Posted via Gerry Hayes on Posterous as I’m off my arse and away from a computer.

Posted via Gerry Hayes on Posterous as I’m off my arse and away from a computer.

Posted via Gerry Hayes on Posterous as I’m off my arse and away from a computer.

Aren’t they cool. You can convert images already on your iPhone or, more likely, you can take a photo using ShakeItPhoto and watch as it spits out a virtual Polaroid. If you shake your phone you can speed up the ‘development’ process. Shaking and waiting for the image is something that’s really only fun the first time you do it so – thankfully – there’s an option to turn that off.

It has a very nice way of making pretty ordinary and mundane things look really rather pretty (in a polarised, saturated, colour-shifted, grainy sort of way). The picture format also forces you to think differently. Normally when taking a photo, most mortals are used to thinking in rectangles but thinking in squares makes you look at things differently.

ShakeItPhoto cheered me up immensely on a snowy morning trip to the shopping centre. It’s not quite perfect – as it crops the standard rectangular iPhone image, it could use a screen overlay to show what will be included in the final, Polaroided photo. Other than that, though, it’s really excellent. If you’ve an iPhone, try it.

You can see the full gallery over at my Picasa.

The weather was reasonable (for Ireland).  Overcast for the most part and a bit of a breeze.  Good walking weather.  The going was steep and exceedingly boggy in places – ankle deep at times. Not a long walk, but good views and an interesting standing stone, inscribed with a cross.

Enjoyed it immensely.  Glad to be back.  Some more images over at my PicasaWeb.

Its uploader for Mac was buggy – editing anything already typed in the text fields before an upload caused it to go mental and, after every upload, it made me login again.  It limited me to 100M a month, which isn’t too bad on an ongoing basis but my initial surge of photos came to more than that and I’m not willing to fork out for additional space or wait a month to upload another few.  Lastly, and most imortantly, it lacked any decent sorting options – stuff was presented in the order in which it was uploaded and I couldn’t find anything to allow me to sort photos in the order in which they were actually taken.

So then, I am back with the Google chaps.  Picasaweb for me.  Gave me 1GB upfront which means I can actually upload the photos I want to without having to wait for three months.  Granted, if I’d stayed with flickr, in a year, I’d have more space than that but I’m all about the instant gratification, me.  Picasa also allows me to sort things the way I want to and makes it easier to organise photos once they’re uploaded.

To be fair, it’s not perfect.  Flickr was better at easily tagging photos or albums and flickr also has better ‘social-networking’ (possibly in part because it’s the most popular).  I’m not really uploading photos for networking opportunities though, so these weren’t deal-breakers for me.

Also, Picasa doesn’t as yet have that flashy sidebar widget where the images expand and shrink.  Static selection of random images for my sidebar now.  Oh well.

Right; dull and geeky post over with.