Rotophonic

A geeky blog discussing the world of music, technology & politics.

Archive for category Design

Not a food photographer? Don’t shoot your own food photos.

Mar 31

Posted by rotophonic in Design, Technology | No Comments

Bad food photo

Did you really think this looked appetizing?

I received a spam email today from a caterer in Hollywood (that will remain nameless) and it prompted me to offer this advice to caterers and restaurants all over the world: If you’re not a professional food photographer, do not shoot your own photos of your food. What might have quickly gotten my stomach growling with hunger now has it slightly churning with disgust.

And while I’m offering advice, a couple tips on spam:

  1. don’t add me to your spam list without my permission.
  2. if you do add me without my permission, please don’t include me and all the people on your list in the To: field.
  3. edit your photos to be a reasonable size before attaching them to your spam.
  4. don’t attach photos to your spam.
Bad food photo

Mmmmm. Is it the food or the Craftsman cottage that’s being sold here?

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Two things Steve Jobs must do now for iTunes and Apple to survive

Aug 16

Posted by rotophonic in Apple, Design, Technology, Television, Video Editing | 2 Comments

Steve JobsSteve Jobs, Apple, the iPod and the iTunes Music Store are definitely riding high. With over 3 million songs sold every day from the iTunes Music Store and over 32 million iPods sold in 2005, Apple finally achieved something it had never achieved before: mass-market desirability. Now the mass market is finally focused both on the sexy design of its products and on buying up as many of Jobs’ lovely inventions as fast as they possibly can. As Mike Mella’s iPodFather movie poster indicates, some feel he might have a bit too much power. And unfortunately, this honeymoon won’t last forever, dear Steve.

Competitors are knocking at Apple’s door and while it’s true that insanely great products usually triumph over poor ones, I’m worried about other products, that are just great (read Beta versus VHS etc etc), beating out the insanely great ones out in the end. When Two and a Half Men can get an Emmy-nomination, the world is still ripe for a repeat of Apple’s late-Eighties fall from grace (Could Steve Jobs become another John Scully after all?).

After all these years of using Apple’s products, it still puzzles me why they can’t seem to make any in-roads into the mega-business world or even the business world of entertainment. Sure, they sell rafts of computers to advertising agencies, graphics design houses, video editing shops and now into the scientific community, but why won’t they get serious about getting big…I mean really big?
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HDR Photography: see what you’ve been missing

Jul 26

Posted by rotophonic in Design, Digital Photography, Technology | No Comments

French Cottage ComparisonA friend of mine just pointed me to some of the amazing work that’s going on right now in relation to High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI). Needless to say, I was intrigued and decided to take a couple photos and give it a shot.Before I describe how I shot and prepared this photograph, let me see if I can give a quick and dirty description of what’s going on here.

Typical cameras (both analog and digital) only have a certain dynamic range they can describe–meaning there is a fixed range between the brightest white and the darkest black. In the real world the ratio of light to dark looking with our eyes is often 10,000 to 1–we perceive the brightest portion to be 10,000 times brighter than the darkest. However with cameras, and especially digital cameras, you’re lucky to capture a dynamic range of 4000 to 1. In practice you might only get a dynamic range of 2500 to 1. With HDR, you theoretically have an infinite dynamic range (really limited only by the device you’re using to display the image).

As a result of this limited ability of cameras to capture the full dynamic range of a scene, most photographs we see never show everything that our eyes can see. Think of taking a birthday photograph at night on a restaurant patio. With the flash from the camera, you’ll probably get all the people properly exposed, but you probably won’t be able to see much else in the background (and the picture won’t generally look exactly like you remember it). Imagine if you could see all your friends, the people at the next table and the cars and businesses across the street. HDR can deliver that experience in a single photograph. Now let’s see how this was done.

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Worst…search…ever! Apple

Jul 13

Posted by rotophonic in Apple, Design, Technology, Worst Search Ever | No Comments

So I’m browsing through Apple’s OS X downloads section today and I decided to do a little search to see the iTunes software they had available. I immediately realized that this was a futile effort as my results looked like this:

Apple Bad Search

The listing is terrible. The navigation controls aren’t at the top. It seems to be clipping out potentially relevant information with the elipsis. Further, in what order are these results being displayed. Given I searched for “iTunes” in this example, why is  the “pause itunes” Automator plug-in almost as important as the iTunes software itself? And given the search returned over 23,000 results, it seems like a little Google-izing might be helpful here.

This wouldn’t be so bad if other listings from their database of shareware/freeware didn’t look so clean and nice, like this:

Apple Good Search

This is a clean, easy-to-read listing and if I need to find out why a particular item matched I can always click the product name to find out more.

If you have ever searched Apple’s Support database, you already know that the company has some challenges around delivering relevant results. How many times, after futilely searching Apple’s Support yourself, have you had to read another blog or another support site to find the Support Document ID you needed?

Apple, you are this week’s Worst…search…ever winner.

Sly, high-design gifts

Jul 10

Posted by rotophonic in Design, Stuff | No Comments

RevengeHailing from Paris, Atypyk offers a slew of cool and often humorous gifts with a slightly wicked slant. My personal favorite is the Revenge CD. While I was usually the annoying neighbor, perhaps I would have changed my ways if I woke up hearing this CD at 3AM. Those with annoying neighbors can return the favor by putting on a vengeful track, like “Drill” or “Party of at least 200 people”, popping in the included earplugs, and sitting back to watch.