Google Maps: now almost display geolocated Picasa web album photos

Google Maps now sort of display Picasa web album photos in context. It's an option in the "My Maps" "Featured Content" collection.

I tried this in Old Montreal. I'd taken some photos there that display correctly in Google Earth (Lachine Canal bike/skate trail). I got mixed results. The images took a long time to appear, and I seemed to get quite different sets at different resolutions. I suspect they're still working on this, but I'm going to test it further today during a family skating outing on the Lake Wobegon trail.

It would be nice if it works, a way to build cheap "guides" for eccentric families like ours.

Update 8/31/07: It's still not working. My Lake Wobegon images haven't appeared yet, though I do see a few other people's images. The Lachine canal images I saw on Google Earth aren't in Google Maps today. Display of the images that are found is quite slow. I don't think the current model is going to scale, Google will have rethink this.

Sidejacking: good news for the VPN providers

Tidbits has a long article on "sidejacking". It's a man-in-the-middle attack on non-encrypted hot spot transactions. Nothing new, but now the attacks are packaged. Basically, you need to pay for VPN services ...

TidBITS: Sidejack Attack Jimmies Open Gmail, Other Services

Use a virtual private network (VPN). A VPN can encrypt all the data entering and leaving your machine, which prevents any local sniffer from gaining anything of utility, including tokens. Several services offer VPN "rentals," where you pay a monthly or yearly fee to have a tunnel from your computer to their servers, out in a network operation center far away from the network you're using. A couple of services are particularly Mac friendly: WiTopia.net's personalVPN ($39.99 per year for an SSL/TLS VPN) and publicVPN ($5.95 per month or $59.95 per year for an L2TP/IPsec VPN).

Jobs explains iMovie '08

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Smurfy Pogue stabs me in the back

See here. He's pissed about the new iMovie. Which, um, I agree kind of sucks. And he kinda sorta hints at why we put out such a brain dead movie maker program. Little hint. Our initial marketing slogan was gonna be, "You wanna make real movies? Go buy Final Cut Pro, you cheap bastards." Or something like that. That one was Phil Schiller's idea. Katie Cotton suggested we try to "soften" it a bit and so in the end it just became: "Completely redesigned to help you make movies in minutes".

Actually, it's not Final Cut Pro Apple's protecting, it's Final Cut Express. $300. Grrrrrrrrr.

iPhoto '08: makes Aperture look fast?

I agree:

iLife 08 - Macintouch

...iPhoto 08 is much slower than 06. When I open it, the MDS process all of a sudden uses a ton of CPU, anywhere from 30%-100%. This happens as long as iphoto is open. Closing iPhoto fixes the problem. I'm running a black macbook 2GHz Intel Core 2, 1GB RAM....

Apple has figured out how to make Aperture look better -- it's now more responsive than iPhoto! I sure hope this will turn out to be a fixable bug. In imported 26 images into an empty folder, and mid-way through the fifth full screen edit iPhoto became sluggish and my MacBook fan roared to life.

Update: I tried another session and I didn't run into this problem, but I avoided full screen editing this time. I'm hoping this really is a bug, possibly with the full screen edits. The editing tools are all significantly improved. I like the events features because I never used rolls, events are simpler. it's odd that double clicking the title bar doesn't hide iPhoto, maybe Apple's abandoning that age-old UI feature.

If this isn't fixed, then I'd suggest not upgrading to iLife '08, but instead save your pennies for Lightroom.

(iLife '08 includes iPhoto 7.01, but most people call it iPhoto '08.)

Panorama from ProVUE: stealth product from stealth company

I remember Panorama as a FileMaker alternative back in the days when there were at least six significantly marketed end-user database solutions for the Mac. So when I read a Macintouch notice of a new version of Panorama I paid a visit to the ProVUE web site:

ProVUE Company Product History.

...2002 The Panorama iPod Organizer combines the power of Panorama's unique RAM based database technology with the portability and flexibility of the iPod for storing phone numbers, email addresses, flight numbers, appointment times ... all the important information you need to access on the go...

It's quite a list of products, most of which I'd never heard of. It's a curious example of a company that's lasted a very long time, but keeps a pretty low profile. I suspect their niche market is older machines running commercial applications -- they still support Classic!

Retrieving a set of original photos from Picasa - quickly

Need to get a set of full res images from Picasa?

Official Google Data APIs Blog: Picasa Web Albums adds new API features

• Searching a user's photos: You can search through all the photos belonging to a single user using the q query parameter. Example:

  http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/userID?kind=photo&q=penguin

  will find all photos owned by user userID which contain the word 'penguin' in the title, caption or tag.


• Downloading the original photo: You can now download the original photo, including all EXIF data. This is accomplished by retrieving the feed with the imgmax=d query parameter and value This will return a feed where the media:content elements reference the original downloadable image.

I tried this:

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/jfaughnan?imgmax=d. This produced a nice feed result in bloglines of all my public albums (if I'm not logged into Picasa) or ALL my albums (if I am logged in to Picasa), but only links to the albums.

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/jfaughnnan?kind=photo&imgmax=d just gave me an error message.

Still working on this ...

Google Calendar Gadgets

Yes, this is cool ...

Calendar Gadgets:

...Calendar Gadgets are special events that appear as icons above a day's events. When clicked, the icon can pop up with any image, webpage, or Google Gadget....

...The only required field is the icon URL. In its most simple form, Calendar Gadget content can consist of just the icon above the day's events — like the Phases of the Moon calendar in the above image. If you want to point to a webpage or image, the type, width, and height must also be provided. For example, the birthday reminder below pops up with an image, and the Movie Releases calendar pops up with an HTML page with movie details...

But what I really want is robust synchronization with Outlook. Pretty please Google?

Windows Live Writer: Firefox integration

There's a Firefox extension that allows you to  "Blog This to Windows Live Writer". It works very well with Microsoft's unequalled blog authoring tool, I've been using it for months now, but these usage instructions are handy:

The Blog This gesture is available in two places: the toolbar button, and the right-click menu. I tried to be a little smart about what you are trying to blog. If you have a selection active in the browser, it’ll be used for the contents of your post. If you right-click on an image or link and select Blog This, that’s what’ll be used.

The "announcement" post this came from was reposted in error today -- the original came out last year. Even so, it's a good reminder of this terrific extension. The odd thing is that Microsoft offers it at all -- WLW is so good it could have forced me (very reluctantly) to switch to IE [1]. On the Mac WLW is threatening to force me to run FF/WLW within an Win2K VM!

Here's the download link for the released version. As I've noted before I used to have problems making it work, but they went away ...

[1] I only have two nits with WLW. One is that it's a modern .NET app, so it's slow to launch on all but the fastest machines and uses a lot of memory. Secondly, it quits after use, or stays open with the post remaining. I'd rather after each post it stayed resident but closed the post window -- in part because it's so slow to launch. (Maybe that's one nit?)

Google/Picasa Web Album API for OS X and others

I missed this June 5 Google Mac article: Picasa Web Albums meets Google data APIs. The author provides some interesting examples of using a data API with Picasa (combine webcam image feeds with RSS), shows examples from an OS X image upload application, and points to Google's open source Objective C (Mac) data API.

Of course if another photo service has an API, then one application is transferring images and metadata between services.

The Google Web Albums Data API has more information, I'm going to start hunting for people who've implemented their suggested examples:

• Include your public photos in your own web page, and allow users to comment on them (and have the comments stored in Picasa Web Albums).
• Write a plugin to manage your albums and photos from a desktop or mobile phone client.
• Create a custom screensaver to display your Picasa Web Albums photos on your computer.

Some recent additions are documented here. You can even play with them directly from your web browser (click here for my last 25 public uploads in Feed (XML format, I've got them in a Bloglines feed now).

I wonder if it's possible to call these APIs from AppleScript written within Apple's Xcode IDE? If so, it might be possible to do some interesting things almost readily. (Or just use Python?)

I do need to think about this. Heck, it might be possible to suck images directly into iPhoto just by creating a URL-query that creates an RSS feed ...

Today, I do like Picasa, even if Google doesn't understand URLs.

Google Earth and Picasa strange loops and the need for four dimensional coordinates in Google's image map layer

Update 9/2/07: Google's Picasa image integration with both Google Maps and Google Earth doesn't work the way I'd thought it did. I'm not sure how it's supposed to work, I can't find any documentation. The one thing I see is that all images are not routinely available to the public even when the appropriate layers are enabled. As of 9/07 image display in Google Maps seems to barely work at all.

I really can't come up with a title to quite explain this. It's just so extremely geeky, recursive, and quintessentially 21st century that I do, however, have to describe it.

First, here's the picture. The rest of the post makes more sense if you click on it, or, if you have Google Earth installed, this link might work to take you to the current view.

From Reunion photos

What you're seeing here is a snapshot of a Google Earth display of an obscure building in Saint Laurent, Quebec (ok, it was once Father McDonald high school, I don't know what it is now.) If you view the entire display you'll see some picture icons.

The picture icons belong to this (public) Picasa album. The album cover picture is also this Google Earth picture. If you click on the Google Earth link above (as of 8/13/07) you'd see that the Google Earth view also contains the above image. Hence the recursion.

The Picasa images appear in the Google Earth embedded image, and are visible to anyone in the world who uses GE on that site with the image layer enabled, because I assigned them all geolocation using Picasa Web Albums "map" feature.

This would, of course, be even more interesting if Google Earth added a fourth dimension (time). Then one could view sites over time, and these images might show up only for certain time slices. Alas, if Google adds this feature in 2037 my heir's will need to update the image metadata, Google 2007 does not allow user specification of the image acquisition date.

PS. There are a few more examples of "strange loops" in this exercise, but I think I've done enough damage for the moment.

Quick and dirty album imaging

The unexpected energy of two organizers means that my high school is having a class of '76 reunion (11th grade in Quebec). I'd love to go, but I can't make it. I sent some images from my iPhoto libraries, but then I decided to try to include material from a very crummy old album.

I didn't have time to peel the photos out and scan them, much less hunt down the negatives, so I decided to try a very crude approach to imaging, one that wouldn't quite qualify for Scanning Basics 101. I put the album on the floor with the cover sheet peeled back, and I snapped page shots with my Digital Rebel XT dSLR. I then ran the images through Aperture, cropped a few and adjusted levels, straightened the pages, then uploaded them as JPEGs. You can see some examples (page background visible) here.

It was a very fast process and it worked surprisingly well. In a few cases I could see more detail on the screen than was readily apparent in the original print. In other cases the original print is better. I'm going to try this with several old albums, though I'll probably use a tripod and work harder to square the images.

PS. While editing this post Firefox abruptly died and I lost the original draft. It's never done that before!

Update 8/13/07: See also: Google Earth and Picasa: strange loops and the need for four dimensional coordinates in Google's image map layer

Update 8/15/07: I've been puzzling over the fact that at least one image shows more detail than is apparent in a quick glance of the original print. On reflection, it's a product of the sophistication of modern digital software enhancement. Aperture is playing tricks on us, filling in missing data by some clever inferencing. The digital image is a simulacra of the original analog image. Interestingly, as a trigger of memory, the simulacra is more effective than the original. The inferencing works. For more on this topic, see this.

You can put application links in a Finder Toolbar?!

Jeez, I thought I knew this stuff: Mac 101: Applications in the Finder toolbar. I did have to switch to "customize toolbar" for the drag and drop to work. I'm a bit aghast. This would have been very handy for configuring my mother's machine if I'd know about it.

Another post mentioned that cmd-T will add a highlighted icon or folder to the Finder Sidebar, and that this is then available for all file save/open operations. Wow, what a way to save on navigation tasks. I never thought of this area as being a "scratchpad" for this type of quick operation, but now I see it was designed that way.

Once gain I note the gap between how a software designer intends things to work and what users end up doing.

Update: oops. I'm not sure the Finder toolbar tip is so great. I added a Folder rather than an application, and when I clicked on it I got the SBOD. Of course my MacBook has been doing that sort of thing since I updated to 10.4.10, so this might be a bad coincidence ...

Dockables: a clever donationware app

[An earlier version of this was accidentally mis-posted to my "world" blog.]

I think TUAW pointed me to Dockables. These are donation ware applescripts with a full installer and excellent icons. I have "sleep", "screen saver", "screen capture", "screen sleep" and "log off" in my Dock now. Since I don't use my Dock for much these are great to have, and of course LaunchBar (love it) can activate any of them easily.

I've always had trouble remembering the key combination for screen captures, and I don't like the TIFF format Grab uses (though I'm sure there's a way to change Grab to use PNG, I don't like those tweaks if I can avoid them). Now I use dockables, open the PNG in Preview, select, copy and then either pastse into a document or "create new from clipboard", then save with a useful name or paste. Ok, so it's not ultra efficient, but it works rather quickly.

Screen sleep is another of my favorites. It simply puts the display to sleep. I didn't think this was possible on an iMac, but it works. I can now quickly rest my screen at night while allowing backups to proceed normally.

These are also handy for the docks of my family members, who really don't know any key shortcuts or hot corner mouse actions.

I'm sending the author a donation.

dotMac needs a refresh: Zip disk?

This is from the readme file displayed with a brand new.Mac iDisk:

Using your iDisk

Your iDisk behaves much like any other removable storage available for Macintosh, such as a ZIP disk. Use the same drag-and-drop techniques to copy documents or folders to or from your iDisk. You can also access your iDisk to upload and download files via a browser by going to www.mac.com and clicking the iDisk icon.

A ZIP disk?! What are the chances that anyone under thirty knows what a zip disk was?

Sheesh.

SkyDrive from MSFT vs xdrive from AOL vs nada from Google

I've had an account for a while with AOL's xdrive. I don't use it all that often, but it's handy every month or so for moving files around. Today I tried setting up a Microsoft SkyDrive from my MacBook. It was a mixed experience. Safari 3.03 (beta) was firmly rejected. Firefox seemed to work, but it hung with a SkyDrive icon after an initial upload. Subsequently I couldn't get SkyDrive to respond from any browser, so maybe I crashed it :-). The Firefox usability was pretty weak in any case, clearly Microsoft intends to bind SkyDrive to IE.

The primary advantage of SkyDrive is that you can share files with anyone on the net and with other SkyDrive users. I don't think xdrive.com allows either option. Press coverage is comparing this to Google's Gmail share, but that's an awkward solution with no public sharing option. Google's only true public file sharing is their feeble Page Creator file file upload option. Apple's .Mac sharing is comparable, but it's fairly expensive (though better than it was).

I guess we'll have to keep waiting for Google to contemplate their next move ...