Photo taken this evening at the Seal Beach pier by Ms. Jen with her Nokia 808 PureView.
Wed 12.12.12 – Eight years and three days ago, I came into the possession of my beloved Nokia 7610 with its lovely 1 megapixel camera, Lifeblog software, and unlimited Cingular data plan.
From my Nokia 7610 to my current kick-ass Nokia 808 PureView, I have had eight great years of experimenting and pushing the boundaries of my photography practice with my mobile camera phones and sharing the photos to this blog, Flickr, Twitter, and various mobile photography projects.
I love mobile photo photography!
I would love to have a full time job in it, be it on a team involved in the creation of the camera phones, the software thereof, or being some fabulous mobile phone company’s imaging evangelist!
Here is to eight more years of great camera phones, better software to mobile blog / photo share with, and to even better photos!
My two favorite Nokia 7610 camera phone photos from 2004, click on them to go to the original post.
Thurs 12.09.10 – Today is the 6th anniversary of my having a camera phone in my hands and using the phone’s camera and internet connectivity to send photos to this blog & Flickr as well as using Nokia’s Lifeblog (r.i.p.) to mobile blog photos and text to this blog and others.
This six years has been the most consistently creative six years of my life, as taking photos daily with an internet connected camera that is always on you has honed my eye, sharpened my senses, made me *really* look & observe even in the most mundane moments, and has inspired many other areas of my life both my creative and other parts of my life.
Since SXSW 2003 when I heard Adam Greenfield & Joi Ito talk about how camera phone photography and mobile blogging was taking off in Japan, I yearned for my own camera phone. In July of 2004, Erika and I went to the “Sent” exhibition at The Standard that Xeni Jardin & SixSpace Gallery curated. My desire for a camera phone increased, as I hated that my computer’s hard drive had become a cemetery for photos never posted to the web, I just wanted to shoot and send.
On Dec. 9th, 2004, when I picked up the Nokia 7610 and drove to AT&T to re-up my contract with a fancy new, shiny unlimited data plan and then started taking photos and moblogging them, a whole new world opened up to me. A world of mobile photography, mobile creativity, and community that I am very glad to have participated in the last six years.
I would like to thank (then) Nokia’s Charlie Schick and (then) Creative Intelligence’s Kristen Bennett for taking a chance on me for the Lifeblog Wasabi four month project from Dec 2004 to March 2005. I am grateful that Nokia has continued a six year run of excellence in producing the best camera phones, here is to another six!
To celebrate my 6th Anniversary of camera phone photography & blogging, aka Moblogging, I will be posting my fave photos from each of the six years over the next week, starting with my two favorites from 2004 above.
Celebrate along with me: take a photo or two or three or more with your camera phone and post them to your blog. To life & creativity!
Photo of Scruffy taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.
Sun 04.11.10 – Ok, I just got over the toughest part, I was able to upload the photo using Movable Type’s ‘Upload File’ with all thedialog box CSS hacks working.
I am able to save and now will hit publish. When you see this it means I was successful in hacking my Movable Type install to allow me to post and upload photos directly from the Nokia N97’s native browser with no plugins to MT or any 3rd party app or site. Wheeeeee…
Update from the N97 a few minutes later: YAY!
Photo taken by Ms. Jen last evening with a Nikon D70s.
Sun 04.11.10 – I am currently hacking my Movable Type installation to allow for direct image upload from a non-iPhone mobile with a webkit browser (Nokia & Android). I am uploading this image from my laptop by pushing a new button on the dashboard that will by pass some of the tricky web/desktop browser javascript that chokes any mobile that is not a Nokia N900.
Next trick is to see if the Nokia N97 can handle this. Beyond altering the header.tmpl, I am also altering the CMS’s main css to get rid of all the fixed widths and absolute positioning in the dialog box css.
If this hack is successful, I will post all the code both here to this blog and to the MT Forums for other folks who would like to also be able to use Opera Mini or a mobile webkit browser to upload images from their mobile/cellphones to their MT blog.
Wed 12.09.09 – The esteemed illustrator/designer Anton Peck has proposed that folks get back to writing on our blogs and to encourage folks to that end has started Project52. I found about about Project52 through a few of Dan Rubin’stweets this evening, followed the link, and decided to take up the challenge.
While I already (mo)blog here daily and have for a couple of years, I have realized in the last year that folks out in the big wide world tend to be confused by what I do professionally.
“Uh, you are a mobile user experience designer, right?”
“No, I thought she was a web developer.”
“You’re both wrong, she is a photographer and mobile blogger.”
Actually, all three plus some. Sorry folks, I am terminally curious and am driven make | create things online be it mobile|web.
I endeavor to take up the Project52 for all 52 weeks of 2010 to blog an article weekly on some aspect of my varied professional interests: be it mobile, web dev, a tutorial of some sort, or my opinion on some aspect of technology.
And yes, I will continue to inflict photos plus other textual bits on you daily through 2010.
I don’t know about you, but I have had a little list of blog upkeep items that have been on my to do list for ages, but haven’t had the time to research and then execute them. After thinking about a few of them for some time, oh like a couple of years, I decided recently to make a real paper list and make it happen.
Here are the things I wanted to do:
1) Figure out how to get thumbnails of images to appear in the excerpted version of this blog’s RSS and Atom feeds.
2) Think about how to keep the evil sploggers (spam bloggers who scrape feeds) at bay AND keep my regular feed readers happy with a good feed. I have had my private full feed for at least two years now & announce it frequently but folks who want a full feed didn’t know about it.
3) Even though Perl is not really my friend, I have wanted to figure out how to alter the Atom script for this blog so that when I use Lifeblog or PixelPipe to mobile blog from my camera phone to this blog that the photo will be uploaded into the file directory of my choice and not the default main blog directory.
A few weeks ago, I dedicated a few hours to attempting to bending the Atom and RSS feed templates to my will. Unfortunately, Movable Type 4.x is very dependent on the Asset Manager for knowing where the images are, and due to challenge #3, I was not able to fix #1 with any satisfaction, as all the fixes required the Asset Manager to know where all the images are and by default the Atom script uploads all assets/images to the main blog directory, which causes a messy main directory with my daily mobile blogging. To solve this, I have been manually moving images to a proper image directory and then updating the blog post later, thus the Asset Manager can’t keep up with me. Poor thing.
Persistent artist vs. computer program. Who is going to lose? In the long run, the program. Until I solved problem #3, problem #1 was a null point.
I solved #2 by resetting my public facing feeds to be a bit bigger excerpts that would show the images but would excerpt any article over a certain length. I use the .htaccess file to stop any lifting of images. And I still have the private complete feed for anyone who emails me and lets me know that they want the url.
Today, I decided to conquer the moblogging directory issue and attempt to make Perl bend to my will.
NaBloPoMo is back!
November is the original and annual National Blog Posting Month and if you have been making excuses to yourself all year that you would like to get back in the swing of blog posting – here it is starting tomorrow only for 30 days – a good challenge.
For the last two years I have been on the 365 Blog Challenge to post every day, of which most of my posts end up being mobile photo blogged (mo-pho-blo), and on the months that I participate in NaBloPoMo I also attempt to post a text blog post every day.
Tomorrow I am going to start on the November NaBloPoMo and post a text/writing blog post every day for the month. Join me and all the others who are participating in NaBloPoMo and it doesn’t matter if you post text every day or a photo or a video or a combo of your choice, it is good fun! Thanks to Mrs. Kennedy for thinking NaBloPoMo up and organizing it.
Update from my computer later in the day, Tues 09.01.09 – I realize that lots of folk find Pixelpipe to be a great mobile blogging application, but I just find it moderately annoying, and the above photo is a great example of why.
To start out with, I was unable to get Pixelpipe to work on the Nokia N97. I was able to get it to somewhat work on the Nokia N95 & Nokia N79, but was not happy with it.
I do find that the Pixelpipe Android user experience is MILES better than the Nokia Share Online + Pixelpipe. Also, I will say that Pixelpipe’s support folk have been great to help me set up an “Atom” enabled pipe so that I can blog directly to this blog, rather than have the photo hosted on the Pp servers.
Today, I went to the Android Market (on phone app store) and purchased Pixelpipe Pro for $1.99 to see if the experience would be any better. In many ways, the user experience of Pixelpipe Pro is better, as there is a nice tabbed navigation allowing one to do tasks such has add a title, body copy, tags, a tab view the queue of photos or video going out, etc. I was not able to figure out how to do a minor task like rotate the image, so I exited out of Pp, went to the Android Gallery, rotated the image, saved it and then opened Pixelpipe again.
The above image now showed up as rotated and up I sent it to Pixelpipe. I was a bit frustrated here, as it did not allow me to choose to what location I wanted to send out to other than the tag version of indicating where it is to be sent. In the paid Pro version, I should be given a drop down menu of my pre-registered pipes and be able to choose one or more of them.
I sent the photo and did not see it show up on this blog within 10 minutes, so I thought we had a Pixelpipe failure, only to see it appear about 20 minutes later in the non-rotated version of the photo, even though I had saved the rotated photo and chosen that one to send in Pixelpipe.
Here is what I would like to suggest to Pixelpipe for their Pro version of the mobile app:
1) Allow the user to do all tasks and activities from the mobile app and not have to go to the website to set up pipes or manage them. All the settings and controls should be editable in the mobile app.
2) Allow the user to be able to do minor image editing tasks in the mobile app like rotate a photo or choose what size the photo should be sent at.
3) Allow the user to choose which Pipe they want which photo to be sent to in the mobile app without having to add tags.
4) Can Symbian also have a Pixelpipe Pro mobile app comparable to the Android Pixelpipe Pro that is completely separate of the evil Share Online? Please.
