The Mossberg Solution » slide show http://solution.allthingsd.com from The Wall Street Journal Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:25:07 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 http://allthingsd.com/theme/images/logo-rss.jpg All Things Digital http://allthingsd.com/ 144 22 Digital Cameras With Room for New Views http://solution.allthingsd.com/20091006/digital-cameras-with-room-for-new-views/ http://solution.allthingsd.com/20091006/digital-cameras-with-room-for-new-views/#comments Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:36:02 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20091006/digital-cameras-with-room-for-new-views/ At a glance, the most obvious physical improvements on today’s digital cameras compared with those bought five years ago are slimmer size and larger LCD viewing screens. Other than that, they don’t look a whole lot different.

But this week, I tested two physical features that I’ve never seen on digital cameras.


[ See post to watch video ]

I used the $430 Nikon Coolpix S1000pj (nikonusa.com), which has a mini projector built right into the camera itself. This extra characteristic lets you take pictures and, by pressing a button on the camera, project them onto any nearby surface, in old-school slideshow style. The projected image can measure up to 40 inches, growing or shrinking as you walk away from or toward the surface onto which the images are projected.

I also tried the $350 Samsung DualView TL225, which had two LCD viewing screens—including one on the front side. This front screen lets the subjects of the photograph see how they look as the photo is being captured, raising the concept of instant gratification to a new level. The outward-facing LCD can also display a smiley face or cartoon animations to encourage children to smile. It also can be used to display a timer’s countdown clock so you know exactly when the photo will be taken.

Technical Advances

These two compact cameras also feature less obvious technical advances that aren’t quite as eye-catching as a built-in projector or dual LCD screens.

Each camera can capture photographs with over 12-megapixel resolutions, and the Nikon and Samsung have 5x and 4.6x wide-angle zoom lenses, respectively.

Both cameras have built-in automatic scene-detecting capability, meaning they can analyze a scene to determine which shooting mode would work best. And they allow the user to edit images directly on the camera like brightening an image or rotating a photo.

The Nikon sticks to one traditional 2.7-inch LCD screen with separate buttons that control functions like menu, timer, deleting and playback. And, like many digicams, it accepts a SecureDigital (SD) memory card.

samsung_mossber

Getting your good side: Samsung’s DualView TL225’s front LCD shows people how they’ll look in photos.

In somewhat unusual fashion, the Samsung requires a tiny microSD memory card. The viewing screen on the back of the Samsung is a generous 3.5-inch touch LCD that covers close to an entire side of the camera; the front-side LCD is 1.5 inches.

I focused my testing on the unique physical features of each camera: the Nikon’s built-in projector and the Samsung’s two LCD screens. I tried them out over the course of a week and used them in real-life situations including at a birthday party and at the Army 10-Miler, an annual run in Washington, D.C.

When the Nikon’s projector isn’t in use, it functions like a regular camera—albeit an expensive one at $430. Nikon says this price is largely due to the cost of its built-in projector. Until now, most people who wanted portable, mini projectors bought them as standalone products; for example, the Pico Pocket Projector from Optoma Technology Inc. is listed for $230 online at Best Buy (BBY).

Subway Show

I took the Nikon Coolpix S1000pj along to the Army 10-Miler, capturing photos of runners as they ran near the National Mall. Later on, while I waited with hundreds of people to get on the D.C. Metro subway system, a friend and I looked through photos from the day by projecting the camera’s images onto a concrete wall.

At first, passersby thought the slideshow images were put there by the race organizers, and they commented about how neat it was that the race images already were posted for everyone to see.

The D.C. Metro was an ideal spot to use the Nikon’s projector because of its low light and white concrete walls. Outdoors, the projected images weren’t quite as easy to see.

I also used the projector in a house and in my office, setting it on a table and turning off the lights for the best view. A tiny remote comes with the camera if you want to sit back and give your friends and family a slideshow. Videos taken with the camera also will play in video format.

To start the projector, I pressed a button on the top ledge of the camera, which immediately covered the lens and turned on the projector’s bright light. A slider button adjusts focus. The image size can be as small as five inches and as large as 40 inches, and it will project from about six feet away. Nikon says the camera’s projector will work for an hour before its battery runs out.

nikon_mossberg

Nikon’s S1000pj displays images and videos with its brightly lit projector—just right for a subway slideshow.
Surprise, Surprise

The $350 Samsung DualView TL225 is black with an accent color that comes in purple or orange. Its front-side LCD screen isn’t visible when the camera is turned off, making for a surprising experience when you take pictures of friends who can suddenly see themselves.

A similar but slightly lower-quality and less-expensive version of this camera is available in the $300 Samsung DualView TL220. This camera’s back LCD screen is a half-inch smaller than the TL225’s and not nearly as bright. Other notable differences include the TL220’s plastic casing compared with the TL225’s aluminum.

Clowns in Action

This front LCD performs various functions in addition to showing people what they look like. A scene called Children puts animated cartoon clowns on the outer LCD in hopes of making a child smile for the camera. Another setting puts a large, yellow smiley face on this LCD when the shutter button is pressed down halfway. And when the camera’s timer is set, the outer display counts down, showing “3, 2, 1″ until the image is captured.

I used this Samsung camera with two LCD screens to take pictures of friends who were all surprised and delighted when they saw themselves on the camera before the photo was taken. At a birthday party, the clown animations made even a group of people in their 20s laugh.

Some Downsides

The downside to this display screen is that it’s to the left of the camera’s lens, so if you’re taking a close-up shot of someone, they will appear in the photo like they’re glancing away slightly.

Another negative of this display is that it blacks out a split second before the photo is taken, so as long as you can hold the pose you saw of yourself on the screen, you’ll look fine.

It’s too early to know whether the innovations in these cameras will catch on, or be viewed over time as expensive gimmicks.

If these features become more common, hopefully the prices will come down and more consumers will be able to enjoy them.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://solution.allthingsd.com/20091006/digital-cameras-with-room-for-new-views/feed/ 0 Creating 'Moments' of Your Life http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090623/creating-moments-of-your-life/ http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090623/creating-moments-of-your-life/#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:30:02 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090623/creating-%e2%80%98moments%e2%80%99-of-your-life/ It’s hard to maintain a monogamous relationship with one photo-sharing Web site. You will sign up with a service and use it as your primary online repository for a while. You may even familiarize friends and family with that service so they expect to see your name associated with it in emails. But before long, other sites with flashier features will entice you to start spending time with them while you continue to maintain your accounts on the old site so you don’t lose your digital memories. Can’t they all just get along in one place?

This week, I tested thisMoment.com—a content-sharing Web site that doesn’t mind if you use multiple sharing sites. It acknowledges your accounts on other sites and the fact that you have probably loaded a bunch of photos or videos onto those sites. It even recognizes that you likely still want to remain connected to those services. In fact, thisMoment is made better by your relationships with these other sites. And the service also makes it easy to incorporate into your account material created by others—even strangers.


[ See post to watch video ]

Anyone can use thisMoment.com the old-fashioned way, by uploading personal content and building “moments” (collections of related content) to share with friends. But thanks to thisMoment’s ties to other sharing sites, users may opt to add others’ publicly shared materials like videos, photos and articles to a moment, making it richer and more interesting. This content can come from sources like Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Facebook—even Life Magazine photos and MTV videos can be interspersed throughout a moment. The Moment Maker tool quickly scans sites for relevant content to add to the moment.

This week, the service introduced an iPhone app for making moments on the go and a Facebook app for creating moments within Facebook. I tried both, in addition to using the thisMoment.com site, and found that resulting moments looked like they took a lot more time and effort to make than they actually did.

ThisMoment’s secret sauce is in its elegant displays. It takes all sorts of content—text, photos, videos—from various sources and meshes it into a handsome slideshow that flows from one visual to the next. Black backgrounds dramatically frame photos and videos, and captions stand out in brightly colored text. Maps from Google (GOOG) pinpoint exactly where the moment took place and a list names other people who were in the moment.

And when you’re all done creating your moment, thisMoment doesn’t mind sharing your final project with others using still more social-networking tools like Twitter, Facebook and some 45 Web publishing sites—if your privacy settings are set for sharing.

For some people, the idea of integrating other online content into their personal moments could be a turn-off. I wasn’t initially sure I would want someone else’s content mixed in with photos and videos I took, or vice versa. And I still wish thisMoment provided a clearer way of differentiating between someone’s personal content and that which was pulled from the Web. (Currently, small print below each item tells where it came from.)

But there’s so much content online that it makes sense to tap these resources. And users can opt to make moments without external content.



ThisMoment artistically assembles digital moments using content from the Web or personal photos and videos.

Rather than just slapping photos on to a Web site where people can see them, thisMoment asks its users to check off descriptive words—or enter their own—to explain how the moment made them feel. Though I originally scoffed at these add-your-own emotions, I later grew to like them when I looked back at my moments and those created by other people. They give these online creations a personal touch that isn’t conveyed in other photo-sharing software programs or Web sites.

Another thisMoment differentiator is its sense of time. You can create moments for things that happen in the past, present or future, like an upcoming wedding or birth, and a timeline at the top of the Web site shows where these moments fit in, according to their dates. If you share a moment with someone who is labeled as being in that moment, she can “seize” the moment, adding it to her own timeline. ThisMoment also encourages you to rate your moments on a scale of small to big according to how much they matter to you, though I often forgot to do this, and to label your moments so they can be organized into different categories.

I soon got the hang of how to use thisMoment to supplement my moments when I didn’t have enough content to create something worth sharing. When I attended a folk rock concert at the Embassy of the Czech Republic here in Washington, D.C., I only captured a few so-so photographs and wouldn’t have otherwise shared any visual memories from the evening with friends. But I used the Moment Maker to troll the Web for content related to Czechomor, the band I saw, and found live concert videos, as well as professional photographs, an online biography of the band and a link to where the group’s album was sold on Amazon.com (AMZN). I used this content and one of my own photos, and made a simple moment in a few minutes. (Check out my moment.)

Likewise, friends of mine recently hosted a murder-mystery dinner, but we were so busy staying in character that we took only one photo of the entire evening. I used that photo of me and my costumed friends as the inspiration for creating a moment filled with photos and videos of murder-mystery dinners from all over. This content came from sites like Photobucket, Picasa, Flickr and YouTube, and I laughed at the number of people who wore stick-on moustaches in these photos.

ThisMoment allows anyone with whom you share a moment to see that moment without signing up for the service. If that person is included in the moment, meaning the creator labeled him or her as a person who participated in the moment, then that person can add his or her own content to the moment—as long as that person signs up as a member of the site.

A variety of privacy options let you restrict who can see your moments—just you, friends, family, people in the moment or everyone. If a moment is set so everyone can see it, they can also use your content in their moments.

You may not always want to use thisMoment to incorporate content from other services and Web sites. But even without outside influences, this service’s stunning visual displays will give your moments a polished look that makes you proud to share.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090623/creating-moments-of-your-life/feed/ 1 A Desktop That Begs to Be Organized http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090407/a-desktop-that-begs-to-be-organized/ http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090407/a-desktop-that-begs-to-be-organized/#comments Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:02:02 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090407/a-desktop-that-begs-to-be-organized/ Like many people today, I keep a lot of my important documents and communications in digital form. But I still print out the files and put them on my desk so I can have them in front of me instead of buried in computer subfolders within folders.

This week, I tested BumpTop, a program that displays items in a way that makes programs and files easy to see and open. It does this by turning your digital desktop into a three-dimensional environment that looks like your physical desktop. A few quick gestures neatly stack piles of items or tack important items onto one of four virtual walls. You can even flick your mouse to “toss” files to programs or group files into a pile, like stacking all your PDF files together. Special photo frames on the walls show slideshows of photos from PC folders or feeds from photo Web sites like Flickr or Picasa.


[ See post to watch video ]

BumpTop comes from Toronto-based Bump Technologies Inc. and it has been in a private testing stage for a little over a year. Starting Wednesday, it’s available for anyone to download at BumpTop.com. It comes in a free or $29 Pro version. In Pro, files you use most often will grow bigger over time and you can flip through a pile’s contents by rolling the mouse’s scroll wheel, among other things.

I used BumpTop Pro for over two weeks and tried it on four computers running three different Windows operating systems: XP, Vista, and the prerelease version of Windows 7. BumpTop says it hopes to develop a Mac version in the future. (It should work on Parallels, a program that runs Windows virtually on a Mac, according to Bump Technologies, but not on Fusion, a similar program.)

Good-Looking Display

This program is a real looker. When I showed it to friends, they immediately wanted to play with it, dragging pictures to pin on virtual walls and drawing circles around several icons at once to stack them into piles like magic. And when you toss files to certain programs, they perform functions. A Microsoft Word document tossed to the email icon generates an email with the document attached. Photos I tossed to the Facebook icon were posted on the social-networking site. Files can be tossed to a printer, the recycle bin, other piles and, in the Pro version, attached USB drives.

Program Switch

But as much as I liked BumpTop, I kept coming back to the same conclusion: It was fun while I was using it, but I wasn’t naturally inclined to leave the program I was using — like my email program, my browser or TweetDeck — just to do something on the desktop in a more visually pleasing way. And since the computer’s desktop has never been as functional as popular programs, it’s hard to expect people to spend a lot of time there.

Mossberg
BumpTop creates a three-dimensional desktop where files can be cleverly organized or displayed.

Also, while BumpTop introduces a new, attractive user interface to the desktop, its 3-D functionality doesn’t extend throughout the whole computer, so you find yourself jumping back and forth between different ways of doing things.

BumpTop requires a computer with 3-D graphics and drivers, which older machines won’t have. Just for kicks I installed BumpTop on my older XP machine, which didn’t have the necessary requirements, and sure enough, it ran slowly and didn’t represent programs like Microsoft Outlook (MSFT) and Mozilla’s Firefox with the correct icons. Specific system requirements for BumpTop, along with a list of what the Pro version has that the free version lacks, can be found at BumpTop.com/download.

BumpTop’s point of view is like looking down from the ceiling in a room with four walls. It installs with three picture frames on its walls, and these display content from three sources: your computer’s My Pictures folder, Flickr.com’s main photo feed and a Flickr feed of photos Bump Technologies chose. You can change the images in settings, or delete the frames altogether.

The picture frames show ever-changing slideshows, and to do this, they only load low-resolution thumbnails of the images they display. This looks good when you’re quickly glancing at BumpTop, but if you double-click on a frame to zoom in, you’ll see a blurry photo. Bump Technologies says it plans to improve this where possible. Any photos on BumpTop other than those displayed in frames are visible in high resolution when you zoom in.

BumpTop loads with icons representing Twitter, Facebook and Email pinned to its right wall. And you can add your printer to the wall and toss things to it, printing them immediately.

Wall Clingers

The small visual details built into BumpTop make it a pleasure to use. Every time you open something, its representative icon hurls toward you in 3-D as if it were thrown. Items that are pinned to a wall flip end over end and playfully cling to the wall surface like a starfish with sticky, suction feet.

Special mouse movements generate on-screen options for organizing your BumpTop. Lassoing multiple images by drawing a line around them with your mouse pulls up a pie menu with options like “Grow,” “Shrink” and “Grid.” A “Pile by Type” option can organize all or just some of your desktop icons into piles arranged by similar characteristics, which by itself could be a big help.

Searching for something on your desktop isn’t a hassle anymore. Any time BumpTop is open, you can start typing and the program will search names of all items in BumpTop for results with the text you’re typing; those that match your request will glow.

I tried BumpTop on a touch-screen PC running Windows 7 — the HP TouchSmart PC — and the feeling of reaching out and tossing things around with my finger was even more enjoyable than using the mouse. As touch-screen PCs become more popular, BumpTop and programs like it will fit in more naturally.

If you miss seeing the photo that was on your regular desktop, an adjustment in Settings lets you use your Windows background on the BumpTop floor. Images can be assigned to each of the four walls; I assigned a photo of the National Mall at night to my back wall and a photo of my favorite lighthouse to my floor.

BumpTop is a pleasure to use and for no cost, the free version is certainly worth a try. If you like what you see and you’re willing to change the way you use your desktop, the Pro version might be worthwhile. Just be sure your computer has the correct specifications and be ready for blurry close-ups of the picture frames.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

]]> http://solution.allthingsd.com/20090407/a-desktop-that-begs-to-be-organized/feed/ 2 Organizing Your Web Life in One Place http://solution.allthingsd.com/20081216/organizing-your-web-life-in-one-place/ http://solution.allthingsd.com/20081216/organizing-your-web-life-in-one-place/#comments Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:06:02 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20081216/organizing-your-web-life-in-one-place/ If you use the Internet regularly, your activities are likely spread out all over the Web. You might be sharing photos on Flickr, emailing via Hotmail, posting status updates on Facebook, following tweets on Twitter, sending instant messages on Google (GOOG) Chat and keeping a calendar on Apple’s MobileMe. You hop from one site to the next, juggling different user names and passwords.

Last month, Microsoft unveiled Windows Live, its Web-based attempt to consolidate many of these activities. Windows Live can be found at home.live.com and includes programs that cover a lot of ground: Hotmail (email), SkyDrive (online storage), Spaces (blogging), Calendar and Events (online invitations). Four new Windows Live categories — Profile, People, Photos and Groups — create a Facebook/MySpace-like feel by following activities of networked users and sharing that data with others.


[ See post to watch video ]

If you’re using a Windows PC, you can additionally download a suite of seven free desktop applications called Windows Live Essentials from download.live.com that enhance and coordinate with the Windows Live services. These include Messenger, Photo Gallery, Mail, Writer, Movie Maker Beta, Family Safety and Toolbar. I downloaded the Essentials and enjoyed using many of them, especially Mail, Messenger and Toolbar.

But I focused my testing this week on the Windows Live Web services, which, as advertised, let me control various elements of my digital life in one place with one password. SkyDrive is a simple and approachable online-storage repository that will be truly useful for a lot of folks who want a central place to keep files. The Windows Live Profile offers handsome personalized pages with bright colors and designs; compared side-by-side with a Facebook page, it made Facebook look dull and sparse. I also used Windows Live Photos to upload digital photos onto my Profile and then shared them with friends and family in three quick steps.

New Windows Live programs
New Windows Live programs include Profile, which offers personalized pages.

Microsoft (MSFT) smartly realized that most people already visit a variety of sites for online pursuits and will want to add those activities to their Windows Live Profile. Users can currently link to 12 other sources, including Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, WordPress, Pandora and Yelp — but not Facebook or MySpace. Microsoft says that it’s working to build relationships with Facebook and MySpace and hopes to have related news next year.

But though various Web activities can be added to a Live Profile, this connection isn’t as productive as it could be. Take Twitter, for example. I added my Twitter account to my Live Profile, but on Live Profile I could see only tweets from myself and from people in my Windows Live network. To see tweets from the 50 people I follow on Twitter, I had to go to Twitter.com.

I had a similar experience with Pandora. I added my Pandora account to my Live Profile, and when I bookmarked Keith Urban as a favorite artist, this tidbit appeared on my Live Profile page. But when I listened to Christmas tunes for a few hours, nothing on my Profile page reflected this (i.e., “Katie is listening to Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ ”).

After linking my Live Profile to my Flickr account, I posted photos on Flickr.com, and seconds later, these pics appeared on my Live Profile. But other activities from Flickr weren’t reflected on my Live Profile, such as when my contacts posted photos or when those in a Flickr group of which I’m a member posted photos. To see this, I had to visit Flickr.com.

Microsoft says that in the case of Web activities, the outside companies choose what to show and what not to show. But I can’t use Windows Live as a home base for my other online activities unless it displays useful data that save me trips to other Web sites.

Windows Live Messenger
Messenger displays friends’ updates.

Like many social-networking services, Windows Live gives special privileges to those who are in the network. To belong to a Windows Live network, one must first have a Windows Live ID, which anyone can get by signing up for Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger or Xbox Live.

Windows Live also allows interaction with people outside the network. For instance, I can share any of the photos that I upload to my profile with friends and family who don’t have Windows Live IDs by simply emailing a link to them. These people don’t need a Windows Live ID to look at the photos.

When I used Windows Live to share photos with my sister, who has received hundreds of digital shots from me on every photo-sharing Web site I’ve tested, she wasn’t impressed. She correctly pointed out that other sharing sites, like Shutterfly, allow full-screen slideshow views; Windows Live limits slide shows to the size of the browser window.

Windows Live Web services work best on Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer browser, version 6 and up, and a special quick-photo-upload tool works only with Internet Explorer. This uploading tool doesn’t work with Apple’s (AAPL) Safari browser or the Mozilla Firefox browser; instead, you must slowly add each photo to your page, selecting them one at a time.

If you’re using a Windows PC, the Windows Live Essentials are definitely worth installing. Photo Gallery enables simple photo publishing directly from your computer’s collection of My Pictures, and specific faces can be labeled and tagged in each shot. Windows Live Mail, which replaced Outlook Express last year, is a smoothly designed program that I rely on every day for use with three different email accounts. Windows Live Messenger links into the Live Web services specifically by retrieving the status updates for each person in your network and displaying those in a ticker-like panel at the bottom of Messenger. The Windows Live Toolbar works only in Internet Explorer but shows an at-a-glance view of your network’s updates, along with photos, email and calendar — all in the top panel of the browser.

Windows Live Essentials are still in beta, or testing, mode, and Windows Live Web services will add more partnerships next month. I’ll be anxious to see if these new partnerships operate more productively with the Live Profile. Aggregating content from across the Web isn’t worthwhile unless that content is fully and usefully accessible in its new home.

Still, Windows Live Web services and Essentials provide solid tools that can help you organize your email, messaging, photos, storage, scheduling and social networking in one place with one password. That, by itself, is a relief.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

]]> http://solution.allthingsd.com/20081216/organizing-your-web-life-in-one-place/feed/ 5 Family Snapshots in the Splendor of HD http://solution.allthingsd.com/20081125/family-snapshots-in-the-splendor-of-hd/ http://solution.allthingsd.com/20081125/family-snapshots-in-the-splendor-of-hd/#comments Wed, 26 Nov 2008 01:28:02 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20081125/family-snapshots-in-the-splendor-of-hd/ This Thanksgiving, families across the country will gather around the television just as quickly as they gather around the turkey. And with good reason: Many people will be staring at beautiful high-definition TV sets. (According to the Consumer Electronics Association, 47% of U.S. households had HDTVs as of July, a percentage that’s likely to increase as the date for analog-to-digital conversion approaches.) But if Eastman Kodak (EK) has its way, many people will be gathered round the TV this holiday season, gazing at family memories in full HD splendor.

Family Snapshots in the Splendor of HD
The Kodak Theatre HD Player’s motion-sensing pointer remote works much like a mouse on a TV screen.

This week I tested the Kodak Theatre HD Player, the photo-centric company’s attempt to snag valuable real estate in the living room. This small, black box pulls photos and videos from computers around the house and displays them on an HDTV. It also enables the sending and receiving of photos via Kodak Gallery, and connects to Web-based photos stored on Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, .Mac and others. Podcasts, Internet Radio and updates from news feeds, weather forecasts and stock quotes are also accessible using the HD Player. And it has a terrifically simple motion-sensing remote that works like using a mouse on a TV screen.

But the HD Player isn’t all smiles. Its $299 price doesn’t include any built-in storage for keeping content directly on the device. It currently has no way of accessing HD movies or television shows, nor will it work with Macs. In comparison, Apple’s (AAPL) $229 Apple TV has 40 gigabytes of storage, can access HD television shows and movies via the iTunes Store, and works with Macs and Windows PCs. This is important because as budgets tighten in the current economy, gadgets have to prove their value and versatility more than ever.

After using the Kodak Theatre HD Player with Windows XP and Vista machines over the past week, I can conclude that this device’s interface shines in its simplicity and is a lot of fun to use. Kodak teamed with Hillcrest Labs to make the player’s motion-sensitive remote and corresponding software, which includes satisfying extra features like images that automatically magnify when the remote control’s cursor points at them and icons that make chirping sounds when selected. The remote itself is shaped to rest comfortably in a hand and has three simple buttons and a scroll wheel.

Quick-access memory-card slots for six types of memory cards appear on the box’s front, and two USB ports can connect to digital cameras or USB storage devices.

Currently, the player’s software works directly with Flickr, RadioTime (8,750 radio stations) and FrameChannel, which grants access to various “channels” like Facebook, .Mac, Picasa, People.com news and National Geographic. Kodak says it will incorporate YouTube access in January; I got a sneak peek at the interface for this and it looks well-organized.

Yet the HD Player’s smart combination of software and remote left me wishing it did a bit more. Photo sharing is enabled only via Kodak Gallery, so you can’t use another Web-based account to share photos directly from your TV. Likewise, a blue light on the box slowly blinks only when new Picture Mail (a message containing shared photos) is received on a Kodak Gallery account, not when new photos are added on other sources such as Flickr Photostreams or Facebook pages.

The Home screen of the HD Player shows four categories: Pictures & Videos, Kodak Gallery, Music and Entertainment. Subcategories are where you might guess they would be, for example podcasts are listed under Entertainment. And a tiny Home icon appears in the top right corner of every screen so you can always get Home with one click. The Pictures & Videos category holds photos and videos from a currently selected Windows PC.

An unlimited number of Windows PCs can wirelessly pair with the player as long as they have special Kodak software installed on them. But only one PC’s content can be accessed at a time. I toggled between two paired computers without a problem, but would’ve preferred accessing music and photos from both sources simultaneously.

The HD Player’s motion-sensing pointer remote works much like a Wii remote control. Wherever you move it, a tiny leaf-shaped cursor appears on-screen. A Hide button on the remote will hide the cursor while you watch slideshows. The remote’s Back button is helpful; when pressed, it backs you out of one screen using visual effects that make the screen shrink into the TV as if you were moving backward.

A play button appears on the first photo in a folder so users can select this icon to quickly start slideshows. Whenever the HD Player receives new Kodak Gallery Picture Mail, or a slideshow is created on a connected PC, yellow alert circles appear on the screen to notify users and a number in the middle of these yellow circles indicates how many new items are available for viewing.

Some content on my PCs took a little while to be recognized by the HD Player, including podcasts that I subscribe to on iTunes. When they did show up, both audio and video podcasts played without issue and on-screen playback buttons made them easy to control.

The HD Player uses your photos to create automatically generated slideshows, called Picture Chronicles, once a week. These Picture Chronicles use up to 50 photos from the same time of year in all of your folders, for instance grouping all Thanksgiving photos together from the past five years.

Kodak has plans to make its player Mac-compatible in the future and also hopes to add other partnerships with new types of content following its YouTube announcement early next year.

The Kodak Theatre HD Player does its job well, bringing photos and videos that might otherwise live only on your PC to your big screen HDTV. For the holidays, this device could be a real plus. But Kodak has some work to do to make this a more useful Web-connected tool.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

]]> http://solution.allthingsd.com/20081125/family-snapshots-in-the-splendor-of-hd/feed/ 0 An Appointment for Sharing Online Videos http://solution.allthingsd.com/20080416/an-appointment-for-sharing-online-videos/ http://solution.allthingsd.com/20080416/an-appointment-for-sharing-online-videos/#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:01:00 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20080416/an-appointment-for-sharing-online-videos/ It’s still too hard to share personal videos with friends and family in a truly satisfying manner. Huge video files take a long time to upload and download. And, even when you share clips via online streaming services that eliminate tedious downloads, you don’t get the fun experience of watching your videos together with others.

This week I tested SeeToo, a free service that lets you share videos in the same time that it takes to open and watch them on your own computer. Even better, you get to watch the video along with the people with whom you’re sharing it and type comments to each other in real time.

SeeToo works when one user selects a video to share with other people, who get an emailed hyperlink to SeeToo’s Web site, seetoo.com. After opening the link, these people join a SeeToo session during which everyone can watch the same video at the same time.

graphic
With SeeToo, you and your “buddy” can watch and chat about a video at the same time.

While the video is playing for the group, each viewer can pause, rewind and fast-forward the video. A space below the playback screen allows friends to send instant messages to one another during the session. There aren’t any limits to the size or type of video file that is shared, and other types of media — including music and photos — can also be shared on SeeToo without size restrictions.

SeeToo sounds too good to be true, and in many of my tests, it was. The service became available to the public in January in its beta, or test, stage. But I’ve used many other products in beta that were in better shape than SeeToo. And there is one major catch: Once a video-sharing session is over, the participants, other than the person sharing, can no longer access the video.

People who are invited to watch videos on the service can do so using any popular Web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari) on Windows (MSFT) computers and Macs (AAPL). But the person actually supplying the video and initiating the sharing session can use only a Windows PC. The initiator also must download a browser plug-in, which seems old-fashioned in the world of Web-based applications. And sharing sessions time out after 15 minutes of inactivity on the initiator’s side, after which point the email link doesn’t work.

I was able to successfully initiate a SeeToo session using Firefox and Internet Explorer on an older Windows XP computer but had trouble with two computers running Windows Vista: Neither worked with SeeToo using Internet Explorer and only one worked using Firefox. SeeToo says this is due in part to Microsoft’s new Service Pack 1 for Vista, and the company claims it will have this problem fixed by today. I also had trouble with the sound.

The concept behind SeeToo is also somewhat limiting. Some people may not be able to watch a video exactly when someone else wants to watch it. Some might rather watch videos alone than with others. And typing out back-and-forth chats while videos are playing could be somewhat of a distraction from watching the video.

I tested SeeToo by sharing video with family and friends and watching video they shared. My sister and I got a kick out of watching video footage from a wedding I attended in October. I shot the video using an inexpensive, low-resolution Flip Video camera and the footage looked pretty good. But SeeToo’s site shares video on a rather small screen, and we both wished it were larger.

We sent instant messages to one another in a small space below the screen, making comments about the guests’ dance moves and the DJ’s choice of music. I used on-screen tools to pause the video when the camera passed by a friend whom I wanted my sister to see. To take a second look, she selected her screen’s Take Control button and rewound the footage to see my friend.

For the first two seconds of a video, users can see a small image in the top right corner of their screen that displays what the other people are seeing. SeeToo explained that this is a way of confirming one person is indeed seeing the same screen as another person.

I originally invited three people to watch the video with me. One friend I invited was at work, where his computer restricts him from watching videos. When he got home that night, the email hyperlink didn’t work — nor did it explain that the session had expired. Instead, it crashed his Firefox browser. I also invited my boss to watch the video with me, but he only saw my invitation two hours later when the session was over.

I didn’t even try to invite my parents to see the video because neither of them sit in front of a computer all day long and they wouldn’t have received my invitation in time to see the video.

In some ways, it was probably better that the other people I invited to watch the video weren’t able to see it, because the instant-message chat screen currently labels everyone as “buddy,” without distinguishing one person from another. SeeToo hopes to change this in future versions of the service by offering users a chance to register, thus receiving a specific nickname for chatting purposes. As of now, no one who uses SeeToo needs to enter any personal information such as a name or email address, which is a plus. SeeToo is also ad-free as of now, but the company plans to monetize parts of the service sometime this summer.

I also shared music and photos with friends using SeeToo, but this feature isn’t obvious; the site is primarily focused on sharing videos. Music playlists can’t currently be shared with friends, nor can photo slideshows be shared. Instead, individual songs or photos must be selected and shared within a session, one at a time.

SeeToo has high hopes of adding many features in the future, probably by June. Those features include a full-size, higher-resolution viewing screen for sharing and watching videos; a fully Web-based, download-free version of SeeToo; photo slideshows; using names to distinguish viewers; and sharing sessions that don’t time out. In addition, it hopes to let Mac users initiate sharing sessions. The site aims to be out of its testing stage by September.

Right now, SeeToo can come in handy if you know someone else is at a computer and ready to watch a video. The invited guest never downloads anything and neither party needs to register to use SeeToo. But its screen is a bit on the small side, and the service needs to become more versatile before it can be seen as a reliable sharing site.

]]> http://solution.allthingsd.com/20080416/an-appointment-for-sharing-online-videos/feed/ 0 A Card Concierge, in Case You Forget http://solution.allthingsd.com/20071205/a-card-concierge-in-case-you-forget/ http://solution.allthingsd.com/20071205/a-card-concierge-in-case-you-forget/#comments Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:01:00 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20071205/a-card-concierge-in-case-you-forget/ Electronic greetings, or e-cards, have come a long way since their debut as one-dimensional postcards and now can include animation, slideshows and personal narration.

These digital creations save forgetful friends who don’t think far enough in advance to buy and send snail-mail cards. However, even the hippest e-cards, such as customizable cartoons from political parody site JibJab.com, are no match for paper cards with thoughtfully penned sentiments.

Photo
Jack Cards offers to send you unique cards in time for you to personalize and mail them.

Rather than fight the ever-popular, old-school cards, the digital world is trying to improve the way people buy and send those cards. This week I tested a Web site called www.jackcards.com, which sends email reminders a month before important dates and offers to ship paper cards one, two, or four weeks before an event. The cards can arrive pre-stamped and pre-addressed, so you need only add your own hand-written message before dropping them in the mail.

Jack Cards LLC of Boston based its business after the notion that an imaginary correspondence butler named “Jack” could take care of you, making you look like the friend/spouse/relative/boss of the year. Its cards range from $1.50 to $6 each, plus the cost of a stamp if you opt to get the card pre-stamped; U.S. shipping is free throughout December.

My primary skepticism about Jack Cards was its content: Did it offer enough variety to justify buying cards without seeing them? Would its cards be funny enough to send my uncle into a fit of laughter? And would they be like the tear-jerkers best friends see in stores and buy for one another for no reason?

Jack Cards prides itself on unique offerings that can’t be found in the local drugstore, and I found that its cards fit the bill for many occasions. It’s worth noting the cards looked even better in person, created by about 40 designers who left me both scratching my head over some of their humor and cooing over their beautiful designs. But the functionality of the site needs to improve, especially in the way it helps users search through cards; too often, results were hit and miss. And it doesn’t incorporate enough rich Web 2.0 features, which could improve navigation on the site and be a real boon for looking at cards (imagine an inset animation of a card opening and revealing its message inside).

Photo

Predictably, Hallmark Cards Inc. isn’t sitting idly by as a start-up tries to steals its thunder. Its Web site, Hallmark.com, sells paper cards in addition to e-cards and it, too, can remind you of coming events. Its way of personalizing cards is to send them directly to recipients with a message typed inside — a method that isn’t as personal. Like Jack Cards, Hallmark offers to mail cards to buyers to send out but doesn’t pre-stamp or pre-address anything.

Hallmark also differs from Jack Cards in the shipping department. A $2.99 birthday card from Hallmark.com cost $2.95 to be shipped to me — and wouldn’t arrive at my door for five business days. The free shipping offer from Jack Cards will end in January, but the company normally charges 99 cents for two- to three-day shipping; this flat fee applies to a package filled with any number of cards.

Without signing in, anyone can browse through the more than 1,000 cards on JackCards.com. Those interested in joining the site can do so for free after entering a name, password, email and birthday. Members are asked to enter a list of the “Fast Five” — people with whom they most often correspond, such as parents, siblings, best friends or close colleagues.

Each of the Fast Five is set up with a name, address and list of events that correspond to the person; I listed my parents with their anniversary, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, birthdays and Christmas. I was a little stunned to find an event titled “Will You Marry Me?” but I suppose Jack Cards thought of everything.

The site could stand to be better organized. The page filled with data on each of my Fast Five seemed jumbled, and jumping from one contact to another wasn’t as easy as it should be. Hyperlinks beside the events I entered for these people directed me to a general browsing page for cards instead of to a page specifically related to an event. These extra steps gave the page a clumsy feel.

Photo

Drop-down search toolbars let you choose the occasion, style of card (Humor, Just For Kids, Romantic etc.), recipient and designer. Each card’s front and inside messages, size and paper color are identified as you move your cursor over them.

I was stunned by some of the Mother-specific birthday cards. None of the cards said “Happy Birthday, Mom,” which was a problem because without that, the cards all seemed ambiguous. A card in this search said, “You are going to cherish this birthday card years from now. Cuz who knows if I’ll remember your birthday again. Happy Birthday.” I can’t think of anyone who would give such a card to a mother. The company continues to improve its searching to be more accurate.

But Jack Cards did introduce me to some clever and original material that I never would’ve seen in my CVS. Beautifully colorful cards made by Masha D’yans caught my eye immediately and looked more like watercolor paintings than cards.

I bought a good variety of about 25 cards and had them sent to me, some stamped and pre-labeled with my return address and the recipient’s address typed in attractive script, others without any stamp or label. Square cards cost more to mail (58 cents compared with 41 cents), but Jack Cards will give you the appropriate stamp. The weight and quality of the cards, along with their artistic attributes, made them feel more special than something that has been picked up from a shelf and opened by a hundred passersby. Many cards were individually packaged in plastic wrappers to stay clean en route.

If Jack Cards can continue to work on its site’s navigation and search functions, I think its system would be welcomed by many people looking for good-quality, well-designed cards that catch the eye. It saves users the hassle of last-minute trips to the card store, and still lets greeting cards keep their personal touch, which is what makes them such a permanent fixture in our lives.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com.

]]> http://solution.allthingsd.com/20071205/a-card-concierge-in-case-you-forget/feed/ 0 Printer, Digital Picture Frame in One http://solution.allthingsd.com/20070829/printer-digital-picture-frame-in-one/ http://solution.allthingsd.com/20070829/printer-digital-picture-frame-in-one/#comments Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:01:00 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20070829/printer-digital-picture-frame-in-one/ Digital picture frames store numerous images and display them in a mini-slide show, adding life to a room filled with unchanging, framed print shots. And digital shots always have a leg up on prints because they can be edited, cropped and improved. But people value the permanency of prints, which they can hold, frame or add to an album.

This week, I tested a product that marries prints with the digital frame: Hewlett-Packard’s $249 HP Photosmart A826 Home Photo Center.

The A826 is the latest in H-P’s series of compact countertop home snapshot printers, meant to turn out small photos quickly. But it has an unusual form, with a large seven-inch screen that also allows for images to be displayed in slide shows, like a digital picture frame. This touch-screen also lets users edit shots using a finger or stylus. Pressing one button prints the image in about a minute and a half.

photo
HP Photosmart A826 Home Photo Center

This new model, due in stores this weekend, is meant to work as a home photo kiosk, so it’s a bit bigger than H-P’s compact photo printers, which have built-in handles for portability and take up less space. The A826 is also pricier than these smaller printers — $70 more than the newest model.

I liked the idea behind this photo printer, editing station and digital frame. Its large screen, 5.6 inches of which are used for the photos, was a welcome change to most photo printers with preview screens that can’t be seen without squinting. But I was disappointed by some of the A826’s features. The newly added ability to draw on images, for example, yielded results that looked fine on-screen but printed out looking like scribble. Removing red eye didn’t seem to improve images on the screen; only when printed did these shots appear red-eye free. And the touch-screen wasn’t as sensitive as I would’ve liked, requiring a few tries to get some buttons to respond.

I couldn’t help but compare the A826 with standalone digital frames. Unlike almost all such frames, the A826 lacks internal storage meaning that in order to keep a slide show going, a memory card, USB drive or camera would need to be plugged into the device. Some digital frames also come with built-in wireless networking to pull images from the Web; the A826 doesn’t have this capability.

This device is hard to miss. Its rounded edges are covered in a stylish white plastic, and the screen is surrounded by black and a pretty shade of pale blue, making it look like a prop from the Jetsons cartoon. It measures roughly the same width as H-P’s compact photo printers, but stands more than twice as tall with the screen at the top so users don’t have to bend as far down to see images. Photo paper measuring 4 by 6 or 5 by 7 inches feeds into the back of the printer in a neat, enclosed compartment that holds up to 100 sheets.

A tiny speaker on the front side of the A826 emits cutesy chimes whenever the device powers on or finishes printing a photo, which I liked. It also uses its large screen for illustrating how to perform tasks like loading paper or inserting a print cartridge.

I got started using the HP Photosmart A826 for its digital frame capabilities, inserting my digital camera’s SecureDigital memory card into a slot below the viewing screen and queuing up about 400 images from my memory card. Images appear on the screen six at a time and in the bottom left corner of each there is a white circle, which can be touched to give it a red checkmark, putting it in the slide-show queue. Tapping the center of any shot magnifies it for editing.

I marked about 30 photos and played them in succession by touching a Slideshow button on the far right edge of the screen. This touchscreen button and others — representing Menu, Back, Print, Scroll Left and Scroll Right — line the left and right black borders of the screen. Only the buttons that make sense to choose at any given time will glow, so users know which ones can be selected and, therefore, can navigate a little easier. For instance, in the Get Creative editing menu, only the Scroll Left, Scroll Right and Back buttons glow.

I folded up a flap that covers the memory-card slots and left my slide show playing for a while on my kitchen counter. It worked like a digital picture frame, for the most part. If the A826 isn’t used for about 10 minutes, it will automatically switch into slide-show mode — a feature I found useful for moments when I didn’t remember that I left it on. This automatic slide show switches over to a black screen after about an hour, though programmed slide shows stay on until turned off.

Touching the screen when an image appears, mid-slide show, will pause the slide show for editing or printing. I used my finger to do simple editing, and most options are offered in large touch-screen buttons, though in more than one instance I had to press buttons with my finger a few times to get them to work. A small white stylus helped, especially for drawing on photos.

I drew cartoon bubbles coming out of people’s mouths and wrote little messages like, “Hey y’all!” bubbling from a Texan friend in a shot from her trip to Europe. These touches can be done in different colors and line thicknesses, and mistakes can easily be erased. They looked good on-screen, but when printed, turned pixilated and detracted from the photo.

I tried some more normal photo editing, such as cropping photos, enhancing a photo’s brightness and removing red eye. The last of these options didn’t work so well in my photos, seeming to leave eyes glowing on the screen. When I printed these shots for the sake of testing, I realized that red eye was actually removed in almost all instances. But this is confusing for users who don’t want to waste ink and paper finding out whether or not the image was corrected.

I found the A826’s most useful photo-enhancing option to be the ability to add captions to shots. These can be entered by using an on-screen keyboard, choosing from five fonts and six colors. The caption can be dragged around the screen to test where it will look best. These typed fonts looked professional and neat, especially compared with my own drawn-on editing.

Printing on the HP Photosmart A826 worked without a problem. It comes with five 5-by-7-inch sheets of paper enough ink for 20 4-by-6-inch prints. Value packs of paper and ink for 120 4-by-6-inch prints cost $35. The printer automatically detects whether it’s loaded with photo paper measuring 5-by-7 or 4-by-6 inches, and prints accordingly. A 5-by-7-inch shot takes a bit longer to print, but looked rather good.

The HP Photosmart A826 seems like it was designed with good intentions, and its large touchscreen is an improvement all on its own. But too many features of this device didn’t work the way they should, from red eyes that didn’t appear fixed on-screen to the touchscreen that didn’t always respond right away. H-P will find an eager audience with this home photo kiosk, but it needs improvement.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email: mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://solution.allthingsd.com/20070829/printer-digital-picture-frame-in-one/feed/ 0 How the Big Photo-Sharing Sites Stack Up http://solution.allthingsd.com/20070801/how-the-big-photo-sharing-sites-stack-up/ http://solution.allthingsd.com/20070801/how-the-big-photo-sharing-sites-stack-up/#comments Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:01:00 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20070801/how-the-big-photo-sharing-sites-stack-up/ Yahoo’s recent announcement that it would be closing its Yahoo Photos division on Sept. 20 forced its users to decide what to do with their photos. The site’s photo-storage and sharing service, which has been around for about seven years, is bowing to its hipper counterpart, chart for more details.

This is a solid site for sharing albums with friends in a few straightforward steps. Though its options for editing photos tend to feel a bit clumsy, they’re probably the best out of the five sites. Most sites expect users to edit images before sharing them. Earlier this year, Kodak introduced a new version of its EasyShare desktop software program with richer editing features, such as images that expand to almost the entire screen.

In addition to its $25 a year Gallery Premier account, you can opt to pay twice as much for the account and a discount on Kodak prints — 10 cents each rather than 15 cents. Paid accounts let you download high-resolution versions of each photo and give you a unique Web address for sharing photos that can be password protected. But the other four sites offer personal Web sites as free features, rather than just with paid accounts.

Shutterfly seemed to be the simplest site, though it isn’t the most attractive or user friendly. All of its features are free. Shutterfly does away with two conditions that Kodak Gallery and Snapfish have: It doesn’t require any purchases in order to keep your account from being deleted nor does it ever require your friends to sign in before viewing a shared album.

But Shutterfly’s simplicity can also be a hindrance. It doesn’t let you upload videos to share, nor can you download high-resolution versions of each photo or send photos to the site via email or mobile device; the other sites do these things either for free or with a paid account.

Snapfish is Hewlett-Packard Co.’s photo-sharing site, and it stands out because it has the most restrictions. Along with its requirement that you purchase something at least once a year to keep your account, guests who view your albums must always sign in; you can’t change this setting like on the other sites. To skirt this issue, Snapfish emphasizes its Group Rooms, or personalized sharing Web sites that users view with a specific URL and a password (if you choose to have one).

Snapfish and Shutterfly both have Web sites on which photos appear too small for my taste, though Snapfish does offer generously sized images in photo slideshows — a plus. I’d prefer the site itself showed larger images in other instances. High-resolution version of photos can be downloaded for a fee of 25 cents for one and five cents for more than one.

Of the two community sharing sites, I preferred Flickr over Photobucket. The site felt cleaner, with fewer distractions and one less advertisement than Photobucket. For people who aren’t used to these more progressive sites, Photobucket and Flickr may seem extreme. They offer things like tagging and use terms that can be confusing. Flickr uses “sets” in place of “albums,” and photos are organized within “batches.” Photobucket organizes albums, but then lets you create sub albums within an album.

Neither site requires annual purchases, and both allow free high-resolution downloads of photos. Instead of one-time sharing, the sites use photostreams, or constantly updated photo blogs that friends can check.

Flickr and Photobucket make it easy to post photos to blogs in one step, including Blogger and Typepad. Photobucket also lets you post to MySpace and Facebook in one step.

In Flickr, you can meet people who have interests similar to yours by searching through Groups. I joined a group that shared photos of tennis courts around the world. Digital photos suddenly offered ways to socialize online without chatting or leaving overused messages for strangers.

Among other things, Photobucket lets you create a Remix — a presentation made of your photos and/or videos after they’re dragged into a storyline and mixed in with music, transitions and graphics. The result was entertaining and professional, though it took just seconds to make.

Ideally, I’d like to combine a favorite feature from each of these sites to make one great photo-sharing Web site. I found something wrong with each one, but Kodak Gallery and its EasyShare software program offer a good combination of editing and sharing. Flickr was my preferred community photo site, though it and Photobucket both offer fresh ways to share digital photos.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Mossberg

]]> http://solution.allthingsd.com/20070801/how-the-big-photo-sharing-sites-stack-up/feed/ 14