5 HUD Portraits, 1 Tight Deadline
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The nation's housing industry is in a free fall from the subprime mortgage crisis. The budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development could be facing big cuts. And the agency is still struggling to respond to a slew of natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina.
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We have some big news today for FlickrFan users, a major new source of high-def photography for the networked living room. They come from Agence France-Presse, one of the world's great news organizations, and a fantastic source of high-resolution news photography. I met with Agence France-Presse when I was in Paris in December, introduced them to FlickrFan and explained what we were doing with the Associated Press. They got excited, it took a little while to work out the technical details, but now we're ready to go. The updates are all out, here's the howto for FlickrFan users. Change #30: Agence France-Presse photos in FlickrFan. There were unique challenges in this project because their flow is huge. Yesterday we got over 3000 new photos. Because there are so many, I asked my friend Matt Mullenweg, if his company Automattic could help us out with server space and bandwidth, and he said yes. The AFP pictures are hosted on wordpress.com. Many thanks to Matt and his company for helping us out. To the extent we're bootstrapping a new use of the net, which I hope is what we're doing, Matt's company has made the kind of contribution we'd like to see more companies make. Usually the companies are happy to make the money, but not willing to help out with the bootstrap, which often costs money. Matt has always been a great guy and a visionary. I thank him and hope that FlickrFan users find an appropriate way to thank him too. And also, please consider the generosity of Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. We all hope that there's a market here, a way to monetize the flow of high-resolution photography to enrich and inform. Other content companies have been reluctant to take a chance on the Internet, we saw that in the early days of RSS and podcasting. I feel that these two media companies are playing the same pioneering role that the New York Times played with RSS 2.0 and NPR played in podcasting. Associated Press and Agence France-Presse deserve our respect and admiration for steping out, for going first, this is how new Internet activities get going. This is what we call market leadership, the real kind. Bravo!! And this couldn't come at a better time, with tomorrow being Super Tuesday here in the USA. Think of all the great photographs we're going to get in the next few days! Kevin Tofel helped test the feed over the weekend.
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Adobe's newest addition to the Photoshop family is a workflow manager for professional photogs, Flickr-heads and camera nerds of all stripes. By Scott Gilbertson.
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... It's with much anticipation that I say this. I have a new product that may be familiar to those of you who used Radio 8, and in other ways may be completely new.  The idea is simple.  There's a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity. The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways. Think of it as the networked living room and you'll understand the vision. Some of the work I've done is technical, some is user interface, and some is working with media organizations to try to create a comfort level, or at least a spirit of Let's Give This A Try. In the latter case, it's much like working with the NY Times to get their news headlines and summaries to flow through Radio's RSS aggregator in 2002. Only this time we're working with photographs, and we think, the best news photographers in the world. And the pictures are beautifully high-def, they look really great when displayed on LCD and plasma screens. I use it with my 52-inch Samsung and 46-inch Sony. Of course what looks great on a wall, also looks great on a 15-inch Macbook or 24-inch iMac.   And while we connect those pros with your TV, it's equally important that we connect your friends and families too. One of the early testers found the pictures that Doc Searls uploads to Flickr a great revelation. Me too. That's because Doc is not only a great photographer, he's also a great story-teller. I find that I can follow the lives of far more friends visually than I can through text messages (which I love to do too!). Viewing great photos on bigscreen TVs, desktops and laptops -- that's one focus, but not the only one.  I wanted to provide a complete two-way tool for people who love Flickr, as I do.  Why Flickr? Well, they've got this great thing called an API. It makes it possible for people like me to make software that runs on a desktop computer that does things like automatically backing up your new photos every night, and providing a drop-folder on your desktop for quick uploads. (It understands tags too, it's incredibly simple.) We also made it easy to post pictures you like to Twitter. Why Twitter? It's that API thing again. They made it easy for us to love them. I wish more network service developers understood how powerful this outstretched hand is.  But that's not all! Not by a long shot. The reason all this will be so familiar to Radio 8 users is that it builds on the same engine, the one that was released as open source in 2004. So I've been working on other tools to drop into this base platform and once we have a good-sized base of people using it for "really simple photos" on the desktop, there will be other tools. And because it's an open platform, other developers can do the same. Not saying they will, but they can.  Anyway, I'm in the last stages, preparing the download site, and a FAQ, and tweaking the installer. One caveat, the first beta release is Mac only. That's because I'm doing all my work on the Mac, and this is a one-man show. Later we will work it out for Windows too, and with a bit more work and a bit more luck, for Linux.  It should be ready before the sun goes down today.
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Blog: Some developers must have too much time on their hands
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Here's an overview of three new programs that promise easier image management.
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Feature Consolidation runs and runs
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Heliodisplay projects a convincing mid-air display.
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By Mark Kellner, The Washington Times  Jan. 30--GRAPHICS SOFTWARE 'SMART' AND EASY: Every once in a while a  software program comes along that really grabs me.
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Excellent titling and chroma key features. Fine stepping-stone for learning Premiere Pro. Good integration with Photoshop Elements.
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Lavorazioni hi-tech, laccature, grafismi e colori assoluti
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Thermal printer produces great-looking snapshots, but they don't come cheap.
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For years, you couldn't go wrong by letting one number drive your digital-camera shopping: the  megapixels, or millions of picture elements, that the camera could record in an image.
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At PhotoPlus Expo in New York, Industrial Color, the leader in digital photo capture and online workflow software, announced the GLOBALedit Export Plug-in for Aperture. The plug-in, available as a free download,   lets photographers âsecurely upload image collections from Aperture version 1.5 into GLOBALedit, Industrial Colorâs online digital workflow solution. Once uploaded to GLOBALedit, image collections are globally available for editing, talent approval, image distribution, contact sheet creation, image markups and retouching notes, FPO and layout creation, metadata services, fulfillment services, and long-term archiving.â GLOBALedit joins a growing list of export plug-ins available for Aperture.
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From Paul Jones' weblog today, there's a posting that more and more developers should live by - Document Your Project Already!
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Adding location data to images is a pain right now, but geotagging was worth it, and it'll get easier. Here are my warnings and a wish list.
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Manually tagging things is a pain and, if one doesn't have obvious geographical features in the photo, it may be hard to locate them exactly on a map. So--how about marrying GPS data to the photos? It's a sound idea, it's doable, but it requires a slightl