Tag Archive for 'Flickr'

Life’s no Picnic

Life may be no picnic, but maybe Picnik will soon enrich your life!

Thank you, thank you, I actually worked on that first sentence for the better part of an hour. Now on to that magical service called Picnik.

Basically, Picnik is an online photo editor, which is a good thing for everyone who doesn’t want to buy Photoshop or install The Gimp, or for those who like to edit their pictures after they’ve already been uploaded. Colour settings, cropping, special effects - Picnik has it. The thing that makes it really usable is that it lets you import your images from your Flickr account (or just search for any photo on Flickr), from any website or simply from your computer.

The whole interface is done in Flash, which makes it pretty versatile and fast. And it looks pretty too! See for yourself:

picnik picture view

Here’s the view when you edit an image:

picnik edit view

You can then either save the edited photos directly back into your Flickr account, create funky little slideshows, email them to some address or to a website or send the pretty little thing off to the printers:

picnik saving

One little detail I think is clever: You can automatically add the “picnik” tag to edited photos when saving it back to Flickr. That’s quite handy when you want to see the ones you’ve edited online, and it’s a good way for the service itself to get attention.

Picnik reminds me of of this one service called Preloadr, which does most of the things Picnik does, only that it’s limited to Flickr (as the name already implies). The upside to less features is clearly that it’s really a lot more lightweight, and does without the use of a Flash interface.

Zooomr 2.0 coming

zooomr launch
Zooomr, once one-man show, photo sharing, Flickr-clone-accused, prototypical web 2.0 service is going to launch its new version tonight.

I haven’t tested the service thoroughly yet, but they do offer a load of interesting additions, stuff everyone’s darling Flickr doesn’t. Like geo-tagging, so you’ll always know right to the square meter where my photos were shot. It also comes in quite a few languages, and overall, it looks like it’s got potential. How they’re trying to beat the hipness factor of Flickr, that I don’t know.

I’ll check out the new version tonight to see what the fuzz is about.

Flock - new milestone out

Flock, the social browser that’s built on the foundation of everyone’s darling browser Mozilla Firefox, has just released a new version. This milestone release 16 is already packing a heap of the improvements that will also be in the Beta release that’s soon to come (according to their website).

I’m not really sure how many of the things I noticed in this release already were in earlier versions (in one format or another), but I’m just going to point out what I noticed after some time playing with this version.

The first thing I noticed was their tight RSS integration. Just click the feed icon that appears automatically as soon as a page has a feed, and the feed can then be added to Flock’s built-in newsreader. While I’m not really a big fan of local newsreaders (which this is, unless there’s some way of syncing that to some server), but I’m sure this is by far the easiest solution out there for RSS first-timers:

flock feedreader

Another feature that’s pretty unique to Flock (albeit not to this release), is their tray…drag and drop text and pictures into it for later usage. It can be activated simply by clicking a little icon in the status-bar:

the tray

This can come in very handy when researching for a blog post or other areas where research is necessary (damn, that reminds me of that paper I should be researching right now).

Finally, there’s the photobar:

flock photos

Now, I could get all excited about this feature, and while it’s really nicely implemented, letting you upload to and view your Flickr stream from inside Flock, I can’t see any immediate use for it. I mean, uploading to Flickr is nice, but there are various solutions, not least upload tools for any kind of OS, that are a lot more versatile. And well, I don’t necessarily need to look at my Flickr photos from within the browser I’m using, if in fact I can just use that browser to go to my Flickr account (and be able to leave comments, search, and do whatever the real Flickr page lets you do). Still, a nice toy.

Finally, there’s an issue that still isn’t resolved in this version. Apparently, Linux and Mac versions of Flock can’t deal with Greasmonkey scripts anymore. Greasemonkey, that extensions that allows for an extremely versatile surfing experience, boasts an impressive number of scripts and which for some people has become almost indispensable. So, when trying to install a script in Flock (on Linux or Mac, I’m on Linux), that’s what you get:

flock error

The Flock team actually addressed this issue on the Greasemonkey extension page, but there’s still no word about when they are planning to make Greasemonkey work for Flock again.




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