Tech Me

SearchMe: A(mazing) Visual Search

Awesome. That’s the response that came out as soon as i looked at the returned results from the url for “SearchMe“. Amazing design. Great looks. Have a look at the search bar itself, pretty inspired from Google.

Looks is not all what it got. It has also got some nice and innovative crux at its base. Enter a query and as you are typing in your letter, categories related to your query ,as shown below, start appearing. Select one and be ready for getting further dazzled.

Once submitted, query is indeed executed quite speedily and returns what can be termed as amazing way to display the results. It displays the images for the pages resulted from your query and also allows you to view the text result screeen if you need it. In there own words “It allows you to see what you are searching for”

And thats not all. It has got the best collaboration way i have ever seen. Enters the concept “stacks”. User can create stacks for there queries and share the same in numerous ways. Mail them, copy the url or put the complete result stack at your blog/website. See below the stack i created for the query “The Dark Knight”

Now that’s amazing list of features something requires to grab your attension.

To the important question. The search quality? I will say SearchMe has some awesome options to keep you interested for the first go. Solutions for queries you can always find at Google.And i sincerely feel its difficult to beat Google’s Search Algorithm and in turn Google in the search arena plainly on the results basis. It can only be defeated with the way results are shown. A more helpful way.

So let’s not get into that all hullabaloo involving war for serach results . Let’s just look at a totally different , but at the same time awesomely attarctive way for viewing search results and collaborating them with friends. Go give it a shot. You won’t be disappointed for sure.

Tags: new, search, visual

Google Suggests Finally…

After spending quite a lot of time in labs, finally google suggest has rolled out at google. I always wondered why google didn’t played and allowed others to play with suggest earlier. I understand there is no space available to mark the feature as beta. But as any other Google product, it can and will always improve, no matter if it is marked Beta or now.

Anyways finally it is here. Firsts thing first. It works only at “google.com”. Make sure you direct all your “co.in”s and “co.uk”s to “com”.

Why Google Suggest? Lemme hear it from the makers themselves:

“We find that by providing suggestions upfront, we can help people search more efficiently and conveniently. Below are some great ways Google Suggest can help simplify your searching.

• Help formulate queries: Instead of just typing [hotels in washington] - did you want [hotels in washington dc] or [hotels in washington state]? Don’t remember that song title or person’s name? Let Google help you search (and yes, I ended up choosing “From This Moment” as our wedding song).
• Reduce spelling errors: Since suggestions are spell-corrected using the same “Did you mean?” feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, misspellings and typos can be corrected ahead of time. Instead of wasting your time with a misspelled query like [new yrok times] or [tomorow never dies], search the first time with the correctly-spelled query.
• Saves keystrokes: Who wants to spend their time typing [san francisco chronicle] when you can just type in “san f…” and choose the suggestion right away?”

Source: Google Official Blog

Am now trying to figure the benefits of this nice little feature for myself. Will update the post soon. Though am still awaiting that amazing product out from the Google team. Been long. Will say am looking forward to see the experimental/universal search out of labs onto Google search homepage in some awesome form.

Tags: google, suggest

Photosynth is overwhelmed…down, to be precise!

Just after a day or so into the public launch, the awaited Microsoft 3D photo’s product “Photosynth” has gone down. Earlier in the day when i tried to explore a synth, following error was thrown

Now suddenly the whole site has gone done with a message which reads “Photosynth is a little overwhelmed”.

There is no official word at there blog too. So reasons quite unknown.

Now thats not a start Microsoft might be expecting. Awaiting response.

Update: Just thought till the time the site re-ignites, you can view the preview video for Photosynth

Update: Finally an official word for the downtime at the blog:

“We have been abolsutely overwhlemed by demand, and have turned Photosynth.com into a special static/read-only mode for the moment. The team is hard at work adding capacity and getting the full site back online. We’ve been under incredible demand since we released just over 12 hours ago. With everyone waking up around the world traffic has been on a steady ramp up since that release and has far exceeded even our most optimistic expectations.”

As they have said… YIKES !!!

Related post: Photosynth Arrives .. Few Questions

Tags: images, microsoft, photosynth

Photosynth Arrives .. Few Questions

Been long, i guess right in 2006, that Microsoft first sowed seeds of Photosynth, a supposedly view changer in picture capturing arena. The first peep into the product and it was clear Microsoft was finally after something big. But hopes floated for it to be as cool as it looked in the demo. Lets have a brief intro …

Photosynth in Microsoft’s own words:

Imagine being able to share the places and things you love using the cinematic quality of a movie, the control of a video game, and the mind-blowing detail of the real world. With nothing more than a bunch of photos, Photosynth creates an amazing new experience.

What?

So to be precise and clear, Photosynth is a platform that allows users to stitch photos together into a single 3D environment (Microsoft calls it a ’synth’, with a hope one day that would replace the tag ‘image’). Once stitched, it lets user (almost anyone accessing the Photosynth website) zoom into various parts or walk through the environment.

Installation:

To explore/create ’synth’, user needs to install the photosynth application. It consists of two parts a browser plugin and desktop client. Browser plugin is required for online exploring while the desktop client is needed for doing all the hard work of creating synths. Installation is smooth with zilch problems. As a standard windows application.

First Look..

If you have photosynth installed you can see the synth for Stonehenge Venice created by National Geographic below. If you haven’t, click on the image for running the installation.

To Conclude:
Photosynth is indeed a great application and concept. It does have what it takes to bring shift in the way images are captured and stored, also viewed. The version runs smooth and is actually a great experience. Strongly recommended.

Few open questions:

• When ‘demo’ed in 2006, a mention was made about collaboration, wherein multiple users can collaborate to create a single synth. Can’t see a way to do that.
• There was also a mention about automated synth creation which scans various images tagged similar and with underlying AI finds which parts fit where. A bit unclear myself, thanks to my mutable memory.
• Privacy is an issue with no option for making synths private. It can be a good social environment with a concept of ‘friends’ here too.
• Wish there was a clear section for system requirements. It indeed can be pretty memory consuming

All said, Photosynth still lies in Lab. I hope a lot more is yet to be seen. Eagerly waiting…

Few Further References:
Photosynth
Wikipedia
Read Write Web

Tags: images, microsoft, photosynth

Twitter in Blog/Website..

I always wanted to add my tweets to my blog, to pen in the sudden and randomly generated vibes in me. I use to do that at twitter. But i wanted to pull in the thoughts at one place. As i owned the place now, i thought of a dedicated section for the purpose and hence came into existence the “Blabber Land“.

If you follow the link, you can find the live demonstration of twitter in blog under the first section named “Abrupt Blabberings“. The procedure is pretty not-so-complex sorts. And with a simple but informative article like this your work is greatly reduced. Thanks Remy …

But still it would need a bit of a scripting and customizing on your part, for better results that is. Few points to remember (basically the ones i didn’t :P)

1. Make sure you add the <div id=”twitter”> section at a proper place. Before pulling the tweets, book the place holder and test the looks with the dummy data. Customize the div section.
2. Add the pre-fetch message at the blog. Let user know something is about to happen in the section. A progress indicator would be a plus.
3. Now add the scipt that fills in the place holder booked earier i.e. the <div> section. Make sure you rename the tweet in getTwitters(‘tweet’, to the id you have mentioned in the <div> section above. So in this case, it should be renamed as “getTwitters(‘twitter‘,”
4. Adding the script section towards the </body> tag of your page would always be favorable. The simple reason being the browsers don’t start any parallel downloads i.e. of images etc as long as they don’t download the scripts. It is always recommended that scripts, wherever possible, should always come right at the end, after most of the page is completely loaded.
   

Tags: blog, twitter

Journey to a self-hosted blog …

Finally i succeed. I have been working on this site for around a month now. I, though, had finalized my contents quite a long time back. But it was because of my random vibes, i could never really convince my mind for a dedicated hosted weblog. But finally…  Though am not sure is it a simple blog or a ‘blogsite‘?

Anyways this the first draft of the site i had in my mind for myself. I will note few points which, according to me, really heighten the user experience levels. It was all as a result of hours of skiing along the web and the constant feedback to myself of my experience as a user. So let me begin ..

1. More space for the actual content on the page
2. Clear separators between two posts
3. Easy on eyes font family and sizes
4. Non-disturbing ads
5. At hand list of recent post and comments
6. No bulky colors
7. Easily accessible links and catchy titles
8. A consistency in the overall site

I have thrived to please most of my expectations. Anyways i will, for now, not talk about my real journey right from ‘Blogger’, where it all started, to ‘Wordpress.com’, where it all beautified, to ‘Wordpress.org’, but just the final phase. The final shift, for me, was never a real pain in … uhh… head. And it shouldn’t be for anyone either. Only thing it requires is more of interest for designing and blogging.

So it all started, once on a frustrated day, with research on the preprocess. Had to earn my domain name ‘elatedamit‘ which i did. Bought the domain at rediff. Few pitfalls, never ever search for the domain you are planning to buy. Especially never on GoDaddy. The reason being various sites internally use GoDaddy for booking domains and, due to some random problem with their coding i guess, they are under impression you bought the domain even if you haven’t. Best example, Google Apps.

Moved to the host part. This was the most reasearched topic by me. I compared rates, providings, user experiences, expert comments and even overall look and speed of the hosting site itself. I really could not single out the best hosting site. Various people said, it depends on requirement. I feel the only thing it depends on is your luck. Choose, depending on how much you can spend, the best appearing host and leave it to luck. Hope that you won’t face any problem.

Roamed and jumped from Dreamhost to Bluehost to eWebGuru. But finally i stumbled upon Lunarpages based on the cost to feature analysis. I have hosted my blog with lunarpages for around a month now. I haven’t faced any issues of downtimes or slow responses yet. One valuable and important suggestion. Never complete the process right at the first time. Let them know you are interested. A guareented bargaining is about to happen.

Once your domain and hosts are connected, what remains to do is limitless. Remove your age-old thinking cap. Upsurge your creativity buds and dive in the vast sea of designing ‘blogsites‘. There is lots to learn and bit to earn too.

PS: Do let me know your views on the overall experience of the site. Let me confirm if  i am normal or has randomness caught my mind too

Tags: blog, hosts, user experience