Today we released an upgrade to Picture Australia. Most of the improvements were behind the scenes improvements involving building the framework for features that will be implemented in a few months.  One feature that was implemented was an “Add to del.icio.us” link.  

A “share this” link is nothing new for any news site, blog or current affairs site, in fact for these sites it’s nearly essential to get your content out there and distributed as quickly as possible.  So why is this feature virtually absent from the collection searches of most libraries and museums?  Isn’t it an ideal mechanism for promoting the core content from their collections and giving it the opportunity for further exposure, particularly given the difficulties many museums and libraries face getting their collections indexed by search engines?

Picture Australia currently provides what are essentially “pre-configured” searches on particular topics called trails.  These are designed to be easy and topical introductions into the collections.  With the addition of the “share this” link, now any user can create a group of related images, add their own descriptions, tag it however they like and promote it.  For example, a teacher may want to create a group of images for a class they are teaching, or a historical train society may wish to collate all the references to photographs of trains in their area. Through the use of the del.icio.us API, this user generated trail doesn’t even need to be promoted on del.icio.us, it can be incorporated into any site, displaying it in it’s own context.

I’ve just applied the recent Leopard 10.5.2 update to my iMac at work and noticed that there seems to be some CSS rendering issues with Safari when the text-shadow property is applied to text.

text-shadow: #000 2px 2px 1px; before the 10.5.2 update:

text-shadow: #000 2px 2px 1px; after the 10.5.2 update:

Changing the code back to text-shadow: #000 1px 1px 1px; produces the the same effect as before the update, but now older versions of Safari render the text without the shadow. Is the old version or the new version applying incorrect pixel values?

Flickr have just announced The Commons, a collaboration where the Library of Congress has placed over 3000 images from their collection on Flickr. These images have been selected, based upon them not having any known copyright issues.This is similar to what has been done with Picture Australia here at the National Library, but in reverse. Picture Australia incorporates Flickr images with images from Australian cultural institutions - bringing the masses to the museums. The Commons works in reverse, bringing the museums to the masses. This model opens up huge range of possibilities that just aren’t possible with the current version of Picture Australia. Now a user can easily add tags, comments, notes or add location data, greatly enchancing the value of the collections.It’s currently limited to the Library of Congress, but hopefully more museums, libraries and galleries will be added to the project in the near future.

Looking at my Flickr photos it’s easy to see what my 200 most interesting photos are. However, if you have more than 200 photos in your photostream how do you work out what is your least interesting flickr photo? With a little help from the Flickr API you can build a page that will show you your 5 least interesting photos.Try it out and see what your least interesting photos are.

I just applied Apple security update 2007-004 to my powerbook (an ancient G3 Pismo running 10.3.9) & now when it wakes from sleep it doesn’t recognise my airport network. After a reboot it detects the network correctly, but once it goes to sleep again the airport network is lost. Turning the airport card on and off again does nothing, the only thing that resolves the issue is a reboot.If you are running 10.3.9, just be aware of what might happen when you install this update. It’s not a show stopper, but just really inconvenient.Update: 2007-05-02 Apple just released security update 2007-004 v1.1 and that seems to have fixed the problem.

Last Friday I gave a presentation to the participants of Picture Australia on the redesign I have been working on. I always get a little nervous before a talk, but then once I start talking the nerves disappear and everything is fine.Today I had a bad start to the presentation. I was standing in front of the lectern with a mouse and my powerpoint presentation ready to go. I click the mouse to start the presentation & what appears on the screen, but the right click menu! Why is it that as soon as the mouse is taken away from the context of the computer, it is so easy to make a mistake like this. The mental model for the mouse becomes a previous/next series of buttons. To move to the next slide, the natural mapping is to click the right mouse button, bringing up the dreading menu & grinding the presentation to a halt. I wasn’t the only presenter who had problems with this, at least a third of the presenters made the same mistake.Maybe it was just the way that things were set up, the laptop was out of reach. Maybe if it had been closer to the lectern the relationship with the mouse would have been there and things would have gone smoothly.

Over the past few years I’ve done a bit of travelling and in the process have made some informal observations regarding the mobile web.In 2005 I visited Egypt. Everywhere you looked there were satellite dishes. If you were in the city or the desert every house had at least one dish poking through the rubble. At one place I could access the internet via a 4800bps dial up modem, but I always had mobile access. Everyone relied mobile phones. Internet access was the domain of the tourist.In August last year I visited Indonesia. Most of the people I met had mobile phones and many had multiple mobile phones strapped to their belts. Many of them weren’t sleek modern mobile phones, they were the chunky communicator style phones. They all spent their time talking and sending SMS messages, rather than using them for email (I assumed the full keyboad made it quicker to type) or web browsing.During my travels if I was lucky I could use email via my phone (a Sony Ericsson T610), but trying to browse the web was a painful process.One my return to Australia I was given a second hand Sony Ericsson V600i so upgraded and signed up to a 3G account. My world changed. I downloaded Opera mini and suddenly I could easily browse the web, check my emails and upload photos to Flickr. The convenience of having Google Maps available at any time has been worth it’s weight in gold.I really haven’t spent enough time browsing many pages (as the data rates are horrendously expensive), but the immediately obvious thing is that web sites work much better on a mobile device if they are built using valid HTML and CSS, use semantic markup. Even saying this, it’s definitely not an easy experience. It really feels like it’s 1994 again and I’ve just fired up the beta release of Netscape 1.0 - not elegant, but you can see the potential and the usefulness of the technology.I’m now wondering how these initial experiences will change with the introduction of the iPhone with simple access to email & web browsing? For many people in the world where the a mobile phone is still the only form of communication, will it open up a new world to them or will life go on as normal making phone calls & sending SMS messages becuase the infrastructure for easy and affordable internet access doesn’t exist?

Flickr have updated their detail level for images of Canberra on their mapping service. This is going to make geotagging my images much more accurate. Thanks.

Web Directions South is over for another year and what a fantastic event it was.At Web Essentials last year, I thought the focus was on standards and accesibility. This year, talk of standards took a bit of a back seat. This is an incredible leap forward in the last 12 months. I guess at a conference like this, it is now preaching to the converted. We as developers are using standards & educating our clients and collegues to the benefits of standards based design.This year, there was still an emphasis on accesibilty, but the big push was on user experience, whether this be through the visual design, information architecture or user testing. Nearly every speaker spoke about the importance of user testing.The main web directions site has great summary of the speakers - I was too busy soaking it up to take copious amounts of notes.

On Tuesday I’m heading off to Sydney for Web Directions. I can’t wait. If it’s anything like Web Essentials was last year I’m in for a great 4 days. I’ve managed to score a place on the workshops that are being held in the two days leading up to the conferece. On Tuesday I’m doing the workshop with Dan Saffer - Designing for Interaction and on Wednesday I’m doing the Derek Featherstone workshop on accessibility. I remember Dereks talk last year so I’m really looking forward to his workshop & learning from such a switched on guy. I’ve only recently found out about Dan & from what I’ve read it seems like I’ll come away with my brain overflowing with new ideas.