The Cattery

The Cattery

Somebody Clever Should Make This

21 July 2004
Filed under Mac, Technology, Text, The Interweb

I took my little, slow iBook on holiday with me, with the intention of making some blog posts from the road, but instead spent my small amount of time in front of the computer fantasising about a non-existent piece of software that would have made the task easier. My fantasy piece of software is a kind of digital photo journal, with which I could the following kinds of things:

  1. Import photos directly from my digital camera
  2. Write full journal entries (not pissy captions, thanks iPhoto) associated with particular photos, or groups of photos. For example, if I took a photo of a house that I liked, I'd be able to write about why. Alternatively, if I'd had a weekend trip to Burgandy to wander gorgeous villages tasting local wines (hypothetically speaking), I could choose to associate a journal entry with a series of photographs, or a particular date, or a category of photographs.
  3. Make journal entries unrelated to any photos in my library.
  4. Could send, with one click, any chosen journal entry, along with appropriately compressed photos, to my blog (and in different views of a journal entry, I could add formatting syntax like HTML, Markdown or Textile). Other entries could contentedly remain private and unformatted if I chose. Perhaps it would even allow me to mark some paragraphs of a journal entry as private - not to be uploaded - and others as web-friendly.
  5. Create multiple custom views of the journal for my own personal satisfaction (sorted by category, or by date, or by whether the entry has been published on my blog, or without particularly boring photos, for example)

One of the reasons I didn't blog overseas was because I was writing (with pen! with paper!) a personal journal, and didn't feel much like repeating the work on my computer. But I would actually prefer to write a journal on computer and just take notes in a notebook if I needed to, particularly if the interface was friendly and journally. I use Hog Bay Notebook to do some journalling, Ecto to do the blogging bits, and iPhoto for getting the photos off my camera and sorting them, but what I'm really after is something that brings it all together.

Maybe it could make my lunch as well.

Views from the Floor

rachel says:

Hi there,
I'm dubiously discovering blogs and after perusing yours I've decided they're potentially addictive. I was disappointed to find no travel blog. After hearing your New Yorker spiel via the artist whose toons you were carrying I was both highly amused and keen for more. Therefore, I too think someone clever should make your ideal blogging-lunch-making-techno-fantasy gadget! However I am a techno idiot so I can only feign any real understanding of your IT daydreams.
Rachel.

Khoi Vinh says:

I think working on the Web calls for applications -- or feature sets -- to be more blended than in other media. I had an idea a while ago for an application that would allow you to comp a Web page as if you were in Photoshop, work fast and loose with layout elements as if you were in QuarkXPress, edit vectors as if you were in Illustrator, use dynamic text as if you were in a text editor, and prep assets for Web production, as if you were in Fireworks. All of which reminds me of the promise of Apple's abandoned OpenDoc, which would allow users to buy features and cobble them together to make applications that suited them perfectly, rather than being bound to monolithic software programs, as we are today.

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