One of Android's mottos is "Be Together; Not The Same". What does that mean to you? To me, it means that you don't need to conform to a single way of doing things. Sadly, Google seems to be moving far away from that ideal. The latest change - adaptive icons. All "adaptive icons" means is that every unique icon has to be constrained in a circle. It makes every icon look monotonous and, in some cases, shrinks the icon so that they're hard to see even on large screens. There's a cognitive…
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Update for 2019! Twitter have changed how they compress images. Some of the techniques in this blog post may be out of date. Let's talk image compression! Services like Twitter will often apply aggressive levels of compression in order to reduce their storage space and decrease download times. This can have negative consequences for usability and image quality. Here's an example - this detail of a logo from my former employers, Vodafone. Solid red - with some fine detail in white: If you…
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This is a lazy way of making a collage of Tweets. I was originally going to use this method: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @6byNine@6byNine it is all I've got so far!❤️ 1💬 0🔁 019:11 - Sat 29 October 2016Mike@6byNineReplying to @edent@edent No idea about getting urls, but this may or may not be useful (cmd is also in image alt-text) pic.x.com/jh3yh4yki0❤️ 4💬 2🔁 020:01 - Sat 29 October 2016 but, sadly, gnome-web-photo crashed repeatedly when I tried to use it. It is a typically u…
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Recently, I wanted to embed an photograph of a book page. I thought it would be nifty if the text from the page could be selected. If you hover your mouse over this image, you should be able to select part of the text. Ideally, it will look something like this... It even works on Android (tried on Chrome, Opera, FireFox) and iOS 7. So, how did I do it? Originally, I was pointed to Project Naptha - it seems to do everything I want but is very JavaScript heavy and requires modern…
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Getting access to my Twitter archive opened my mind to the nature on transience of the media we create. Take, for example, this tweet and image: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edenthttp://twitpic.com/2dhr3 - Loving #mint09 :-)❤️ 0💬 0🔁 012:24 - Mon 23 March 2009 Well... ok... fun at the moment it was taken, but does it have any use beyond that? On the off chance that I become a subject for scholars in the year 3723, perhaps. Should some media just be declared ephemeral? The word comes from th…
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Google has rightly received praise for its reworked "Contacts" functionality. But there is still a rather glaring error. One of the things I love to do is add images to my contacts. It gives me a visual cue when I'm scrolling through looking for a person, it prompts my memory when I see the face of a friend calling me, and it helps me remember what people look like. As you can see, I'm pretty good at keeping everyone's photo on my phone up to date. Which Conditions Are Appropriate? …
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