GPS and Digital
Camera
2007-09-30
Imagine you had a digital camera with build in GPS
and a compass for direction...
Imagine that GPS information is saved with every
picture in EXIF-data...
Imagine there is a server you could upload your
images of places you had been...
Imagine a software like Google earth would allow you
to get to a point on earth, watch those images people
have taken there and lets you even browser through
time. How did that place look 5 years ago? How does
it look in winter, in summer? Just walk through
images and explore that place seen through the eye of
different people...
Feasibility? Easy.
Benefit? Fun.
Themes
2006-06-25
Did you notice...
...quite a lot of software uses themes/templates to
customize the look of a document without changing the
content. The most popular and well known use is
definitely HMTL with CSS resulting in a division of
content and the look (style) of a page. You can
design different styles for web-viewing and printing
like you might see on this page (print it!). Or
simply apply a new theme to modernize your site.
This great ideas slowly reaches every part
application development. What is the content - what
is the look? In iDVD the way the chapters are
arranged (plus the movies) is the content and you can
change the look and feel of the DVD by applying
different themes.
The same is true for many other applications like
internet-content generators (RapidWeaver or iWeb for
html or iSale for ebay), presentations (Keynote) or
even text-editing (Pages).
My question: What is next? Any new ideas or have we
reached the end of all possibilities - quite likely
not!
What it boils down to is that an application must
have some way to present its content - so that this
presentation can altered. If you alter the appearance
of the app itself we would call that skins - a little
bit outdate probably because uses get confused if
every application looks different. This approach has
proven the be wrong.
So which field can be conquered? Plain editing apps -
frankly, I don't see a chance here... An image or
sound editor without export to anything other than
native formats? If you can do a slideshow we're back
again.
But take Google Earth (my favorite game right now).
It has a lot of potential!
The content should be the pin-points of locations (as
geographical data) whereas the look could be
satellite images (as it is now) or 3D contours of the
landscape, populations density or anything alike -
plus you can overlay them in some way (thus applying
multiple styles).
Mmmh, style inheritance just like CSS...
Just my 2c.