I thought that this image of some slide film would be appropriate for PhotoFriday this week. It works (to my mind) for two reasons. First, the theme is “Round” and the shape of the film canister is, well, round. Secondly, Fuji Sensia is in the news as it has been discontinued. It’s quite sad news. In the days before I went digital it’s the film that used the most.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Warm.” I’m entry number 195.

Related posts:

1. Sky
2. Dead of Night
3. Warm

“Warm,” this weeks PhotoFriday, is a bit of an alien concept here in the UK so I had to go a little further afield in order to find a picture to represent this weeks theme. This was taken in Tennessee, USA.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “The Street.” I’m entry number 215.

Related posts:

1. Crooked
2. Sky-High
3. Damaged

This weeks PhotoFriday, “The Street,” was one where, unusually, I had quite a few options that I was happy with. In the end I figured that it had to be somewhere where pretty much all of life happens on the street. There were a few images taken in Vietnam that came close, but I like this one in Havana, Cuba, because everyone was completely oblivious to my presence; life goes on even when there are nosey tourists with cameras.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Photoshop Skills.” I’m entry number 167.

Related posts:

1. Photoshop Skills
2. Friend
3. Found Objects

I nearly didn’t take part in this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, “Photoshop Skills,” as I’m not a big Photoshop user. I tend to tweak images, enhance the colours, maybe a little dodging and burning, but nothing that would show my Photoshop skills — the whole point of my edits are normally that you can’t see them!

Then I remembered that I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the years trying to make the perfect panorama. The above image, taken in Siena, Italy, is perhaps the best that I’ve managed. (I’ve used a variant of this one before for PhotoFriday.)

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks PhotoFriday challenge, “Best Friend.” I’m entry number 173.

Related posts:

1. The Street
2. From My Past
3. Sunshine

For the past few weeks I have spent almost as much time in Switzerland as I have at home. Unfortunately with business trips you can never guarantee that you see anything more of the place than the airport, and office and a hotel¹.

Fortunately I did finish “early” a couple of days though and the weather did manage to cooperate.

My first time in the city I arrived at the office in a taxi and walked five minutes to the hotel. Dinner wasn’t far away either. I had no impression of the orientation or size of the place. Well known for being next to a lake, I couldn’t have told you which direction to find it.

It turns out that it’s a very pretty, small city. When I did figure out the lay of the land I realised that nothing was very far away even on foot.

On the last day I went to Zeughauskeller for dinner.

Perhaps not the healthiest of options but, I am told, traditionally Swiss. (The yellow stuff on the right is called Rösti, basically a potato pancake.) A pretty good way to round out my three weeks in the city.

1. Since this was a business trip I didn’t have my regular camera with me and I had to shoot with my iPhone 4. It is surprisingly good for a phone but a long way from even my old “proper” camera in terms of image quality.

Related posts:

1. Travelling with work
2. Spanish Sunset
3. Vienna, Austria

Related posts:

1. About the pictures
2. Miscellaneous Pictures, 2003
3. Miscellaneous Pictures, 2000

For this weeks PhotoFriday, “Best Friend,” most people seem to have gone with pictures of their slobbering dog or grinning, cutesy couples.

That’s not my style.

I found these ducks in a hotel in Zurich, the yellow one in the bathroom, the chocolate one on the bed. I thought it would be nice to introduce them. They got on famously until one came to an unfortunate, albeit tasty, end.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Crooked.” I’m entry number 187.

Related posts:

1. Crooked
2. Friend
3. Damaged

This weeks PhotoFriday, “Crooked,” is another one where I thought someone else must have got there before me (especially since I’m two days behind the “Friday” schedule). But, as far as I can tell, no one else has gone for “The Crookedest Street in the World.” Also known as Lombard Street in San Francisco.

(My second choice would have been potentially libellous images of banks or stock exchanges. It maybe just as well I didn’t need to go down that route.)

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Sky-High.” I’m entry number 229.

Related posts:

1. Metal
2. Disastrous
3. The City

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Sky-High.” My first thought was a picture from a plane but then I thought it was likely to be a bit of a cliché. Bizarrely I didn’t see many other entrants with the same idea so I went with the above image, taken on my iPhone landing back in London.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Summer Fun.” I’m entry number 279.

Related posts:

1. High Speed
2. Damaged
3. Blurred

Last year Yahoo! announced, with no notice, a significant change that had far reaching consequences for all third party applications including my iPhone program, Yummy. This is the third in a series of posts that discusses how I dealt with it.

We’ve already talked about most of the work, starting with an overview, the announcement, the low level technical challenges and the implementation (technical and UI). All that remains it to launch it, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Availability

I switched my own Delicious account over to use my Yahoo! ID to shake out as many bugs as possible and I’d already had a few emails from people asking if they could help, so by the time I submitted the update to Apple it was in pretty good shape.

It launched on 13 December 2009, simultaneously for the full version and Yummy Browser. I decided against holding back for the free version.

Despite the volume of code that had changed, I decided to call is a “point” update (moving from version 2.3.1 to 2.3.2) because it didn’t really add any new user-level features. In hindsight maybe I should have made more of a fuss over it, since it was the first — and is still the only — Delicious iPhone app that supported Yahoo! IDs. But it felt wrong to kick my competitors over something that was just as outside their control as mine¹.

Lessons

So what have we learned through all this process?

I’ve learned how vulnerable Yummy is to outside influence. I had been planning a new feature release before the end of last year but this slipped until the first quarter of 2010 because of all the work that I have outlined above. I’m glad that I’ve kept “agile” (an overused word in the software industry), sticking to relatively small and frequent releases as this made it much easier to change from one feauture set (mostly what you see in the current Yummy 2.4 release) to another (OAuth).

But I think most of the lessons need to be taken on the other side, by Yahoo! From my point of view there were multiple failures:

1. No notice. It was impossible to have an application ready for day zero as we just didn’t know that a change was coming
2. No documentation. Even when we found out about the change there was little to no documentation about how to make the change
3. No concessions to desktop apps. It just is not possible to write a desktop application² with a fluid, easy to use UI. OAuth works nicely for web apps but not so well for desktop (and mobile) ones. Twitter is pushing forward with xAuth which solves this problem. It’s not yet standardised, which is a problem, but guaranteeing a poor user experience is hardly a winning strategy either
4. No transition. When Twitter moved from basic auth to OAuth³, both systems worked for over a year. This meant that there was no single, big switch over. True, they incentivised new apps to use the new scheme and the end of basic auth is going to orphan a bunch of apps but, still, there has been a year when developers can transition from one scheme to the other. For Delicious this change happened overnight, but not for all users. Instead we have to support both schemes and with no obvious method of knowing which one to use in advance

Luckily Yahoo! seem to have noticed the pain that their development community have been put through. They have since (albeit very recently) tried to get a handle on who is developing what against their APIs. Quite how they’ll use that information is anyones guess but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

1. Six months later and with no updates from any of them I’m feeling less charitable!
2. By “desktop” I mean something that doesn’t run in a web browser. iPhone apps in this sense are “desktop” applications.
3. Past tense as, while this process is still ongoing, it will be complete shortly.

Related posts:

1. Delicious Debrief (Part 1/5)
2. Delicious Debrief (Part 2/5)
3. Delicious Debrief (Part 4/5)