Nontrivial Exercises

Tumblr-ing

If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.

So say the guys at Tumblr, a new service that focuses on creating a very quick, one-way collection of information and a simple way to publish it.

They call them tumblelogs, and they’re really pretty innovative. Sure, there are plenty of blogging platforms, both hosted and do-it-yourself, one can use to publish ideas. I mean that’s what blogging is all about, and that’s what several million people are doing every day. Why would the world need another blogging service?

I know that I wrestle with the desire to write about the many ideas and subjects that I think about versus the time to do justice to the development of the thoughts and conclusions I would do for a blog post. Often I just stop starting because I don’t think I can finish right then.

Tumblr sort of gives you permission to be quick and random. There are no categories, there are no comments, the designs are very clean and minimalist. The format encourages and supports succinct bits of text, photos, videos, quotes, links or conversations. It’s actually really freeing to be able to simply put up a quick thought without worrying about all the metadata fit and finish that you would (or at least I would) with a typical blog.

They do offer a few pre-made themes but they also thankfully give you the ability to do your own design by modifying the CSS and layout of the HTML code.

Tumblr is fully hosted on the tumblr.com domain, there are no ads (at least at present) and they offer RSS syndication. They also support custom domain names if you want to use your own domain.

To write a post you may log in to your tumblelog and write it from the browser, or you can use a bookmarklet to quickly capture text, pictures or links while browsing.They are working on an API that will allow read and write access so you could use a blogging tool (like ecto) to write posts. You can also automatically import other feeds as posts, e.g. your del.icio.us - or ma.gnolia - bookmarks, your Twitter updates, etc.

I’ve created my own tumblelog - come check it out and let me know if you start Tumblr-ing too.

Holding Dearly to What’s Inside

Holding Dearly to What’s Inside Hosted on Zooomr

Endless

Endless Hosted on Zooomr

for more photos from the park this Wednesday afternoon, see my Zooomr smart set

My Path to Aperture

Chris has added forums to his cool MyAppleStuff site, and I’m helping him out as a moderator there. One of the forums is for photography and I was writing a post today in response to Wayne’s earlier decision to buy Apple’s Aperture photo editing and management app, and thought I’d share it as a brief overview of how I came to be an Aperture user.

I bought Aperture about 2 months ago and haven’t regretted it one bit. I used iPhoto previously, and then tried Adobe Lightroom when it was in the beta 4 release for about a month.
I really liked Lightroom - it was like a giant leap forward from iPhoto in terms of organization / DAM and color toning. It was like a whole new level of organizing and editing for me.

I didn’t (and still don’t) have Photoshop and had been using Gimp as needed beyond iPhoto. I had used Picasa on the PC before I got my Mac mid-last year.

I then decided to try Aperture. I put off trying it because I was afraid that once I started using the trial that I’d find that I “couldn’t” live without it, and I didn’t have $300 in the budget.

But, I finally gave in and got the 30 day trial. Sure enough, it fit like a glove into what I wanted to do. I got to the end of the trial and ended up buying it.

The one complaint I have at the moment is the lack of vignetting functionality. Lightroom has this. Obviously you can do this in Photoshop but I still don’t have that. You can export from Aperture to an external editor easily, like Gimp. The problem is that Gimp only supports 8 bit TIFF, not 16 bit TIFFs.

You’ll probably never notice the difference of 8 bit vs. 16 bit color in small prints or small online pics, but I just don’t like to lose info / data that I already have in an image, so I don’t use it.

Now, I’d like a MacBook Pro to go with my Aperture, because it just hammers my MacBook when doing editing or when I move around a lot. The anemic video chip on the MacBooks is quite frustrating when trying to do any graphics-intensive work, but they weren’t really designed to do that. Saving my pennies …

Joy

Joy Hosted on Zooomr