How my day was...

[mdlbear]

My day at work was almost entirely taken up with the Patent Review Committee: a dry run in the morning for my presentation, and the meeting itself all afternoon. My walk got squeezed down to under half an hour.

But the presentation went well; I'll find out tomorrow whether it passed. In any case, the next step is to get back to turning it from a bailing-wire-and-duct-tape demo into a real system. I'm actually rather pleased with it -- it's a system of physical devices, not just software.

Somehow I managed to twist my right ankle, just standing up out of my chair. Aspirin and a brace seem to have taken care of the worst of it, but I'm grumpy. That was the good ankle.

Not my project, but it's cool as heck and launched today: iCandy.ricohinnovations.com. No Linux client yet, unfortunately; I'll see what I can do. [11-10: Note: iCandy is cool technology, but it's still beta at this point and the site might not be the best introduction to it. The somewhat-misnamed About Us page might be a better place to start. Note that you need a webcam and iTunes in order to use it; we're all hoping that the need for iTunes will go away, because it's just as useful for sharing links to photos and websites as it is for sharing links to music.]

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I am stupid. All along, I thought you were trying to show me a picture of some physical object, displayed via iCandy. I didn't understand that you were trying to show me iCandy itself.

I read about the process in Wired (I think) a month or two ago. It looks like something that will be wildly popular with certain sub-sub-cultures of younger users. But it's not something I can imagine myself ever having any use for at all. (And I flatly refuse to install iTunes on my computer. I did, once, for something that needed it; iTunes took up way too much storage space and way too many other resources, had some unpleasantly spyware-like habits, and ultimately crashed my machine.)

[mdlbear]

Ah; that explains a lot. I'll still pass along your dislike of iTunes; they need to be beaten over the head with that a couple more times, in my opinion.

I don't use iTunes, either, but I can see myself putting QR codes on, e.g., advertising fliers for my CD or for one of my websites, if it ever became popular.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

While you're at it, also give QuickTime a kick in the sweetbreads. I have never managed to get it to work right.

And, yes, the technology behind iCandy could be very useful in advertising.

[mdlbear]

(If I want to point at a picture, I'd just embed a thumbnail and maybe link to a larger version. When I post a link with text that looks like a URL, you can be pretty certain it's the website itself I'm trying to point to.)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

This isn't a communication failure on your part - this time, it's my fault. People show off all sorts of things by linking to pictures on their Flickr or Photobucket accounts, and that's what I thought I saw. I need to pay better attention to context.

[mdlbear]

... or the status bar -- you're probably used to sites like slashdot that display a link as just the site name and hide the rest. LJ actually gets it right; if you put in a bare URL you see the whole thing. e.g., http://icandy.ricohinnovations.com/rocket2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=37&Itemid=47
(which would have been a much better place to link to.)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I don't read slashdot, but I do use SeaMonkey as my browser, and, like all Netscape products, it displays the real URL in the status bar with a mouse-hover. (I especially like this in email - it helps identify otherwise clever phishing messages.) However, even the URL didn't tip me off... I guess I figured that Ricoh, being involved with photography, might have an online photo-sharing service. And then I saw "click here to sign up", and jumped to a very wrong conclusion. Call it a "senior moment", I guess... *sigh*.

[mdlbear]

We have an online service for shared documents, but its priced for business use.

It's still valuable feedback: if the first thing someone sees on a page is a signup link with no indication of what the site is about...

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I do a bit of web design myself. I think the "about us" page should stand alone, as a splash page, with a "click here to sign up" link under the logo (and possibly again at the bottom of the page), redirecting to a form page with more information, such as the privacy policy. After the service is established, then just put the signup/login field below the logo.

[mdlbear]

Agreed. The home page should give you enough information to decide whether to go further.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Web Pages That Suck (http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com) is extremely instructive... ;-)

[mdlbear]

Indeed -- I've made use of it on occasion.