iPhone app review: flook is fun!

The past few days I have been playing around with flook, a new "location browser" application for the iPhone, and I like it. You can access some aspects of it in a regular browser, but it's really focused around the iPhone application. The basic idea is that users create "cards" with a photo, title and brief caption, together with a location, and you can browse for cards that are close to you. The user interface is very simple - you just swipe to go from one card to the next. The following is an example of one of my cards, featuring my local brewpub (which I live above):



The application is well designed, and has a fun and quirky feel to it. The following screenshot is an example - the oddball robots feature throughout the app.



As flook starts up it gives you strange messages like "flook is snurging its capitulators" and "flook is polishing its locbots" (though I haven't seen that one much recently, so I guess my locbots must be pretty shiny!). Those still make me smile, though maybe the novelty will wear off at some point :).

So anyway, there's nothing very complex about the functionality, but that's part of the appeal too. It's simple but fun to use.

I think that two of the main challenges that the flook folks face are first, getting enough content in there to make it more interesting (it has just been released and I am the first user in Denver, so there is limited appeal to me in just browsing through my own cards, cool though they are ;)!). I have put in a couple of feature requests in regard to content creation, including the ability to more easily take my existing pictures from flickr and create cards from those (especially from photos which are already geotagged). The second big challenge, once they have a good volume of cards in the system, will be how to filter them effectively, to show you ones that are interesting to you.

There are a few things missing at the moment which I imagine will be addressed soon. One is the ability to find friends who are using flook, via the usual assortment of mechanisms like searching your contacts or Facebook friends. You can tweet from flook but I'd like a bit more control over how that works - currently there's just a global toggle which will cause a tweet to be sent whenever you create a new card (or not). I'd like a third option which would prompt you whether you want to tweet or not for each card, and give you the ability to edit the tweet message (currently it shows the title and caption from the card, with a link, which is a good starting point but depending on the situation I might like to tweet something a little different). The tweets are geo-located too, using the new geo feature of the Twitter API, which is cool. Flook has a scoring system, but at the moment there's no way to see how you rank, and nothing that I can see at the moment that promises to have that somewhat-silly-but-somehow-addictive quality of foursquare's mayor system.

The team behind flook has a strong pedigree from Psion / Symbian and they are well funded, so I think that while flook is clearly still in very early days, it will be an application to keep an eye on. If you have an iPhone, I recommend that you give it a try, it's fun!

Quick review of iPhoto 09 Places and Faces

I received my copy of Apple's new iLife 09 a couple of days ago, and being a keen photographer have spent quite a bit of time trying out the new features of iPhoto, especially Places and Faces. This is just a quick initial review - I may do a more detailed one in the next few days. Briefly, I very much like Places, with the exception of a few minor niggles, but Faces, despite an undeniable coolness when it correctly identifies someone, was overall a disappointment.

Places does a nice job of mapping geotagged photos. What I especially liked was the way that it clusters groups of photos that are close into a single pin on the map as you zoom out, and it breaks them out as you zoom it. Some other systems out there do this too, but most that I have tried have some issues (for example only displaying a limited number of pictures on a single map). I haven't done serious scalability testing so far, but have about 1700 geotagged photos on my world map so far and performance is good (these are a mixture of precisely geotagged photos with a latitude-longitude from a GPS stored in the photos' EXIF metadata, and others where I have just specified the city for a group of photos). It is easy to specify a location for a single photo or a group of photos, using Google search for geocoding so you can find the usual assortment of landmarks, businesses, etc as well as addresses. The system also generates a nice hierarchy of place names, so for example I can ask for all the photos in Stanley Park, Vancouver, British Columbia or Canada. There are some situations where the reverse geocoding doesn't find a name at some level of the hierarchy, and it uses a label of "Other", but overall this works well. Overall I think it's the nicest implementation of a system for viewing and managing geotagged photos that I have seen so far.

I really wanted to like Faces - the demo certainly looked really cool. I take a lot of photos and manage them in Aperture rather than iPhoto (I currently have 108,000 images in Aperture), and whenever I have time I tag the photos, including names of people in them. So good face recognition has the potential to be huge time saver. It's really cool when it works, and it does work well a good amount of the time, but overall it didn't work correctly sufficiently often that I'm not sure it is as fast as manually tagging names in Aperture. I will probably try to do a more systematic test of this impression over the weekend. There are two ways it can not work - it can find a face in the photo but not know who it is, or it can fail to find a face in the picture at all. The second case happened more often than I expected - it did very poorly with people wearing hats, large sunglasses, or with faces at an angle. Adding a face manually is a lot slower than doing a manual tag in Aperture (which can be a single key press for "favorite" tags, or a single drag and drop otherwise) - you have to click a button, drag to move a box, and drag again to resize a box, click a button, and type two or three characters of a name. There's also a confirmation process where you click to confirm that faces are who the system thinks they are, and (as far as I can tell) this has no ability to confirm multiple pictures at once (for example clicking on the first of a sequence and then shift-clicking on the last, as you normally do to select multiple items) - you have to click on each individual picture. The system could also be a lot cleverer about handling pictures that are taken in a sequence. It is very common with digital photography to take several photos of a group of people in a burst - and the date and time are stored so this situation is easy to identify. If you manually identify people in the first shot of a sequence, this should really carry through to other photos in the sequence, but it doesn't.

Also, as with iPhoto in general, Faces does not seem geared to handling large number of photos. I have 50+ people in my "Faces" already, a lot of whom just appear in a few photos, and there's no easy way to filter these down or organize them into groups etc, so it will be pretty unwieldy as I load more in there.

So overall, I think face recognition is a really exciting technology and it will be hugely useful in the future, but I don't think it's quite there yet based on my experience so far. In addition to improvements in the core recognition technology, there's a lot that Apple could do to make the workflow more efficient - it definitely has the feel of a "1.0" release (which is a little disappointing coming from Apple, with their strong focus on usability). I hope to see the face recognition capability come to Aperture soon though, hopefully with some improvements in the workflow for large volumes of pictures.

Quick review of Microsoft Photosynth

As regular readers know, I've been an Apple convert for over a year now, and unlike a number of my friends who run multiple operating systems on their Macs, I have had no compelling reason to run Windows and so have resisted that and been living a largely Windows-free existence. The two main things I miss with not running on Windows are some of the cool 3D things Microsoft has been doing with Virtual Earth, and the impressive Photosynth. When Microsoft announced that Photosynth had moved from a closed demo version with a few sample datasets to a version which lets you create your own "synths", I thought I needed to give it a try (being a keen photographer).

I went to the site using my Mac and got the following message:

Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows. Trust us, as soon as we have a Mac version ready, it will be up and available on our site.

That was actually better than I thought - I'm pleased to see that they have a Mac version planned, and also that they have a bit of a sense of humor in their announcement :).

So anyway, I decided there was nothing for it but to dust off my old Toshiba Windows laptop and give the new Photosynth a try. When I first saw the original Photosynth videos, I was super impressed, but also a bit skeptical about some of the more extravagant claims of automatically hyperlinking all the photos on the Internet - it just seemed to me that there wouldn't be enough differented features in many photos for that to work. And that is somewhat borne out by this guide to creating good "synths", and by my experience so far using Photosynth - there are definitely techniques to follow to make sure that the process works well. Check the guide for full details, but in general it is good to take a lot of overlapping photos, more than you might think, with relatively small changes in angle or zoom to ensure that all the photos are matched.

Click here to see these synths

I created several synths today, starting with a couple of the inside of my loft, and then doing some exterior ones. You can check them out here (Windows only, as previously noted - and you have to install a plug-in, but it's worth it). Overall the process was very easy and I was impressed with the results. It took about 10-15 minutes to create and upload a small synth, and a little over an hour for the largest one. You have to upload the data and make it publicly available at the moment (it sounds as though there may be more flexibility in this regard in future).

In a few cases, it didn't match photos which I thought it would have done. In general the issues seem to be either when you zoom or change angle by too large an amount, and it seemed to have a little more of a problem with non-geometric objects than with those with a regular shape. Also in a few cases I found the navigation didn't quite work as I expected. In the models of the Wynkoop Brewing Company and Union Station, it built everything into one continuous model, but I seem to only be able to navigate continuously around one half of the model or the other (you can jump from one to the other by switching to the grid view and selecting a picture in the other half of the model). If anyone discovers a trick which enables them to navigate around the whole of either of these models in 3D view let me know. I assume that this would probably not be an issue if I had taken more pictures going around a couple of the building corners. I also tried building synths of two smaller models - the Brewing Company and Union Station down the street, as well as a larger model which incorporated all the photos in the two smaller ones, plus a number of additional connecting photos - and it was interesting that some photos which matched in the smaller models did not match in the larger model (even though the photos they matched with previously were still there).

A cool user interface feature is the ability to display the point cloud generated by Photosynth by holding down the control key, and dragging the mouse to rotate. And another cool thing to try is using a scroll wheel to zoom in dynamically on the current image.

It's fun to be able to take pictures at very different detail levels - if you look around in the larger synth of my loft, you can find one of my favorite recipes and see what's on my computer screens. I think there's quite a bit of scope for doing cool creative things in synths - Paula appears in a few of the photos in my loft, and not in others with similar viewpoints, which gives an interesting effect, and I think you could have some fun with changing small things in between photos (but not so much that Photosynth can't match correctly). I think you could also add annotation to certain images, that is on my list of things to try too. I also plan to experiment with doing some which combine different lighting conditions, and would like to do some HDR photosynths using photos like the following - which will be a bit more work but I think would be well worth the effort.





Coincidentally, I recently heard from Gigapan Systems that I have made it onto the list to get one of their beta panoramic imaging systems, which should be arriving shortly, so it will be interesting to compare the two different approaches to creating immersive image environments. I don't expect to compete with Stefan's impressive Ogle Sweden expedition, but hope to find time to do a few more cool synths and panoramas over the next few weeks.

MapJack

I found a site called MapJack via this post at Mapperz last week, but haven't seen much other comment on it. They provide a similar "immersive photographic" view of the world to Google Street View, but they include data from some locations where you can only walk (not drive), and some that are indoors - including a tour of Alcatraz. Currently they just have a beta site with coverage for San Francisco. The user interface incorporates some very nice ideas.

One of most interesting aspects of this for me is in the "About MapJack" page, where they say:

Mapjack.com showcases a new level of mapping technology. What others have done with NASA budgets and Star Wars-like equipment, we've done on a shoestring budget, along with a few trips to Radio Shack. Specifically, we developed an array of proprietary electronics, hardware and software tools that enable us to capture an entire city’s streets with relative ease and excellent image quality. We have a complete low-cost scalable system encompassing the entire work-flow process needed for Immersive Street-Side Imagery, from picture gathering to post-processing to assembling on a Website.

This is just another example of people finding ways to bring down the cost of relatively specialized and expensive data capture tasks - it made me think of this post on aerial photography by Ed Parsons.