Biggr Fattr Flickr

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel with a new look on Flickr that many Pro users don't appreciate.

MY FLICKR PRO accounts just got more valuable. For $50 a year, I get an ad-free, retina-friendly online photo storage system for full-resolution images.

I also like getting three minutes of video, up from 90 seconds of video playback for my clips. But I'm limited to 50 MB for each image and 500 MB for each video clip. This is better than what people get with sharing sites like Facebook or Instagram, the two places that have stolen a march on Flickr since the iPhone entered the market.

It feels like Yahoo! wants me to simply convert to a free Flickr account but I can see a lot of value in the faster service while free of advertisements. Because of promotions and generous friends, I've rarely paid the full $49.99 annually for my Flickr Pro account.

There are some real advantages of staying with the Pro status, even though Flickr has removed my "Pro" badge under my image. For example, I like the stats I get with my Flickr Pro account and it is very convenient to be able to replace photos with a better image while knowing the URL of the image won't change. This has a lot of value when promoting a poster across a network of websites or when I want to change one of my images that some chancer has put on an internet property without attribution or permission.

Thanking Tapadoo for Insights

Photo of Dermot Daly with LSAD Students.

ONE OF THE BEST ways to provide a quality check on an academic curriculum is to get expert industry opinion of it. Today, three creative multimedia students sat with Tapadoo's MD an got a leading edge opinion about their emerging skills as application developers.

Dermot Daly set aside an hour in his office to meet with Ross Bolger, Patrick Broder and Edgaras Zvirblys. After a quick hands-on demonstration of a three-game children's education app, Dermot offered his judgment. You can hear what he thought in the audio clip below.

Visiting Tapadoo

Teaching Hyperlapse to the Back Seat

Screenshot of work by teehanlax.com/labs/hyperlapse/.

WE HAVE A WELL-USED Sony Xperia in hands of our backseat camera operator and she is inspired by dreams of hyperlapse video clips as a way of reliving  journeys she never filmed or create journeys she wants to take.

Teehan+Lax Labs have created interactive Google Street View hyper-lapse animations. The project is breath-taking in some ways and browser-limited in others. Nonetheless, the video captures (below the fold) are brilliant. They totally transfix my 20-month old son.

Why I Am Lumiaed and Paused

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Lumia with Moleskine.

I HAVE AN OLD Nokia Lumia running Windows Phone 7 and like my iPad, it won't update to a new operating system. I'm keeping both the original iPad and the original Lumia because they just work.

This is the first time in my life that I have stepped off the upgrade treadmill and have moved away from innovative technology. It's a decision driven by austerity mandated by the Irish government and manifested by a combination of savage pay cuts along with rising prices. Because I cannot eat my electronic gadgets, I'm diverting more of our household cash into shopping baskets, petrol, child care, and medicines. There's actually nothing left to buy shiny technology, something that has already impacted our five-year-old as she realises the DVD player does not work. We've put crayons in front of the DVD player to let her know there's an option in the sitting room beyond the TV screen.

In the meantime, I get polite nudges from O2 telling me I can have a Windows Phone 8 with the Blue update. It's nice knowing Microsoft's clear upgrade path will be out there waiting for me when I get my next pay rise in 2016. But for now, I'm stepping off the upgrade pathway in nearly everything--hardware, software, and web services. For someone involved in teaching emerging trends in technology, it's a significant downgrade in my professional life.

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Bernie Goldbach teaches creative multimedia to Honours degree students in the Limerick Institute of Technology.

 

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Where Responsive Design Encapsulates Environmental Factors

Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel | Image of Kindle over coffee.

I WAS READING an interesting take on responsive design shared by Ade Oshineye and ended up thinking about how the Ambient Light Sensor API might enhance my time on Kindle.

This takes responsive web design to the device level, using the light sensor of a device to tell developers more about the current environment. My little Kindle doesn't have a light sensor, so I wouldn't expect a result but my newest phones have camera technology sensors built in that make the phone's flashlight function work better than the crude sensitivity levels of earlier models. In a more sophisticated world, one conceptualised by Tim Wright, the Ambient Light Sensor API would capture light level through an event called ondevicelight.

This API would return values in lux units (lx), giving an international measurement of light intensity and then perhaps causing better device-level support for text background colour or device illumination. This would be responsive web design for enhanced e-reading. Armed with light sensor information, developers could adjust color values, typefonts and screen flicker to optimise the on-screen reading experience.

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Tim Wright -- "Environmental Design with the Device API" on A List Apart, February 12, 2013.

Bernie Goldbach teaches emerging technologies in the Limerick Institute of Technology.

And While You Were Busy Tweeting

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Foodie shot from G+  

WHILE MANY OF US remain content with the nests we've made in our favourite online spaces, the Big Letter G quietly refashioned social networking. You might have missed this subtle evolution.

Google Plus has quietly evolved into something bigger than Twitter. But because most social media mavens cannot move their minions into this new space, G+ continues to be labeled as using overhyped metrics.  It might feel smaller and colder--just like Twitter might have felt in 2007. But things are very different inside Google Plus spaces once you look around.

You don't have to look any farther than the Google Plus apps. In my experience, using iOS 6.1 and Android ICS, they're levels above in sophistication and stability than the native apps built for Facebook and Twitter. You can get a pulse of trending items--real newsworthy trending items--by swiping through G+ and because the character count isn't truncated, you get more contextual information on screen at every juncture. Plus you get coherent threaded discussion at every node.

Upcoming Audio Disruption of Audio On Air

A NEW SLIDER inside Google Hangouts could disrupt social audio services. Specifically, Google has shipped two new features that allows you to tweak a slider that lets participants select an audio-only mode.

Tim Blasi of Google explained that you can "choose this mode to send and receive audio only, and thus, significantly reduce your bandwidth requirements. Other participants will only see your profile picture, but they’ll hear you loud and clear." This will keep Hangouts running when I'm walking around inside old ruins near my home in County Tipperary, Ireland--if I walk about with a laptop. The service doesn't show the sliders on a mobile device.

Hoping Tablet People Pay

Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel | My Kindle, My iTouch, my Moleskine.

I LISTEN TO PEOPLE who talk about getting news they can use on their mobile screens. Anecdotally, it sounds like many of my online friends pay to get stuff on tablets.

Opening mobile revenue streams is a big challenge for content developers. Many Irish analysts figure that the print broadsheets have another eight years before their major revenue flow is via digital channels. The conclusion occurs because of the year-on-year declination of print subscription revenues.

You might think tablets' pleasure and convenience would induce people to pay for content on screen. I pay for half of the content that lands on my Kindle (sandwiched between TWiT and my Moleskine in the photo). And you might assume that advertisements delivered into tablet space, with their higher resolution and potential for greater interactivity, might be received differently than on the desktop.

But data in an October Pew report "revealed that the broadening of the tablet universe has not made people more likely to pay for content. But there did seem to be more response to advertising in this news space than in the desktop realm."

The report also revealed "certain demographic groups are more likely to respond to ads than others."

Going Digital at the Speed of Sound

THE OCTAVER EXPERIENCE on Audioboo has demonstrated different ways people acquire audio samples. I snapped a photo of my low tech method.

I use a Sony ICD MX-20 to grab audio from my shirt pocket, from my Bihn bag and from other sound sources like the iPad in the photo. The sound sampled that way is normally poor quality so I often peel off the Otterbox sleeve and line out from the iPad and into the digital dictaphone. Audiophiles will tell you that is also not ideal since the MSV file format compresses sound.

But as a work-around for spontaneous recording, it does quick work and has become part of the toolkit that I show teachers and learners at our workshops.

Bernie Goldbach will integrate multimedia production into the Clonmel Coder Dojo, possibly with the use of handheld personal technology.

Waiting for Adobe Edge Reflow

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Logo from Adobe  

I HEARD ABOUT REFLOW on Audioboo and followed Paul Boag's links back to a teaser video.

Teased as a completely new tool, Adobe Edge Reflow an intriguing app that would help our third level creative multimedia developers become better front end designers where their design vision can more efficiently become a reality. That's because Adobe Reflow is a Responsive Web Design tool that produces layouts with CSS that work on desktops, tablets and mobile devices.

I like how Reflow works with Web Default Layout (percent-based with positioning executed by padding). It exposes CSS specs to allow designers to place background images and gradients inside the Media Query screen. All the styles and properties can be exported from a project--but like Paul Boag, I'd be worried about bloated code.

Adobe Reflow

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Bernie Goldbach collects links on web development.