Tai Shimizu

On SOPA / PIPA

2012-01-18T09:53:38Z

Most people in this country can’t say that their income is directly and significantly impacted by piracy. I can. The day a cracked IPA of Filterstorm was first posted online, I saw a massive jump in website traffic. I excitedly checked the previous day’s sales numbers, but was disappointed when I saw they were even with the day before. It didn’t take me long to figure out what had happened. Now every time I release an update, I see someone tweeting about a cracked IPA within just a few hours of release.

The solution to piracy is not massive governmental censorship. The solution to piracy is all about releasing quality products at reasonable prices with easy access. If you make people pay exorbitant prices or jump through hoops to buy your product—if you release a movie only on DVD and not for download—it becomes easier to pirate than to purchase, and people will.

Piracy does hurt me, but not nearly so much as it would if I were selling 10 times the prices, or outside of the App Store. The genius of the App Store is in its removal of barriers to purchase and installation.

Contrariwise, SOPA is the stick to my carrot, and an ineffective one at that. If a user uploaded copyrighted material to Vimeo, the Attorney General could require Google, Reddit, and all manner of sites to simply remove all links going not just to the particular video, but to the all of Vimeo, including the Filterstorm tutorial videos I host there. SOPA’s censorship is akin to banning the word “Boeing” because hijackers crashed their planes into the World Trade Center. It does little to stop the problem, but causes a lot of harm to the sites being censored, the sites having to implement the censoring, and everyone who enjoys user created content.

CORRECTION 2012.01.19: My example is incorrect, as vimeo uses the .com TLD and would be classified as domestic. I believe the example would be correct had vimeo’s address been vimeo.jp, for example.

Nikon J1 Review

2012-01-02T12:50:46Z

Note: this review is a work in progress and will be updated over the next few days with more images and details.

Battle lines have been drawn across the camera industry. Micro 4/3 cameras have been resounding successes, Sony is betting on tiny bodies with big sensors (and equally big lenses), and Pentax has its miniature Q. Canon and Fuji still have surprises in store, but with the J1 and V1, Nikon has finally shown its hand.

Nikon J1 with 10mm pancake and iPhone 4S

The J1 is tiny. By itself, the body is close in size to an iPhone 4/4S, but 3 times thicker. It feels significantly smaller than the Micro 4/3s cameras I’ve used, especially when taking the size of lenses into account. Even the Canon G12 is bigger than the J1 despite the Canon’s much smaller sensor. Nikon found a hole in the market, planted a flag, and claimed this newfound territory in their own name.

Nikon J1 with 10mm f/2.8 pancake

Specifications

Nikon's official specs can be found here. I've highlighted a subset below.

Sensor Size	13.2 x 8.8mm 0.52 x 0.35"
Sensor Diagonal	15.9mm / 0.624"
Crop Ratio	2.7
Resolution	3872x2592, 10.1MP
RAW File	12-bit NEF
Shutter Speed	1/16,000–30s
Frame Advance Rate	5fps (manual exposure), up to 60fps (auto)
ISO Sensitivity	100–3200 (6400 extended)
Autofocus	Phase Detect and Contrast Detect
Built-in Flash	YES
Hot Shoe	NO
1 System Multi Accessory Port	NO
Battery	EN-EL15, rated 230 shots
Tripod Mount	1/4" Aligned to lens center
Dimensions	106 x 61 x 30mm 4.2 x 2.4 x 1.2"
Weight	383g / 13.5oz with battery/memory card

Sensor size comparison.

Nikon J1 with 30–110mm f/3.8-5.6

Design

While Fuji looked to classic rangefinders when designing the X100, Nikon seems to have been eyeing the iPhone with envy when designing the J1. The J1 can’t hope to match the pure functional simplicity Jony Ive et al. have created, but cameras are a different beast than phones. The best iPhone camera interface couldn’t hope to compete with an array of buttons and knobs for controlling a camera, just as no amount of buttons and knobs could match a touchscreen for creating masks in Filterstorm.

Nikon J1 with iPhone 4S

The white (it also comes in silver, red, pink, and black) part of the camera is metal, whereas the black on the back is plastic. The metal has a higher quality feeling to it than does the plastic, but in overall it doesn’t feel at all cheap.

The front of the J1 is simplicity itself, with just a single button to release the lens. The front also contains other necessary bits, the lens mount, an autofocus assist lamp, remote trigger IR receiver, and two microphones. The top has three buttons: power, shutter, and a video record button — which oddly only works if you’re in video mode (more on that later). The tripod mount on the bottom is properly aligned with the lens, but the battery cover is a bit flimsy. On one side, you’ll find HDMI and a USB port. I think audio-in as the V1 has would be more useful than HDMI.

The rear buttons in general are comfortably placed for my small hands, so long as the camera is being supported on the bottom by the left hand (which you should be doing anyway). If you hold it with only the right hand, you can shoot fine, but probably won’t be able to change settings.

Nikon J1 with Fuji X100

Performance and Controls

The J1 feels eager to please. It starts up quickly, in approximately the time it takes to move your finger from the power button to the shutter. If you’re using a zoom lens, unlocking and extending the lens will automatically turn the camera on, a nice touch. Unfortunately, locking the lens will not turn the camera back off. It shoots at a fast 5 fps under manual settings and can go up to an amazing 60fps in auto exposure, though the buffer will understandably run out very quickly at that speed. There’s no appreciable shutter lag, everything feels very snappy with one caveat. You cannot turn off image review, which means when you’re not shooting continuously, there’s approximately a 2 second shot-to-shot delay. I hope that will be fixed in a firmware update.

Nikon J1 with 10–30mm f/3.5–5.6

RAW file

Autofocus is fantastic. In decent light when using phase detect, it’s as fast as a good SLR. Things slow down when it has to fall back to contrast detection, but it’s still best in class in terms of speed and accuracy.

Manual focus is okay. It’s controlled by a rotating dial on the back of the camera. It’s probably the best manual focus I’ve used that’s not a focus ring on a lens, but it’s still not as good as having a the real thing. Hopefully Nikon will release some lenses with focus rings, but I’m not holding my breath.

Nikon J1 Back

The back of the camera has a nearly useless mode switch with 4 options: video, still image, best shot selector, and the baffling motion snapshot. For some inexplicable reason, Nikon’s marketing department seems to be in love with the motion snapshot, but it just seems bizarre to me. The video mode option on the dial seems odd to me, too. There is a dedicated video recording button on the top of the camera, but it only works in video mode. It seems to me that the video button on top should simply take a movie with the current still image settings so that no special video mode is necessary. Please write in the comments if you can think of a good reason for Nikon to have done this. You can also take full resolution still images while recording a movie, which unlike the dedicated motion snapshot feature, I could see being useful.

Nikon J1 with 10–30mm f/3.5–5.6

If you want to switch between PSAM modes, you must do so through the fast and well laid out menu system. It’s still not as good as having the dedicated knob, but not terrible, either. The PSAM controls are analogous to those on Nikon’s DSLRs. Instead of having a primary and secondary rotating ring for changing shutter speed and aperture, the two-way switch on the top right acts as the primary control, and the spinning ring on the back acts as the secondary. In Aperture priority, you can press the switch on the top up to increase aperture/down to decrease, while in shutter priority and manual it works to control shutter speed, with the aperture controlled by the rotating ring in manual mode. Exposure compensation is easy to access as well. Since the exposure compensation button is part of a 4-way dial under the ring, you can press it and rotate the ring to change exposure compensation in one quick motion.

My one complaint with is with ISO controls; you have to go through the cameras menus in order to change ISO. The exposure compensation button does nothing in manual mode, and could have potentially been mapped to bring up the ISO menu. It would be a huge help and even makes logical sense as the use can be analogous. The function button on the top currently currently brings up continuous/single shutter controls, an option in the menu to change it to control ISO would also be fantastic. I doubt Nikon will change any of this in a firmware update, but they could.

Image Quality

Image quality reminds me of the D60, but with more noise at low ISOs. It’s an impressive feat for a camera with a sensor a bit under 1/3 the area, even if it does come a generation or two later. Color reproduction and dynamic range are both good. The lenses remind me of Nikon’s DSLR kit lenses, but perhaps a bit better. They’re plenty sharp, but are slow and with a decent amount of distortion. They also focus faster than cheap DSLR kit lenses. I will have more information in coming lens reviews. If you have a program that can read the J1 RAW files, you should look at the difference between some of the RAWs and JPEGs posted. You can get some more detail out of the RAW files than the out of camera JPEGs are producing.

30–110mm @f/5.6, 110mm, 1/80s, ISO560

RAW file

Low light performance is worlds better than point and shoots, probably close to micro 4/3 despite the difference in sensor size, and bad compared to modern DSLRs, as is to be expected. Fast primes would be nice.

30–110mm @f/8, 66.4mm, 1/60s, ISO360

RAW file

Things I Love

Size — It's really tiny, especially when taking lenses into consideration
Performance — It starts up quickly, focuses quickly, has little shutter lag, and has high frame rates with a decent buffer.
Autofocus — Much better than anything I've seen in the class.
Display responsiveness — The LCD has very little lag.
Video — Very little rolling shutter, and video looks good.
Build — It's a great looking and feeling camera.
Unlocking Lens Turns on Camera — As soon as a zoom lens is extended, you're ready to shoot. Nice.
Image Quality — Similar to DSLRs of just a few years ago. Images are a bit noisy at low ISO, but there's a lot of detail and dynamic range captured.
Sound — Or more accurately, lack of sound. It's very quiet once the beeps are disabled through a simple menu setting

Things I Think are Just Okay

Manual Focus — It's much better than I expected it to be without focus rings on the lenses, but focus rings on the lenses would be still be better. Thankfully, I don't think there's anything design flaw preventing Nikon from releasing lenses with focus rings in the future.
Price — It sets you back about the same as an entry level DSLR. You pay for the size.
Display Quality — It's not bad, the V1's is better.

Things I Hate

Mode Selector Dial — It could have been useful, it is not. PSAM should be there.
No dedicated control for ISO — Aperture and Shutter Speed both get dedicated controls in Manual, but ISO must be handled through the menus.
Locking lens does not turn off camera — Not a huge problem, but it would be nice. The camera can detect when the lens has been locked, so this could be fixed in a firmware update.
No Bracketing — I don't bracket too often, but it's good to have. This could potentially be fixed in a firmware update.

Who It's For

Photographer's Camera — If you want a small but capable camera to always have by your side, The J1 can fill that niche well. Thom Hogan and Rob Galbraith both prefer the V1 which I haven't used. It certainly has its advantages but is bigger and lacks built-in flash.
Parents — Lots of parents buy entry level DSLRs because they want high quality pictures of their kids. The J1 is a great camera for that market, likely better than a DSLR in most cases.
For Anyone Else — Similar to above. It's probably a great camera for a member of the point & shoot crowd who wants something nicer, but doesn't necessarily want to get into photography as a serious hobby.
Mountain Unicycling from Canada to Mexico to Fight Human Trafficking — If you want to minimize size and weight and maximize quality, it's about the best out there.

Nikon J1 with 10mm f/2.8 pancake

RAW file

Conclusion

I’ve quite enjoyed shooting with the J1 so far, and will be sad to give it up. Alas, it was purchased for my brother to take with him on his aforementioned unicycling trip. He needs something light with good image (and video) quality for the trail, and I can’t think of a better option, though the Fuji X10 and X100 might both be decent choices, too. Most of my complaints are about the fact that I’m not the target consumer for the J1—I want easier access to manual options and the J1 wasn’t built for that. However, the V1 was supposed to be, and all my complaints about controls are identical for that camera.

Despite the complaints given, the J1 is a fantastic camera. The general responsiveness, especially of autofocus makes it feel closer to a DSLR than other mirrorless cameras. I don’t believe there is anything of comparable size that can match the image quality and performance. Certainly Micro 4/3 cameras can match or best the IQ, but when lenses are taken into account they’re not too different from a small DSLR in size. It has rough edges, but is a great little camera.

Arbitrary Numerical Rating: 4.5 of 5

More Photos

CX Lenses vs. 50mm (FX), 18–200mm (DX), & 80–200mm (FX)

Butterfly, 10–30mm f/3.5–5.6 @f/5.6, 30mm, 2/333s, ISO400

RAW file

Nikon J1 iPhone 4S

Nikon J1 with 10mm f/2.8 pancake

Nikon J1 iPhone 4S

Nikon J1 with 10mm f/2.8 pancake

RAW file

30–110mm @f/5.6, 110mm, 1/30s, ISO2000

RAW file

Hayden Planetarium 10mm f/2.8 pancake, @f/2.8, iso 100, 1/160s

RAW file

30–110mm @f/5.6, 110mm, 1/60s, ISO1600

RAW file

30–110mm @f/6.3, 110mm, 1/250s, ISO125

RAW file

Nikon 1 System Impressions

2011-12-30T17:44:24Z

Update: My J1 review is available here

It’s been a long time since I’ve reviewed anything on my blog, but I’ve been playing with a Nikon J1 and am going to try to get reviews up for the J1 and 3 lenses: the 1 Nikkor 10mm f/2.8 pancake, the 10–30mm f/3.5–5.6 VR, and the 30–110mm f/3.8–5.6 VR.

Nikon J1 with 10mm pancake and iPhone 4S

The J1 is a tiny camera, perfect for when you need to save space while mountain unicycling from Canada to Mexico. By itself, the body is close in size to an iPhone 4/4S, but 3 times thicker. It feels significantly smaller than the Micro 4/3s cameras I’ve used, especially when taking the size of lenses into account. Even the Canon G12 is bigger than the J1 despite the Canon’s much smaller sensor.

Nikon J1 with 30-110mm f/3.8-5.6

What I’m trying to get at here, is that Nikon found a hole in the market, planted a flag, and claimed this newfound territory in their own name. There has been a large gap in sensor size between the very high end point and shoots, and the existing mirrorless market which has quickly become incredibly competitive. Excepting Canon, most of the industry has weighed in, from Micro 4/3, Sony NEX, and Pentax’s tiny Q, to Fuji’s runaway success with the X100 foreshadowing their future interchangeable lens system. Unlike the X100 and some Micro 4/3 cameras, though, Nikon has gone with a very modern design, eschewing classic styling. It looks sleek, is extremely responsive, and has one of the best menu systems I’ve seen on a camera, but some old-style dials would certainly help.

Nikon J1 Back

The mode selection dial on the back is basically useless. All it’s good for is changing from still images to video, and that could have been done by using the video button on top. To me, it seems like engineering wanted to put PSAM there, but marketing wouldn’t have it as it might displace the prominence of their baffling motion snapshot mode.

It isn’t as bad as that sounds, though. The menus make changing PSAM modes only slightly more annoying than if they were on that dial, and manual is surprisingly easy to control. The switch on top controls shutter speed, and the spinning dial on the back controls aperture. A third control for ISO would make me incredibly happy.

Hayden Planetarium 10mm f/2.8 pancake, @f/2.8, iso 100, 1/160s

RAW file

I think Nikon has a winner in the 1 system, especially if future versions put more focus on manual control. I’ll have more details on controls and image quality in my J1 review, so stay tuned!

35mm Equivalencies for Lens Focal Lengths

The CX sensor format used by the 1 system has a 2.7x crop ratio. Below are some conversions to 35mm focal lengths:
10mm -> 27mm
30mm -> 81mm
110mm -> 297mm

I’ve updated my Focal Length Calculator to show the Nikon 1 crop.

Thank You, Steve Jobs

2011-10-05T23:37:43Z

Among my earliest memories is buying a Mac Plus with my parents, which served faithfully along with the many Macs I’ve owned and relied upon throughout my life. It may or may not be that my Macs were responsible for my choice to pursue an education in Computer Science, I cannot say; regardless, the state of the entire computer industry at the time of my education was largely of his influence.

Not long after college, the radical shift in software distribution created by iPhone and the App Store allowed me to become independent—to start a life writing software for myself, to be successful.

His impact has been immeasurable, and he will be missed.

Tai Shimizu

Building a Better Browser

2011-08-10T00:10:21Z

EDIT: A public beta build is now available here.

Goodbye to an Old Friend

For years I used The Omni Group’s venerable OmniWeb as my primary browser. OmniWeb had a number of features I love: thumbnail tabs, address bar text shortcuts, and integration with OS X services. Unfortunately, few people are willing to pay for a browser and The Omni Group made the very understandable decision to halt active development in 2009. I kept using it for a year or so after that but sooner or later I had to leave it behind and find a replacement.

Out with the Old…

Opera, Firefox, and Chrome all have a lot to offer, but none feel like Mac apps. All use the ugly legacy style scrollbar in Lion, and you cannot use OS X’s define word popover on website text. Safari has been the browser I’ve been using most recently. I love the back/forward scrolling in Lion and I’ve remedied the lack text shortcuts by using Alfred, but I still miss thumbnail tabs and don’t like the address bar.

…And in with the New

My browser project was initially made as a proof of concept. A week ago I tweeted a video of what I had made that day. I did it for fun — to give an idea of how I wanted a browser to look and feel so that were I to complain about the lack of a browser catering to my desires, I could point to something concrete. With WebKit handling the difficult part about writing a browser, it wasn't long before I had something usable. I originally planned to stop the project after that day, but continued working each night after concluding work on Filterstorm. I even gave it a name. Torii.

Torii are Japanese gates that mark the entrance to shrines — the boundary between the profane regular world, and the holy. Like it’s eponym, Torii is the gateway between our world and that of the internet.

Scrolling to the previous page in Torii

The Interface

While you can hide the address bar in any browser, the interface for doing so is usually implemented as an afterthought. There may be an ugly sheet, or popup window that comes up when you access it, and it feels worse than keeping it locked to the top of the window. Really, though, there’s no good reason to keep it visible all the time.

The information it presents isn’t very useful, and since you have to click or use a keyboard command to edit it anyway, why not simply keep it off the screen until you want it? Torii does exactly that. You can use ⌘L to access it like in any other browser, or click on the tab to bring it up.

The address bar searches your history and favorites as you type, and tells you the resulting action if you hit return. Typing an address works as usual, you can type a word or phrase to search for it as in other browsers, or use a shortcut “w torii” to go directly to the wikipedia page for torii. You can use the up and down keys to scroll through the history search results, or you can use the tab button to go directly to the first history search result, saving you a precious key stroke. Back/forward controls, as well as the close button all appear when the mouse hovers over the tab, both giving them a stronger visual connection to the content they are affecting, and allowing you to use the back/forward controls on tabs in the background.

Hovering over tab shows back/forward controls

Anyone who regularly uses side thumbnail tabs knows they hold a lot of advantages over the regular sort. Even when the thumbnail is small, seeing a webs it’s color scheme can let you very quickly identify the tab you want. Scrolling with many tabs works better, as you get a list that scrolls downwards like a webpage, rather than either the rather ugly horizontal tab scrolling or list of tabs that won’t fit. Closing many tabs at once using the mouse works better, as the tabs are of uniform size and the close button for the next tab will always fall in the same place as where it was for the tab you just closed. Firefox has fixed this for horizontal tabs by making them not resize until you move the mouse away. It’s a clever solution, but not as elegant.

Tabs display loading progress

Something I haven’t before seen in a tabbing interface is using the background of the tab as a progress bar. Combined with thumbnails which update during the loading process, it gives you a very strong visual indication of the loading progress of all your tabs.

Future Plans

At this point I’m not sure where I’ll go with the project. I’m already using Torii regularly for browsing, but there are a ton of tiny details that need to get done. The download manager is barely functional, there’s no form completion, and no extension system. The Omni Group stopped developing OmniWeb for a reason. There’s a plethora of good, free browsers on the market, so why pay? The one thing that’s changed since then is the App Store, perhaps there is a market there.

I do hope to release a free public beta at some point in the near future.

A Third Time with Charm

2011-06-13T15:37:20Z

Thoughts on the Development of Filterstorm 3

When the last major update of Filterstorm went live, I still had a day job and Filterstorm Pro was nothing more than a concept. Indeed, it was that update — version 2.5 — which prompted me to quit and allowed me the financial stability to write FSPro . Of course, this means iPhone users who have been the majority of sales since 2.5 have not seen any major update, nor any update at all since last November.

Filterstorm Pro was never meant to be standalone. From day one It was considered the foundation of Filterstorm 3; a new, better project built with the lessons learned from the original two versions. When I started writing Filterstorm less than a year and a half ago, I had no experience with iOS. My initial naïveté would have caused problems had I continued expanding upon that initial code base.

FS3 Launch Screen

Interface Introspection

With the release of FSPro two months ago, all my time since has been spent doing two things: eliminating the launch bugs FSPro, and working on FS3. Much of this work has already found its way into FSPro. Real-time previews, blend modes, split previews, and the color overlay mask view were all part of this process. Most of the work, however, has been on the iPhone interface.

New Sliders on iPad (overlay blended blur)

Both iPad and iPhone get an entirely new interface with this release. The difference is that most of the work for iPad was already done for FSPro. Furthermore, iPhone’s interface was never nearly as good as that of iPad. The big problem was that iPad’s interface had basically been crammed in to fit on iPhone’s screen. It needed to instead be its own separate entity; it was finicky. Where the tab drawer was redesigned on iPad to be more space efficient, it needed to be eliminated entirely on iPhone. Where FSPro had kept something almost identical to FS2’s floating palette, it needed to be redesigned entirely on iPhone. In fact, I liked the new iPhone sliders so much that made a very late change (3 days ago) to the iPad interface and am now using a modified version of the new sliders there, too.

Popovers on iPhone

I decided to make my own popovers for use in FSPro rather than using the ones provided by Apple for two reasons. You can’t customize the appearance of the built-in popovers, and they can’t be used on iPhone. It was a great decision; popovers are fantastic on iPhone. They’re quicker than using modal sheets (the things that slide up from the bottom), and are perfect for displaying smaller bits of quickly-dismissed information and buttons.

Making the Grade

In my blog post for the release of FSPro, I stated several design goals which I’ll repost here:

Reduce the number of taps and complexity of gestures required to do anything.
Devote as much space to the image as possible
Eliminate any unnecessary color from the interface as it may distort the perception of white balance
All features should be easily discoverable
Discoverable features may have less obvious gesture-based shortcuts for power users

So did I succeed with the new interface on iPhone? Mostly. The main navigation does take slightly fewer taps to get places in FS3 than FS2. Also buttons are larger/easier to press in general, and everything looks much nicer.

B&W sliders no longer cover half the image on iPhone

When applying filters, however, extra taps can be required to switch between slider settings. This was a tradeoff in order to accomplish goal number 2, to devote more space to the image, and the image remains big and beautiful when doing things like B&W where much of the image used to be covered. Other tools, like curves, take up the same amount of space as before, but the curve control itself is larger without covering more of the picture.

The last two points were less successful. I think things are a bit more discoverable than in FS2, the home screen labels I have added should help with that, along with better visibility of features. However, the learning curve is probably still higher than I would like it. I am always surprised when people don’t simply tap on buttons to find out what they do, and instead avoid them as they are unsure. Text documentation and videos should help with this, but there remains room for improvement.

Final Thoughts

Refinement is something I’m constantly striving for and missing. I always reach a point where the new version is much nicer than the old, and will therefore be of great value to existing users. However, this point is always well before things have truly been done right.

Apple’s behavior in this regard makes them both great and bemoaned. They famously wait to add features like copy/paste on iPhone, but (usually) get it right when they finally do. People complain that feature X doesn’t exist yet, but when it comes, feature X ends up better for the wait. I have been acting like most companies, releasing feature X when it is of benefit to the user, not when it is perfect. Filterstorm 3 has been a long time coming, but the wait has brought it towards my goal of refinement — at least a little bit.

NECSS 2011

2011-04-12T10:22:40Z

Photos from NECSS 2011

Phil Plait's Keynote

Eugenie Scott

Carl Zimmer

Todd Robbins

The Long Road to Pro Part 2

2011-03-20T21:16:00Z

Continued from yesterday

Filterstorm Pro. It's almost here. Finally.

The plan from the beginning of Filterstorm Pro was to start from scratch, importing and modifying classes from Filterstorm 2.6 as necessary. In the end, around ¼ the code is as it was in Filterstorm 2.6. The rest has been rewritten or heavily modified.

The Tabs as They First Appeared

The very first piece of code I wrote specifically for the new project was the new tab drawer. The Filterstorm drawer helped simplify things when it was introduced, but also always took up more space than I liked. FSPro’s tab drawer is much smaller, and disappears completely when previewing image adjustments or applying masks.

This is related to a few of the sometimes conflicting design goals I always keep in mind with Filterstorm.

Reduce the number of taps and complexity of gestures required to do anything.
Devote as much space to the image as possible
Eliminate any unnecessary color from the interface as it may distort the perception of white balance
All features should be easily discoverable
Discoverable features may have less obvious gesture-based shortcuts for power users

Evolution of Tabs

In keeping with these ideas, the tab drawer was shrunk, and a toolbar added for single-tap access to things not related to the content of the major tabs. Similarly, all the canvas controls require one or two fewer taps as compared to Filterstorm 2 thanks to placing the controls within the tab itself.

The filter controls, however, both in keeping with showing the maximum amount of image possible and due to the fact that only one can be applied at a time remain as in Filterstorm 2. It takes one extra tap to hide the tab drawer and brings up a hud containing the controls.

The Library

The library was built with similar design goals. One tap to select, two to open, tap and hold to see image options. You can also pinch open to get a quick fullscreen view of an image in order to quickly rate it especially when you want to decide which of similar images is best.

With the extra time of not having a day job, I was able to put a lot more time into detail. I created popovers that match the look of the app and dim the background to emphasize focus. Transition animations are much more prevalent than in Filterstorm, adding a layer of polish. I was able to create a custom photo picker showing larger thumbnails of images making it easier to find the ones you want. FSPro is — and soon Filterstorm 3 will be — far closer to my goal of the definitive iPad photo app than any previous incarnation.

Metadata: Now a First Class Citizen

IPTC metadata was not part of Filterstorm when it was first released. It was added by request of users, but it always felt like an afterthought; this is no longer the case. Photojournalists were always in mind when creating FSPro, and I wanted to make metadata entry not only as quick as possible, but flexible enough to meet a variety of workflows. You can create presets of IPTC data to batch apply to images. You can also simply select a number of images and modify their IPTC data all at once. As everyone has different requirements as to which fields they use, you can choose which fields appear in the interface so that you can quickly see only the fields relevant to you.

Export Redefined

Among the most vocal complaints about Filterstorm was the lack of Dropbox and Flickr export. Not only does FSPro fix this problem, but also allows you to have as many FTP export options as you like and gives you the ability to create FTP folders at the time of export. Of course there are more image services I would like to support, but FSPro has laid the foundation for adding these in the future, both for FSPro and Filterstorm 3 when it is released.

Finally I would like to thank my beta testers. They are a fantastic group of photojournalists and photo enthusiasts whose differing needs and workflows expanded my views as to how people use Filterstorm, and found numerous bugs that may have made it into the release version without them. FSPro certainly owes much to their efforts.

The Long Road to Pro Part 1

2011-03-19T16:33:36Z

Filterstorm Pro. It's almost here. Finally.

At this time last year, Apple had just begun reviewing iPad apps for the store. I had begun working on Filterstorm as soon as soon as the SDK was available in January, and at that time was nearly ready for submission — or so I thought.

For a long time I had wanted to write an iPhone app, but never really knew what I should do. iPad was different. The moment I saw it I wanted to write the definitive photo editor for it. It was my first iOS app and my experience with Cocoa on Mac was limited to personal projects, nevertheless I continued with my lofty goal. I submitted Filterstorm to Apple, was approved on March 31, and was live on April 1 (iPad was released on April 3).

It’s hard to overstate how stressful that month was. There were a number of memory problems that didn’t manifest in the simulator, and the speed was much, much worse than I had expected. I worked as hard as I could to fix everything. The 1.0.2 update was released onto the store just 2 days after I got my iPad. Version 1.0.3 made it onto the store 5 days after that, and 1.0.4 followed only 3 days later. Things had massively improved by 1.0.4, and I allowed a bit more time to elapse before version 1.1 was released — the first to contain new features.

Version 1.0.1 in all its glory

A year later it’s mind-boggling to think that I was working a full-time job and had 5 releases on the store in a single month.

The next few months brought several more feature updates including gradients, a price tag, and an increasingly over-crowded interface that hadn’t made much sense in the first place. Despite all this, I firmly believe Filterstorm was the most powerful photo editing app on iPad, and I had the immense pleasure of getting featured in staff favorites (80,000 free downloads) and a flattering writeup from Mac Life.

It was around this time that people started talking to me about IPTC information. Captioning was first an option in 1.4, which also brought email and FTP support. I liked the idea of Photojournalists using FS to transmit images from the road, but at this time I was busy thinking about how to make the interface clearer with version 2 and I was still working a full-time job. That market wasn’t — and couldn’t be — my real target at the time.

Version 2.0

Version 2.0 was released in mid-August. It brought the now-familiar basic interface layout (the drawer), large image reprocessing, and automations. It was met with mixed reactions; the new interface was clearer, but also took up more space, especially as controls for curves, hue, etc. appeared within the drawer rather than floating HUDs. It wasn’t very pretty, but it was much more capable.

iPhone, Finally.

I immediately started working on the iPhone version after 2.0 was done. The iPhone market was crowded, but everyone wanted an iPhone version, myself included. I had a lot of trouble scaling the interface down to the tiny screen, and while I am extremely happy that I was able to maintain all the features from the iPad version, I’ve never been very satisfied by how finicky it is on the tiny screen.

This was, though, the proverbial straw to the camel. I had been making slightly more money on Filterstorm than at my job since it launched, but money from iPhone sales turned the security of my day job into a liability eating away at my programming hours. I gave notice a couple weeks later, on October 1, and worked my last day on October 30.

By this time I knew I was going to write Filterstorm Pro. My original goal with Filterstorm was to make the definitive iPad photo editing software. With the iPhone version out — and after several conversations with photojournalists — I expanded that goal to encompass mobile photography workflow.

My first month of freedom was spent making sure that everything was working well with the regular version so that I could concentrate on FSPro with a minimum of distractions. With that out of the way, (and some time off to work on Light Compressor), I was finally able to concentrate on Pro.

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I was originally going to write this all in one chunk, but that took longer than expected. Tomorrow (hopefully) I’ll post about the development of Filterstorm Pro.

Edit: The continuation is now available here

Fitts’s Law, Touchscreens, and Filterstorm Cropping

2010-11-01T09:44:51Z

The official Twitter app’s (née Tweetie) innovative pull-to-refresh system has been a big hit, one copied by many apps. If you’re not familiar with the design, the screenshot below shows the interface. You have a list of tweets like in any twitter (or list based) app, but instead of hitting a button to refresh, you pull down the list just past where it ends and it will refresh.

Tweetie’s ‘Pull-to-Refresh’ Interface

Though I’ve read of distaste for the feature from some, I’m personally a big fan and have had it on my mind while working on Filterstorm. The reason it’s so fantastically useful isn’t hard to understand; in other apps I have to move my thumb into a relatively awkward position to hit a button at the bottom or top of the screen, but using Twitter’s system, you can put your finger nearly anywhere on the screen and simply drag down a bit.

In interface design, this property is called Fitts’s law. Loosely, Fitts’s law states the closer to, and larger the target for the pointer, the faster the pointer can reach the target. Since we’re talking about accomplishing a goal — refreshing the contents of a list — I would add the complexity of the gesture as a parameter to the amount of time it takes. Tapping is easier than swiping is easier than pinching, with a number of other gestures in the spectrum. In Twitter’s case, swiping is a bit more complex of a gesture than tapping, but that’s overshadowed by the other two variables. The distance to the list of tweets is going to be very small, since the list takes nearly the entire screen, and the size is huge.

This brings us to cropping. Cropping, like nearly all of Filterstorm’s tools, was originally designed for use on iPad, and like many of Filterstorm’s tools, did not make the transition to iPhone well. It’s accomplished by moving control points along the cropping box to scale the size, or using a center point to move the box; zooming in and out does not alter the crop. The problem on iPhone were that the control points on the corners were too large, obscuring much of the image making you zoom in and zoom out to help see what you’re doing. Worse yet, the drawing method is slow on the retina display.

Old Cropping Interface

New Cropping interface

The new cropping interface is much cleaner. The lines are less obtrusive than the large box, the irrelevant toolbar no longer shows at the bottom, and it’s faster and easier to use. Almost the entire screen can be used for pinching or flicking the image to position it in the cropping rectangle.

Old Ratio Picker

The old cropping interface was a two step process, using the interface above, you choose the cropping ratio and whether or not you want to be locked into that cropping ratio, then you crop.

New Ratio Picker

The new interface never asks us this first step unless we want it to. Tapping the show ratio button will at any time bring up the cropping ratio boxes (defaulted to the image’s original ratio), and then you can swap the values or put in your own and the cropping lines will move to match.

Now that I have moved to working on Filterstorm full time, I’m going to be spending more time cleaning up existing features to make them better. The new cropping interface will be out when Filterstorm 2.6 is released along with new features including borders and double exposures.

The Legendary Nikon SP

2010-09-23T21:28:24Z

Back before the Nikon F changed everything and photographers adopted the SLR as the camera of choice, rangefinders dominated the world. In the late 1950s, Nikon set its sights on the top of the market — the Leica M3 — and created the SP which would go on to become the basis of the Nikon F.

The story of the SP as it relates to me is much less grandiose. I’m too young for it to be a purchase for nostalgia sake, and I have no desire to be a camera collector; my relationship with cameras is that I use them to take pictures. Now, I’m not saying that I’m abandoning my D700 for an SP, but I’ve not really shot with rangefinders before and I want to see what all the fuss is about. I could have gotten something much cheaper, but who could deny the allure of what may be the best looking camera ever?

The SP’s build quality is fantastic. Like a precision watch, it exudes a feeling of quality and purpose. Everything has a reason to be, the styling is defined simply by both the mechanics and how the photographer is meant to interact with it. I’ve used many manual cameras, and much of this is true of others, but the rangefinder mechanism is what really sets it apart from everything else I’ve used.

The front of the SP is dominated by this long viewfinder window. Something odd for any camera, and largely the reason I think it looks so good. The window is elongated because of another oddity: it has 2 viewfinders. The primary one, with brightlines for 50mm, 85mm, 105mm, and 135mm, and a smaller wide-angle finder for 28mm and 35mm lenses without an external finder. This allows it to have a nice massive viewfinder with a 1x zoom factor on the primary window, while still being able to frame for 28 and 35mm lenses. Though if you’re spending much of your time at the wider angles, that viewfinder isn’t nearly as nice. Having a 1x magnification finder means I can keep both eyes open while shooting and things look perfectly normal. I keep both eyes open on SLRs at times, too, but it’s much more natural this way. However, being left-eye dominant means I do have trouble focusing without closing the other eye.

I’m not sure how bright the rangefinder originally was on my SP, but I know they dim over time. I haven’t had much trouble seeing it to focus so far, but I’ve only had this camera a few hours.

In front of the shutter release in the picture above you can see this table saw-like device. This is for focusing the lens, something I find amusing to do from the camera body. Unfortunately, it also feels somewhat like a table-saw against my fingers; I hope originally it was a bit smoother to turn.

Now all that’s left is for me to load it up with film and do the one thing that matters: shoot with it. I’ve been looking forward to the digital mirrorless interchangeable lens camera market expanding (and can’t wait for the Fuji X100), but maybe if the SP helps me take photos that look as good as it does, I won’t need to wait.

Announcing Filterstorm 2

2010-07-06T08:48:11Z

I can’t believe it’s been 2 months since I’ve posted here on my blog. Filterstorm has really been eating up that much of my time. If you’ve been following Filterstorm on Twitter, you know I’ve been talking a lot about Filterstorm 1.5 and all the work I’ve been doing on it. Well, today I’m renaming it Filterstorm 2, since it’s such a massive overhaul of the original version.

I’ll go through a quick sequence of screenshots of my process for a photo I took yesterday of a snow leopard trying to stay cool.

Above is the original photo, taken with my Nikon 85mm f/2.8 PC tilt/shift lens. It’s very low contrast largely due to the glass the photo was taken through.

Here’s the photo loaded into Filterstorm 2. The first thing you’ll notice if you’ve used Filterstorm before, is that the top bar is gone, and now there’s a bar on the side. Rather than buttons that reveal popovers which cover the image, this bar pulls out a drawer which covers the image.

In the old versions of Filterstorm, when you were making, for example, a curves adjustment, the popover would almost certainly be covering part of the image. If you wanted to see that part of the image, you’d have to exit the popover, and reposition the image. The new drawer can be opened or closed at any time, hiding the controls whenever you want to see more of the image.

Here I’ve pulled out the drawer, and opened up the Automations menu (the gear icon). Automations are saved sequences of edits that you can re-apply to any image. What’s showing here is “Enhance” and “Vintage”, what are for now the only built-in automations.

If you’ve edited an image in a way you will want to do to a number of other images, open up the automations menu, and hit the save button on the bottom. It will let you name a new automation based on what you’ve done to the image you’re working on.

Here I’m applying the “Enhance” automation, which applies some tone mapping and curves adjustment.

This is the result of my built-in enhance button. The contrast level is much better than in the original.

Here I’ve pulled out the drawer again, and tapped on the luminance button, to open up the luminance controls. I’m planning on darkening the background to make the snow leopard pop more, so I’ve pulled the curves down.

In Filterstorm 1, I would first choose brush mode, (or color range mode, or gradient mode), then set my adjustment to the way I wanted it, but things have changed in Filterstorm 2. Now the filter is always the first step. So when I adjust my curves, I have 2 buttons on the bottom to use to apply it. The “Apply” button applies the filter to the whole image, wheras the “Apply with Mask” button lets me use the brush, gradient, and color range modes.

Here I’ve hit “Apply with Mask”. You can see the toolbar has changed. This is what it looks like in what I call “masking mode” which contains all our old controls. The beauty here, is now I can switch between the modes and apply the same adjustment in multiple ways. I can apply it via gradient, and then take my brush and add the filter to different areas of the picture, too. I could also take my eraser, and remove part of how the effect was applied by gradient. This makes all the tool modes, especially color range mode, much more flexible and powerful.

Here I’ve closed the drawer (still in masking mode, you can see the indicator shows I’m brushing), and have brushed on my curve change to the background. Now the ground beneath the snow leopard is more natural, and the area above his paws is less distracting.

The check and x buttons at the bottom of the toolbar take me out of mask mode. The check button will approve my masking changes, and the x button will cancel them.

Another new ability in Filterstorm 2 is one a lot of people have asked for: text. I’ve opened up the text controls here, and you can see the default text has popped up. Like the default suggests, I’m going to use this for a watermark.

Here I’ve placed the text and am typing in my name.

The text tool has the ability to change the size, typeface, color, alignment, and opacity of the text. You can also use text in masking mode. This allows you to apply effects such as having the text fade in with a gradient. I’ve chosen a translucent green for this image. Text works with the automation tool, so if you tend to put watermarks on your image, you position the text the way you like it, and save an automation so you can do it quickly every time.

This “Save Large Image” button is a placeholder button for a very big feature of Filterstorm 2. Filterstorm 2 increases the maximum dimension of an image to 3048px, which makes the final version of this image 6.2 megapixels, good enough for web and print up to a pretty decent size.

iPad is very limited on RAM, so the export process takes almost everything out of RAM, including the image that was being displayed and shows you a progress indicator. This image took about 40 seconds to export.

And here it is, the 6.2 megapixel final image exported from the current beta of Filterstorm 2. It’s still a few weeks away, but is a fantastic update. I hope you’re looking forward to it!

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals

2010-04-24T10:47:05Z

This is my first update entirely from my iPad. I edited the photos on the iPad on Filterstorm, uploaded them via FTP and FTPOnTheGo and am typing this up in Safari on iPad. Typing up the post certainly isn’t as convenient as on my Mac, but the rest of the process was a joy, and if I had my keyboard dock with me, this part wouldn’t be bad, either.

All photos were taken with the Nikon 300mm f/4.5 ED-IF

This is my first photo post in over a month. I’ve been concentrating so much on Filterstorm development in my time outside of work. Thankfully I was dragged out by some friends to this free Grace Potter and the Nocturnals concert outside Grand Central for Earth day.

I unfortunately didn’t really get the chance to enjoy the free concert very much, as my D700 was having problems. It won’t review photos on the LCD after taking them, won’t format the memory card, and won’t enter live view. I was shooting the concert in the hope the pictures were actually being saved. Thankfully they were.

If anyone’s experienced this problem before, drop a comment or send an e-mail. I’m gonna try a firmware update/restore and see if that does the trick. If not, I’ll be sending it out for repair.

Filterstorm Update

2010-04-10T21:58:14Z

Filterstorm 1.0.3 came out today, and brought much needed speed improvements. I also submitted 1.0.4, which is probably about where I should have been a week ago for iPad’s launch. This means work begins on 1.1; finally I get to work on new features.

All this work has kept me from posting anything photography related here in some time, but I do promise I’ll get back to that once things settle down a bit.

Filterstorm Tutorial

2010-04-06T07:33:58Z

The Filterstorm tutorial I put on this site a bit ago now has a new incarnation, now with video of it being done on an actual iPad with Filterstorm 1.0.2 (available now).

http://filterstorm.com/tutorial.tai