Author: paolovalde

Automatic photostream

Here’s a great story about finding yourself in somebody else’s photos.

Today Facebook has access to my timeline on Moves (which they bought), which means that potentially they know where/when I was for the last six month with a good degree of precision. 

They also have access to billions of geotagged photos. Cross referencing this information Facebook could easily generate a timeline of photos taken around me. And this is with today’s technology.

There all all kind of privacy issues to discuss, yet there are quite exciting possibilities with photography. Just ahead.

Life after Aperture

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It has been quite evident for a while that Apple had little love left for Aperture, but now it’s official: the photo editing software will be retired.

I’m sure that Photos, Apple’s new photo management app, will be nice and perfectly integrated in Apple’s ecosystem, but most likely it won’t have the kind of professional tools I need.

Which leaves me with just one possibility: move to Adobe Lightroom.

I have many friends who love Lightroom, and recently I have given up and started paying for Adobe’s subscription plan, so technically I already have Lightroom installed on my Mac.

But unless I’m missing something, once I will have moved all my photo archive to Lightroom I will have to keep paying a ransom to Adobe every month just to be able to access my photos, on my computer.

Yes, I appreciate that all my files are there, but there’s a whole lotta metadata and work associated with those files which depends on Lightroom and will be lost if I don’t pay the monthly fee.

The future of our digital photos is something we should start paying much more attention to. Right now it doesn’t look very bright.

PS: as some commenters pointed out, there is an option to buy Lightroom as a standalone application which I had not been able to find. This makes the whole migration option much more likely to happen soon. Thank you all :)

Know where I’m going

Screen Shot 2014-05-14 at 09.17.01

This map shows all my movements from January 1st 2014 to right now. The data were collected by the app Moves and the map generated by Move-O-Scope.

To me this is absolutely awesome.

Running Moves significantly reduces the battery life on my iPhone 5, but it’s something I have been willing to live with because I just love the data that gets collected and the way Moves displays it.

Walking patterns in our neighborhood
Walking patterns in our neighborhood

Then Moves was bought by Facebook.

When Facebook bought Instagram I thought: “Oh, well… the pictures I was posting to Instagram were public anyway”. I was a bit annoyed with how they treated the integration with Twitter, but this was pretty much it.

When Facebook bought Whatsapp I thought: “Oh, well… I have never used Whatsapp anyway”.

But I do feel uncomfortable about Facebook buying Moves and having access to their data. Strangely enough giving all the information about my moving around to a tiny and unknown Finnish company felt better than giving it to a huge American one.

My walking patterns in London
My walking patterns in London

I haven’t deleted the application yet, but I guess that I will do as soon as I will find a replacement which works as smoothly as Moves. Or maybe I will just live with it.

What is certain is that I will keep running a tracking application on my phone.

30 years later

On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”

It must have taken a few weeks after that famous January 24th before my dad came home from an Apple resellers meeting with a big white box with a colorful logo.

mac_picasso_logo

The first Macintosh of my life was installed in our living room, with a plaid to protect the polished mahogany table. The mouse. The graphic UI. MacPaint. It was love at first sight.

Since then I have used a Mac pretty much every day. I cannot think of any other piece of technology that I have used so much and for so long, and that has had so much influence on my life.

I have used a lot of Macs.

At the beginning it was the 128K. Then the 512K. Then it was the Plus. The first hard disks (what will we ever do with 10Mb of storage?). And the internal ones, which as soon as summer arrived started overheating.

The Macintosh II had colors, the SE/30 was quick, the IIfx was sooo powerful! I worked for years doing graphic animation on a IIfx.

When we started working together, the first Mac Monica and I bought was a Quadra 700. And a LaserWriter 12/640 which lasted for almost 20 years.

There were some dark times. System 7. The Power Macintosh 8500. Some friends moved to Windows. I stubbornly stuck with my Mac. I even bought a 20 anniversary Macintosh.

Then the light again (Jobs was back) with the colored iMacs, the translucent G3 desktop. And the beautiful G4 Cube.

And all the laptops. Starting with the fantastic PowerBook 100, which was simply amazingly small. And then the sophisticated, black and cool Lombard and Pismo. And the first G4 Titanium. Can you imagine? Titanium!

And then all the Aluminium MacBooks, and the incredible light Air, and… it’s today.

Thanks for the ride Apple. And what a ride!