{"id":472,"date":"2012-04-21T11:50:18","date_gmt":"2012-04-21T18:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/?p=472"},"modified":"2012-04-21T19:08:47","modified_gmt":"2012-04-22T02:08:47","slug":"portable-computing-ui-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/2012\/04\/21\/portable-computing-ui-redux\/","title":{"rendered":"Portable Computing UI Redux: Editing Photos While Walking Downtown"},"content":{"rendered":"

One thing Instagram’s done for me (or to me): It’s made me much more prone to editing images on my phone. Which means I now have more data on the real-world equivalent of Charles Stross’ speculative incident in the beginning of Accelerando<\/cite>:<\/p>\n

[Manfred is] standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs [smart glasses that now seem like a prediction of Google Glasses] powered up…. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived.<\/strong> The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. (emphasis added)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve written before<\/a> about what the hell kind of UI he’s using to tell his systems to actually do<\/em> all this stuff. One thing I noted was that, working on a modern smartphone, “Cropping is pretty much out of the question, although someone could<\/em> write an app for it.” But that was two years ago, when I was using a Palm Pre… over 6 months before Instagram even launched their first product.<\/p>\n

Fast-forward to this Monday. I was walking down Market Street and saw a statue that I felt like grabbing a picture of. I took the pic with my phone’s standard camera app. Then I decided, what the heck, why not post it on Instagram? When you import a photo from your Android Gallery into Instagram, it “gives you the opportunity” (i.e., forces you) to crop the image so it fits their 1:1 aspect ratio. While I was doing the cropping, I noticed: There was some text in there that was really kind of distracting. I wanted it out of there.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>Here’s a thumbnail of what it looked like in the beginning — the image my phone’s camera first recorded. Click it for a larger version.<\/p>\n

The cropping I was planning to do already brought out the “cross” motif behind the angel a bit. But that meant that the “Asian Art” and “San Fr…” text on the right arm of the cross was really<\/em> distracting.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, note that at this point, if you consider Instagram to be a weblog, we’ve already<\/em> pretty much fulfilled the parameters of what Manfred Macx did. (Or, we could have<\/em> fulfilled them, if I’d gone ahead and cropped and posted.) Okay, there’s no way Instagram is my<\/em> weblog… but it’s a public record, which would certainly “show I’d arrived” somewhere. If I had just landed in Amsterdam, I could snap a picture of the Begijnhof or the Magere Brug or some such, crop it, and post it on Instagram with a comment like “Amsterdam, I am in you!” Mission accomplished!<\/p>\n

But I didn’t feel like posting my photo with that annoying text in it. I recently downloaded a few Android image-editing apps, including something with “retouch” in its name, so I fired it up. It turns out to be called TouchRetouch Free<\/a>, and it’s based entirely around content-aware fill\/erase. It’s designed to remove unwanted content from your photos. It was just what I needed! In under three minutes, I’d vaporized the offending text – and that includes time spent figuring out the UI and reading the one-page help screen.<\/p>\n

I will probably be upgrading to the paid version soon. Ninety-nine cents seems a quite<\/em> reasonable price for this software!<\/div>\n

So I saved the retouched photo, re-opened Instagram, cropped and posted. Total time… hard to say, especially given that I was walking around at the time and<\/em> had to pause for an unrelated task in the middle. But it didn’t feel like a huge hassle<\/strong>, that’s for sure.<\/p>\n

\"Previous<\/a><\/p>\n

From the above photo to this version<\/a>, in a time that was definitely under 10 minutes, on a mobile phone<\/strong>. That’s pretty cool.<\/p>\n

Addendum:<\/strong> By the way, if you want to follow me on Instagram, my handle there is kmactane<\/span>, just like my Twitter handle. I’d link to my Instagram user page except… there is no such thing. Seems quite silly of Instagram. I’ll be writing more about that later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One thing Instagram’s done for me (or to me): It’s made me much more prone to editing images on my phone. Which means I now have more data on the real-world equivalent of Charles Stross’ speculative incident in the beginning of Accelerando: [Manfred is] standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[106,123,85,124,84,104,91,23,8,10,9],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":480,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions\/480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}