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When I first pitched photomash they either loved it or it was met with a “huh, you do what?.” Photomash lets an iOS or Android user take a photo and erase parts of the photo. After erasing a part of the photo you can see through the hole revealing what the camera sees. At that point you line up your shot again mashing the two photos together. You can keep erasing and mashing. It’s extremely simple yet a bit confusing to explain.
After getting the app prototyped it became obvious to me that some users needed some creative help to understand what was possible with Photomash. The idea of a tutorial seems kind of annoying. So, I had the idea of showcasing all the stupid and wacky things my colleagues and I came up with while testing the app. We built a system that solved two problems, making it social and teaching users how to use the app in creative ways.
The challenges ranges from simple things like replacing someone’s face with someone else’s, then sharing it. Others get crazier like creating a “Frankensteined” version of someone. Overall the challenges needed to be simple tasks that only took a minute or two.
Many of the challenges like teabaggin came from playful explorations. I stumble upon the teabaggin challenge while testing. I happened to take a picture looking down at my nethers while I was sitting. I erased a bit then pointed my phone at a developer and started to laugh uncontrollably. Slowly while testing challenges began to show themselves organically.
One night me and my fiancé were taking turns playing around with ideas. She ingenuously came up with my favorite, the lollipop head. Take a picture of someone, then erase a huge area where their head was and move closer to take a shot. The results are hilarious and super simple.
Another one of my favorites was inspired by people defacing signs and billboards. The sign anagram challenge introduces people to the idea of taking a picture of a word and erasing letters to make a new word.
“ Bubny loves fairies,
my daughter
and him have that
in common ”
The icons for the challenges were inspired by xbox achivement icons. Conveying the challenge in the icon was pretty funny in a few instances like man baby and teabaggin. The icons also servers a purpose of letting users know which challenge they are on while taking photos.
Some interesting points about vision and inspiration, and how long sometimes it takes to see them realized. The part toward the bottom about the 16×16 pixel display seen in 1968 is really an impressive example.
From “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design” by Bret Victor:
This little rant isn’t going to lay out any grand vision or anything. I just hope to suggest some places to look.
Before we think about how we should interact with our Tools Of The Future, let’s consider what a tool is in the first place.
I like this definition: A tool addresses human needs by amplifying human capabilities.
That is, a tool converts what we can do into what we want to do. A great tool is designed to fit both sides.
In this rant, I’m not going to talk about human needs. Everyone talks about that; it’s the single most popular conversation topic in history.
And I’m not going to talk about about technology. That’s the easy part, in a sense, because we control it. Technology can be invented; human nature is something we’re stuck with.
I’m going to talk about that neglected third factor, human capabilities. What people can do. Because if a tool isn’t designed to be used by a person, it can’t be a very good tool, right?
http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/
Ran into this one today on pushing to a Xampp install: http://jakebohall.com/enable-curl-on-xampp/04/2009
Shoutout to Jacob Bohall for this one! http://jakebohall.com
“The problem?.. curl was not enabled by default in Xampp. You receive the following error:
The solution? These simple steps!
Step 1. Stop all Xampp services: Apache, Mysql, Filezilla, and Mercury.
Step 2. Open the following files in your editor of choice. (Replace C:\xampp with the location of your xampp install)
Step 3. Find the following code in each of the files, and remove the ; (semicolon) at the beginning of the line. You will most likely see it at line 546 or line 582.
Step 4. Start your apache services.
See what an easy fix to curl on xampp by simply removing a few semicolons. Happy Coding!”
So ran into an issue the last couple of days where I couldn’t get a drupal 6 site to work correctly on Rackspace’s Cloud site service. I was able to bring up the homepage, but not any other page, so rackspace’s live chat helped me out. here’s the source solution:
http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/index.php/
Why_is_mod_rewrite_not_working_on_my_site
“On Cloud Sites, due to our unique hosting environment, we require a slight addition to the code used for mod_rewrite. You will also need to make sure that the site is using either PHP4 or PHP5 as the default technology.
In the .htaccess file containing your rewrite rules, after RewriteEngine on, add RewriteBase /. Example:
RewriteEngine on RewriteBase /
Depending on the application, you may need to further specifiy the RewriteBase / to include the subdirectory the application is installed in. For example:
RewriteBase /subdirectory
You can find more information on mod_rewrite at Apache’s website.”
Found this on yahoo news. With the use of a Microsoft Kinect, some Grad students figured out how to project onto any surface and make that surface an input device, pretty impressive: