Techpaulogy

iPhone Panorama App Comparison - Pano vs AutoStitch vs VideoPano vs See This!

I've been spending a lot of time lately trying to take my iPhonography to the next level, including playing with a lot of outdoor panoramic shots (links to my latest photos). I've tested a number iPhone apps for the job, here are the 4 that are left on my device after trying out twice as many:

Video Panorama

This app is the easiest to use of the lot. It's a great idea: you just slowly take a scrolling video of whatever scene you want to capture, and this app stiches the video together in a panoramic photo, like the one here of my backyard during a snow storm:

Pros/cons:

+ easiest to use, just pan your video camera across a scene
-  medium image quality output

Pano

Pano offers a more standard process for panorama shots (like you find on digital point and shoot cameras), that gives you an overlay of the previous image, as you line up each shot for a series of photos. This one is better than any of the other apps I've found that offer this kind of multi-shot interface; it outputs the highest quality pamoramic images. Here's an example:

Pros/cons:

+ provides an overlay of the previous image to line up each shot as you take the series of photos
+ high image output quality
-  can not make multiple passes across a scene (e.g. 2 horizontal passes, for a taller, more inclusive panoramic shot)

AutoStitch

AutoStitch is more "open ended" that the other apps -- it'll take whatever photos you select from your camera roll, and stitches them together. You don't actually take the photos from within its interface. The upside of this is that you can do any pre-processing edits you want to clean up the images that get stitched together, and you can combine any number of images, not necessarily 1 straight horizontal or vertical pan across a scene. It really gives the you the most flexibility of all the apps.

A downside of this is that it doesn't help you line up the images while you are shooting, but I've found despite this, it actually procudes some of the highest quality panoramic shots of all the apps:

Pros/cons:

+ can use HDR photos, or make pre-processing edits to photos, for highest quality panorama images
+ can make multiple passes across a scene, not just one pan
-  no guides, so have to estimate ~30% overlap for each shot

You Gotta See This!

This iPhone app offers the most unique take on panoramic photos, really a collage of images similar to what is called "Hockneyesque" after artisrt David Hockney.

+ most unique panorama, more of a collage
+ can make multiple passes across a scene
-  poorest photo quality

And the winner is...

Of these, I recommend Video Pano for its ease of use, or AutoStitch for it's flexibility. Both of them let me shoot on the iPhone's native camera, and then trim or edit as needed before turning into a final panoramic photo.

An HDR camera app will really make your iPhone photography pop

Cell phone cameras are pretty limited, the iPhone's included. Especially when it comes to poor light conditions, like scenes that have a lot of very dark and light areas. You know, when you're taking a photo, and you have choose between the background/foreground, or the person in the photo? No matter where you focus the iPhone camera, you just can't get both, so you have to compromise.

Enter HDR technology - High Dynamic Range imaging. It can be done in a variety of ways, and there are a variety of iPhone apps that take this technology mobile. Essentially, you take 2 photos, one where the camera is focused on the darkest areas of your shot, one where the camera is focused on the brightest areas of your shot, and then the software combines the two so you get both parts of the image to look great. Here's an example of me taking a photo of a rainbow outside my office window. Lots of bright and dark areas. So, popping open my iPhone app of choice -- Pro HDR, see the end of this post -- I take two photos, and then the camera app combines them into a composite:

1. Dark Photo - get the sky and clouds

 

2. Light Photo - get the buildings and tree colors

 

3. Combined Photo - background and foreground combined!

 

Looks great! I get the sky and the clouds in the background, and the light coming off the darker buildings and the tree details.

I looked at a few iPhone apps to get this job done:

• HDR Camera and HDR Camera+ -- both of these iPhone apps take a single photo and produce HDR effects using different filters. Not quite the best results.
• True HDR -- this camera app lets you take two photos and merge light and dark areas, looks great.
• HDR Pro -- in addition to merging a light and dark image, this iPhone HDR camera app also provides options to adjust image colors further once the composite image is made:

 

We have a winner!

Clearspace just took enterprise collaboration to a whole new level - hello 2.5

I am so excited. Hunkered down here at the Jive HQ (Club Fed), our whole team has been cranking like never before. Engineering, Marketing, Product, Sales, you name it -- everyone has been heads down building, testing, re-mixing, and giving feedback on our Clearspace platform. We've been sitting on the 2.5 beta here for a month or two, and it is hands-down our best release ever. You can tell by how pumped everyone is here internally. We are so excited we literally bumped launch from September into August, effectively taking our launch runway from 5+ weeks to 2 (kind of a masochistic move). We just want to get it out there for everyone to get their hands on. I honestly can't imagine ever working for a company that doesn't have some kind platform like this to add a "social productivity" layer to its business underpinnings.

Ok, so what is so cool? Here's some highlights:

• Brand new text editor that can handle images and streaming video like butter. Drag, drop, re-size, publish. Never been easier (and you know that's what it takes to drive user adoption).
• Dynamic search that guesses what you are after as you type (broken out by Content, People, and Spaces). I barely need to even go to a search results page anymore.
• Social networking all over the place, including status updates, friends, groups, people search, etc. I mean really, Facebook for the enterprise. But a lot less spammy.
• Theming console for dummies. Now you don't need to know java or struts or freemarker (or whatever you needed to know) -- there's just a UI in the admin console, like popular consumer CMS/blogging platforms. And if you want to get ninja, there's an example CSS kit that you download, modify, and re-upload. Smooooth.

Anyway, go and check it out for yourself:

• Clearspace - connect employees with a comprehensive social productivity collaboration solution
• Clearspace Community - build customer communities and integrate your other online marketing channels (like SEO).

P.S. Props to the SWEET videos by Kalani (and edited in part by Sigler). And Sam is shaking things up at Go Big Always...

Jive's code to be in millions of Google Android phones!

Here's some great news: we just found out that Jive Software's Smack XMPP library is being built into Google's Android mobile platform. It was news to us, but it's great to be a part of this industry-changing initiative between Google and the Open Handset Alliance. Read the Jive Talks blog post for more info...

Evaluating Buzz Monitoring Tools - Suggestions?

My team is currently in the process of evaluating buzz monitoring software to get a better grasp on Jive, its competitors, and the enterprise software industry in general. When I say "buzz monitoring," I mean a tool that tracks blogs, wikis, discussion forums, news sites, and other online communities for specific keywords, and helps aggregate and analyze that data to determine trends, supporters, product feedback, etc. I'm hoping some other folks out there may have feedback for Justin and I?

---

Right now, here is an initial list of products being reviewed:

• BuzzLogic - we were also evaluating this when I was at Anvil Media
• BuzzMetrics - BrandPulse/BlogPulse (by Nielsen)
• BuzzPerception (by CustomScoop)
• Orchestra (by Cymphony)
• Radian6 - thanks to @davidalston, @RichardMcinnis, and @lebrun on Twitter
• SEER (by VML)
• TruCast (by VisibleTechnologies)
• Umbria

---

The basic requirements are as follows:

Track/Monitor

• Track social media by site and by source (some bloggers post on multiple sites)
• Allow for both branded search ("Jive"), competitors, and general industry terms ("collaboration software")
  • Including advanced search operators (and, or, not) to filter noise
• Weighting/ranking of posts -- some are high impact (ZDNet) some are low impact (personal blogs)

Analyze

• Allow for trend analysis
  • Data import/export to integrate with Google Analytics, Eloqua, and SalesForce traffic & lead data
• Record tone of post (positive, neutral, negative)
• Record meme of post
• Record product discussed in post (Clearspace, Clearspace X, Openfire, etc.)
• Allow for human intervention in automated processes
  
  • Weighting
  • Tone
  • Meme

React/Participate

• Tools for getting involved in external conversations
  • Track replies to comments
• Track offline/back-channel communication (a.k.a. CRM when conversation ends up on email)
  • Depending on the CRM capabilities of the tool, we might also consider integration with SalesForce.com to manage blogger relationships

---

Does anyone have experience with these products and services? Any recommendations? For example, Jason Falls has a great video over on his blog about his visit with Radian6.

Jive Won "Technology of the Year" Award from Infoworld

Jive just won Infoworld's annual Technology of the Year award, for its Clearspace X online community software. Specifically, Clearspace X was recognized as the  "Best Community Platform" in the Applications and Middleware category, alongside other winners like Oracle SOA Suite ("Best Enterprise Service Bus"). Winners were chosen by InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers:

"these Technology of the Year award winners represent the best business process management system, best enterprise service bus, best database middleware, and the best SaaS collaboration and community platforms we tested in 2007."

The award is based on a review of version 1.1.1 earlier in the year, and since then there have been a number of great additions, including:

• Customizable dashboard (users can filter updates & new content they're interested in)
• Customizable interface (admins can drag-and-drop rearrange and add content modules)
• Popular and related content widgets connect blog posts, wiki documents, and discussion threads
• 1-Click sending discussion/forum/blog/wiki content via email

More commentary on the award can be found at:

• Silicon Florist
• Fast Wonder
• Jive Talks

Advanced Operators: Some of My Favorite Tools

The topic for this Advanced Operators session is a roundup of our favorite tools -- online, desktop, or otherwise (paper?). I haven't jumped in for the last few conversations, but after grabbing lunch with Justin, I realized it's been too long! So, that being said, here are some of the tools in my daily arsenal:

Blog tools

• Lijit - I am loving this new widget for my blog (look at the search box, to the right). It is ridiculously simple to setup. Basically, it is a slick interface to build a Custom Search Engine for all your web content (blog, Digg, del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, etc.), and then hook it into your blog sidebar. But it's better than Google CSE alone, as it tracks tons of stats, is readily skin-able, shows a tag cloud of popular searches... And works some magic for users who arrive at your blog via a search engine. If it detects users coming from search, it offers up other content in your network that might also be of interest (try this search, click my blog, and look above the post title -- you don't see that box if you arrive there without performing a search first).
• CLIQ - a new widget coming out of local Portland crew StepChange (with technology from Offermatica), that groups your friend's blogs together into a "CLIQ." Then it shows popular and featured content from your blog and your friends' blogs in the sidebar (based on its tracking algorithms). While it sounds really cool, it is still in private beta and getting some kinks worked out. Like what happens when you want to be part of multiple CLIQs -- I have a few friends who are already involved in another CLIQs, and can't intuitively be involved in mine too. Luckily, the support team has gotten back to me with answers to my questions, so I have been able to find work-arounds. I've been constantly searching for a Featured/Popular Post widget for TypePad, and this finally looks to be the answer! With a social flare.
• coComment - this tool keeps track of conversations you have on other blogs, and lets you know via RSS if people respond to your comments. Then, it can spit out a widget to toss on your blog sidebar, to display your conversations elsewhere.
• Last.fm - Ok, a fun on. Perhaps the best music community I've found online, it tracks everything I listen to with iTunes, Pandora, Yahoo Music Engine, Windows Media Player, and its own player (that has tons of great, free music). Then it ties together all sorts of stats, which can be used on your blog sidebar (see my photo blog -- bottom left sidebar) or on Facebook. It's also a great way to explore new music, and connect with other people who share your tastes.

Other tools

• Snag-it - This one is indispensable. It's the best screenshot tool I've found. I wrote about Snippy earlier, and have since realized that this was totally worth the cost. Not only can it capture entire web pages with auto-scroll, but it makes the print screen button about 300 times more useful -- let's you annotate and markup screenshots on the fly, before saving them as files or copying to the clipboard for use in email, Powerpoint, etc.
• RoboForm - I use this a few times an hour. It saves all my passwords and personal information, and then automatically fills forms online. I don't have to remember passwords any more, and it fills in pretty much any form the Web can throw at you (even has user-defined fields). Most importantly, it's encrypted. But it's also super portable. I sync it to my USB thumbdrive at home, and sync it to my PC at work, so it all flows seamlessly. Plus, it syncs to my Treo, so I have my passwords on the fly when I am at an Internet kiosk or a friend's house.
• DesktopSidebar - While Google, Yahoo (Konfabulator), and a number of other players have rolled out desktop widgets, I still swear by this. For people who live in a Windows world, this by far and away has the best Office/Outlook support for power users (and those of us who follow GTD practices). It puts a heads-up display of all my tasks due the next few days, appointments, scratch pads (notes), multi-snip clipboard, and pretty much anything else you'd really want on your desktop for instant use.

While this list is by no means exhaustive, there are plenty more tools I am in the midst of using, that I could write about: FeedBurner, BlogRoveR & FeedDigest (hat tip to Marshall K for these), Picnik, Wufoo, CrazyEgg, Greasemonkey... so many!

All Your (data)Base Are Belong To Us

Online databases, be warned: you are mine. I just ran across a web broswer from Kirix, called Strata, that's really a "data browser". From their site:

Kirix Strata is a new specialty browser for accessing and manipulating data from the web. View and work with data from web tables, CSV files, and RSS feeds, integrate information from web services to create personal "desktop mashups," browse and work with MySQL, Oracle and other databases.

It's a pretty slick, based on Mozilla's Gecko engine, that's well integrated into the other tools I use (e.g. Office). Beyond being able to automate report creation out of web-based tools, it lets you mashup data from different sources. I am just beginning to test what I can do to (and stats I can generate). Get excited. Does anyone else use other data extraction tools for web-apps? (For example, Selenium IDE).

And, for old times sake, All Your Base... the original video, on YouTube.

Make a Desktop Application out of any Web Service

I've been using a program called Bubbles for some time now, and it's been extremely helpful in my daily routine at work. In a nutshell, it takes web pages and makes desktop applications out of them.

I'm keenly focused on reducing clutter and creating contexts around my workflow (GTD influence here!), so this is a great way to keep Firefox for browsing and research purposes only, and separate all the web services I have open for long periods of time (SalesForce, AdWords MCC, SlimTimer, etc.) into their own "bubbles" -- essentially, their own programs in the task bar that can be hidden and sized independently of the browser. This way I can Alt-Tab switch between applications just like they are separate programs, without cluttering up my browser, which inevitably has 34 tabs open already...

It's especially useful in an agency environment, where I am logged into so many different client accounts, and also my own accounts. With Bubbles, I can have both open at once an not interrupt the flow.  For example, I can have our Google MCC account open in Bubbles, while I have Google Reader open in my browser to read industry news.

The Easiest (Free) Screenshot Tool: Snippy

Ever want to make a quick screenshot to send to a co-worker? Or, make a quick screen-grab to toss into that PowerPoint deck that's due in 30 minutes?

Well, the easiest tool in the world for that is Snippy. Hit F11. Select anywhere on your screen. Open an e-mail. Hit Paste. Done. You can download this simple screenshot tool for free. Doesn't even need an install. Just drop it on your computer somewhere you can find it (say, your Start Menu) and it's ready to go.