Don't worry. Any random donations from slashdotters will be FAR outweighed by his bandwidth bill this month. For Chrissakes, he posted *movies!* Sure, he pulled them now, but the damage is done.

Re:A little fishy to me

[13bPower]

Nah, This guy is an ubuntuforum regular. We've seen this project and his other little projects before. More donate-ware than rip off slashdot I'd say.

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.

Re:A little fishy to me

[4ndys]

You could consider it fishy, however I'm not actually affiliated to him at all. I found the blog after following a link through from Ubuntu Forums. He has also mentioned to me that he would keep track of who had donated what, so if you were to donate you *could* end up getting it for no extra charge once it's complete.

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?

[sinclair44]

Unfortuantely Picasa is Windows only. According to the summary, this one should be fully cross-platform.

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.

Re:So, basically, its Picasa?

[badasscat]

I've tried Picassa, tossed it, and purchased a photo app. Have you ever tried to scroll through a few hundred photos in Picassa? Google has a whole new (and bad) way for the scroll bar to work.

You do realize there's a scrollbar on the right and a scrollbar on the left, didn't you?

The scrollbar on the right can be used in several ways as well. You can pull the slider up and down, you can click anywhere in the scrollbar, you can use the arrow keys at the top and bottom, or you can click the "=" buttons to quickly move p and down a grouping of photos.

If you don't like this, you can use the traditional scrollbar on the left to quickly navigate folders.

I wonder what "photo app" you "purchased". Have you tried actually navigating through a large collection of photos in Photoshop? I actually use Picasa as a front-end to Photoshop; it blows the doors off Adobe Bridge, which is supposed to do some of what Picasa does but does it all very, very poorly (mostly because it takes about five hours for it to do simple things like display a thumbnail collection).

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

Re:I have already done this (sort of)

[winkydink]

Hey, that's not porn in those screenshots!

Re:I have already done this (sort of)

[rjstanford]

Ya know, its funny what turns some people on.

[shudder]

I mean, really. This is a family forum, for chrissakes.

Re:I have already done this (sort of)

[CottonEyedJoe]

Do not underestimate the power of scantily clad ladies to advance software design and development.

ideal way to manage photos (cool video)

[mcguyver]

This is how you manage photos:

Crazy Multi-Input Touch Screen

Althought likely vaporware, it would be cool to have a multi touch screen...

Re:ideal way to manage photos (cool video)

[timeOday]

For the lazy, the linked video shows a user shuffling around photos on a virtual desktop using a touch screen, so it is highly relevant.

Re:ideal way to manage photos (cool video)

[Daxster]

They're called tablet notebooks or tablet PCs :-P

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.

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.

Or....

[Starker_Kull]

"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.

A little human nature to me

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:A little human nature to me

[winkydink]

Naww... then it would be named The Gimp. :)

Videos

[TubeSteak]

He's got some videos on his site

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/ lowfat/preview-1.ogg
http://macslow.thepimp.net.nyud.net:8090/projects/ lowfat/preview-1.avi
http://macslow.thepimp.net.nyud.net:8090/projects/ lowfat/preview-1.swf
http://macslow.thepimp.net.nyud.net:8090/projects/ lowfat/preview-1_h264.mov
^the mov link doesn't seem to be working^

Re:Seriously?

[LiquidCoooled]

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.

Already Down

[Admiral Trigger Happ]

It appears that the /. affect has already hit him

more mirrors

[alienfluid]

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

Point missed

[xvalentinex]

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.

Link to the real video page

[aurther_dent]

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

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:Natural Is Overrated

[jlarocco]

It would be like having a music mgmt system that could find/organize music files by humming a melody or riff.

Not to detract from your point, but in my mind, the image file equivalent of finding a music file by humming would be finding a photo by drawing a rough sketch of it. THAT would be really cool.

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.