My Digital Life

Thanks to Laughing Squid for pointing out these amazing photos of London taken at night from a helicopter.  Looking at his site the photographer, Jason Hawkes, seems to specialise in these sort of shots.

There’s a good post over on the MS Digital Memories Experience blog about how you can use the various Windows Live tools to add Geotags to photos without the need for GPS.   It’s then followed with another post about linking your photos to a tour within Live Search Maps.

It got me thinking… That’s pretty cool stuff, and well done to those guys for putting it all together, but something that does all of that in a more integrated way would be so much nicer.  I’m a fan of Live Photo Gallery and given there are so many other Geotagging tools out there it would seem like a great thing to add to this ’software’ part of the Live ’service’.  Given MS’s other mapping and virtual earth tools this shouldn’t be a too hard to integrate (can you tell I don’t do development?!).

What I’d really like to see though are the things like Photosynth and Deepzoom.  Photosynth still impresses the hell out me, and I can’t wait to see it working in a product form.  I’ve used it in some demos at work as an example of what sort of technology we can look forward to and it always seems to capture peoples imaginations.  Everyone can think up a use for it.  Hopefully something will appear before too long. 

Having played with the PhotoZoom site a little I reckon that would be another good addition to Live Photo Gallery.  It’d certainly be a good example of Software + Services - click a button on your desktop and MS processes your photos in the background.  Quite what format they’d be delivered in I’m not sure, perhaps similar to what’s on the site now, an object you can paste into an email or website.  Sounds good to me.

Anyway… enough rambling from me. 

I just read a good post over on Steve Clayton’s blog about DeepZoom, it perfectly illustrates a conversation I had last week about the SeaDragon technologies.  At the time  I didn’t have net access so couldn’t demonstrate my point, but Steve’s quick mock up with some Paul Smith stuff is a great example of how DeepZoom could be used. 

Hopefully I’ll build something like this into a site I’m building for my better half, though I need to get my head back into dev stuff first!

Having seen DeepZoom, I’m really looking forward the release of the PhotoSynth technology, having the same zoom capability but also being able to move around the products in 3D will be amazing.

It could be this is old news an I’m a bit behind, but last week my better half had me looking at digital photo frames for her mum.  I’ve never really looked that had at these before, they always seemed like a bit of a gimmick and I knew that if I had one I’d soon get bored of transferring pics using SD cards.  Having done some research though I find that there are a few companies now offering frames with wifi on board - which is cool by itself - but they’ve also started to appear with built in support for Flickr, Live, Webshots, RSS feeds and even email.  What a great idea!  Rather than continuously feeding your frame S cards, just point it at your Flickr photostream or at the interestingness RSS feed!

The two frames that I spotted were from estarling (RSS & Photobucket) and Digital Spectrum (Flickr, Live etc).  Though I’m sure there are more out there.