Yesterday I took a look at Google’s Picasa Web Albums offering. I know it’s been around for some time, but after encouragement from various people, it seemed like it was time to finally get some first-hand experience and see what it’s all about.

In true Google fashion, all seems to be heavily optimized and very slick. There is, in fact, no doubt that Google’s Javascript is second to none. Unfortunately the offering still feels very utilitarian.

When using Flickr, one feels more like one is mounting an exhibition of ‘artwork’ for the world to view; screen-furniture is kept to a minimum, the title is emboldened at the top of the page and each image is well spaced. Using Picasa Web Albums, the experience is more like merely ‘throwing’ a miscellaneous set of photos online; the thumbnail view is cluttered, images feel squashed together. Things just feel far less artistic and considered.

However, I am acutely aware that, for many people, the Google approach is far less confusing for viewing photos and better geared to – at the risk of sound like an internet snob – the average user. Certainly, when it comes to uploading, not having to tag photos makes it a much more pleasant experience.

For the time being, I’ll probably keep both Flickr and my Picasa Web Album up-to-date and we can see how they fair against each other:

• Flickr
• Picasa Web Album

Please feel free to comment on your viewing-preferences — it might affect which I decide to stick with in the longer-term ;).

Update: After much deliberation, I’ve decided to stick with Flickr for the time being and have closed down my Picasa Web Album. Better luck next time Google.

For the last couple of weeks — in anticipation of the Apple TV — I’ve been trying to put together a solution for transcoding movies into a format suitable for my iPod, iTunes and Apple TV.

After much tinkering, I have come up with ‘Transmogrify’ which is a collection of Perl, AppleScript and a some Objective C which provides a Folder Action which will convert any movies dropped into a folder to iTunes mp4 files.

I’ll put a page up in the ‘Software’ section when I have a free moment, but for the time being, you can download the installer here.

Once installed, just open the ‘Folder Actions Setup’ dialog and add the Transmogrify script to the desired folder.

Thanks must go to Thomas Sutcliffe who wrote me a little Objective C utility which sets folder icons.

The script contains ffmpeg, the project page for which can be found at http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/.

Some time ago, Chris Gunton asked me to produce a web-based interface to allow people to browse his iTunes Library.

Knowing only perl at the time and having but a limited grasp of XML, I ended up with a somewhat rudimentary and slow solution. Ever since, I’ve been keen to rewrite it in PHP, add support for back ending into a database to speed it up and release it.

Today, I finally drew all that tinkering to a close. If you point your browser here, you can download and use it on your own website. It’s GPL’d, so feel free to tinker as much as you like.

You can also view my iTunes Library should you so wish.

One of the nice things about holidays is that you get a little more time to experiment – I thoroughly enjoyed playing around with my new Canon IXY 800IS (that’s an IXUS for those of you outside Japan) when travelling around Japan for the last couple of weeks.

More specifically, I played around taking a few panoramas. I’ve not yet had a chance to go through them all, but I thought I’d post up a QuickTime of the view from Miyajima.

I’ve been playing around with DoubleTake to do the stitching and have been fairly impressed with the results.

Chatting to Mouse recently, I remembered a little project that he and I had worked on an extremely long time ago…

When I first started programming (in OPL, Psion’s Basic equivalent) I decided it would be quite fun to write a little virtual pet for my Series 5 — nEzumi (from the Japanese, ねずみ for mouse or rat) was born. While the project was a little too ambitious and never saw the light of day, I did manage to pursuade Mouse to look out one of the original animations he did: