Philoking.comfrom Jason Burns’ perspective…

I have to first thank my buddie’s girl for letting me onto this little jewel. I found it on her blog following a trackback from a comment she had left on mind and I am blown away. The tool is called Inquisitor 3 and it’s basically spotlight for Safari.

This is the results that appeared typing philoking on my mac. Of course it autocompletes as you type and shows you relevant results as well as quicklinks to searches with your default search engine.

According to their site:

Inquisitor… it’s like Spotlight for the web.

Start typing and websites pop up immediately, along with ideas to refine your search.

It’ll autocomplete your words (is it reading your mind?) and you can add more search engines to Safari with customized keyboard shortcuts.

Oh, and it’s free.

Give it a look and I think you will find it difficult to not be impressed by it’s elegant interface and simplicity. Search on!

Download Inquisitor 3

I decided today to make a Vista theme for my blog. I started with a screen shot of Outlook, and opened it in Adobe Photoshop and started simplifying it. Once I had the basics of what I wanted, I had a single flat jpg that looked something like this…

I brought it into back into Photoshop and made a couple slices to create a top header, top fade, repeat fade and footer image, as well as a background fade, and I was able to get started with some html and css.

I laid out the elements and got it all working before I installed Wordpress on my local wampserver and began integrating it into the “default” template.

I spent about an hour adding all of the formatting for the Wordpress generated content to the css file I created when I sliced the image up, and within about 4 hours, give or take, I had it as you see now, well as long as now is June 13th. I am sure I will tweak it more tomorrow and throughout the weekend getting it just how I want.

But there you have it, a tribute to Vista as a Wordpress theme. I want my blog to be a bit unique so I won’t release this out for everyone, although I may make a pink twist on it for Dawngrrl.com.

Hope you like it, and if you are a Mac or Linux fanboy, get over it…I work for Microsoft, remember?

I am designing what I want my next step of my application to look like and do and two things occurred to me that I want to cover.

1. Sometimes you take photos in different places before downloading your card
2. This is 2008 man, you’ve got to support tagging so you can search your photos contextually with the operating system.

With those two features in mind, here are my ideas I will start on tonight and probably not have a working mock up till after the weekend.

And now things get hard…
Gosh, this means I will have to put more thought into how it works. I have quite a few ideas on this short list (which isn’t short at all) and Photo Transfer is going to grow from a file copier to a real photo transfer, sorting, backup and meta-data management system.

First I want to add a filmstrip metaphor at the bottom of the screen that you can use to multi-select or single select the photos that you want to manage.

In keeping with this concept, many photographers like to sort photos in a rating system (e.g. keeper, trash, 1-5, etc.) so it would be nice to be able to sort the work and archive files into that type of file system. That means a big preview screen to make snap judgements on things like focus, exposure, etc.

It also means actual RAW file support which to me means this app has now become Vista only (or XP if you have the right stuff installed) as I will most likely use Windows Presentation Foundation.

Stealing a bit from the iTunes metaphor for managing mp3 meta-data, I want to be able to assign tags, sub-folders and even possibly comments to photos one or many at a time. This means adding EXIF support and a UI for managing a default tag list and a session tag list, also managing the tags currently used on the photos you are working with.

Another gimme’ with adding bulk-edit would be the ability to name and auto-generate named sequences for groups of photos. (laketahoe1.jpg, laketahoe2.jpg, etc.) Again helping file system search capabilities.

I intend to leave real after the fact management to programs like Microsoft Expression Media, but we all know it’s garbage in, garbage out, so if the process of importing your photos cleans up your meta-data, you are better off, also at this point those of us that import to a laptop on the road, then merge to a master archive after the fact get the benefit of keeping it all consistent.

Looks like there is a lot of work and learning ahead for me, and I will likely re-write most of what I have done so far to make it more stable and efficient so I can just plug it into this new UI framework and bolt on features as I go.

Keep an eye on the blog, it should be an interesting ride.