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Quick style comparison of mobile image search sites

May 10th, 2013

The other day I glanced at a classmate using Baidu to perform an image search and was impressed with their presentation:

Note the nice big images and the lack of margins around images. After seeing this presentation, I realized that the common approach of adding margins around images is pretty unnecessary.

I also noticed that the images are a variety of sizes, leading to a less sterile experience. There’s surely some clever math going on behind the scenes here to make sure the images appear “justified” (to use a word from the recent Flickr redesign).

Google

Note the smaller photos, which sometimes causes features on images to be indiscernable.

Also note the more common approach of adding margins around the images. This seems to remove a lot of space which could otherwise be used to show more details of images, which is the approach Baidu takes.

Bing

Bing uses a nicely-designed slick interface with a black background, which I tend to like a bit better.

However, all its images are cropped or resized to be exactly the same size, leading to a more sterile gridlike experience.

Also, just a minor complaint, but the search magnifying glass appears to be a tiny bit blurry, especially compared to the sharpness of the Bing logo. But it’s barely noticeable, especially compared to Yahoo (below).

Yahoo!

Yahoo has nice big images, actually a bit too big. Bit it also appears to suffer from the approach Bing uses to resize photos to make their dimensions exactly the same.

Again note the common white margins around the images.

The non-retina top graphics (logo and search button) are so blurry and distracting that I have to at least mention them here. These images look blurry on every modern phone on the market today, and it’s sad to me that neither developers nor QA cared enough about this to do something about it.

Strangely, these images look fine on the main “Web” tab, but they are distractingly blurry on this Images view as well as others.

Flickr mobile app (iOS)

The Flickr app itself has some decently-sized images, but here again we see the image margins at work. This is also present on the “justified view” on the desktop site, so I suppose they wanted to be consistent.

Flickr mobile web

This is certainly the worst out of the bunch. It’s a real waste of space, with small images sacrificed for textual information that’s a little excessive for this screen.

I think this is just due to the website’s age. Flickr’s mobile website is much neglected and is showing its age. I would be really nice to see updates to match the nice progress they’ve made with the “justified layout” that you can see on their desktop site and mobile app.

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Kyoto Cherry Blossoms 2013 (京都の桜２０１３年)

April 30th, 2013

Check out my cherry blossoms 2013 set on Flickr.

Japan has a healthy fascination with the beauty of nature, and this includes the ephemeral cherry blossoms. And one of the prime locations for cherry blossoms is Kyoto, Japan.

It takes a while to realize, but there actually seems to be a wide variety of cherry blossoms which blossom at different times. This stretches the season out a bit (the prime blossoming lasts only about a week). It’s nice to be able to walk around for a few weeks and find random beautiful cherry blossoms.

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Video: Spring in Kyoto (京都の春)

April 15th, 2013

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How to import imiwa? vocabulary lists directly into Anki (iOS/iPhone guide)

February 27th, 2013

EDIT: big thanks to my classmate Robin from Switzerland who showed me the key steps to getting this figured out!

For the last six months, I’ve mainly been using imiwa? for iOS to look up Japanese words whenever I don’t know them (mostly in class). However, I found that I built up big lists without ever reviewing them.

The best way to review is of course through Anki, but it was a laborious process to import each word one-by-one. I should’ve figured there was an easier way!

Step 1: Export list and email to yourself

Most good apps, including imiwa?, include an export function. They may export directly to an Anki file (all the easier!), or they may export to a tab-delimited file, as imiwa? does. For this tutorial I’ll assume you have a dictionary that does the latter, and for the purpose of this quick tutorial, I’ll use screenshots from imiwa? on iOS as a guide.

Your first step is to open up imiwa? and go to the Lists tab (click the icon at the bottom):

Click on the list you want to export, then click on the icon next to the Edit button at the top of the screen:

At this point we have a few options. Choose the bottom option (“Tab separated values”):

After a little processing, imiwa? will finish and direct you to the email app, where you need to email the list to yourself. Just type in your email address and hit Send:

Step 2: Download and import to desktop Anki

Now switch to your desktop and download the file you emailed to yourself. It should look something like this:

Note that there’s a lot of “junk” data that we won’t need when we import into Anki. Don’t worry, there’s a way to get rid of it!

Now open up Anki, click File -> Import… and select the file you downloaded (from the email you send to yourself).

Step 3: Hide junk columns from Anki

When you import the file, you’ll get prompted with a screen that looks like this:

This allows you to tell Anki which deck to import into (you probably will want to create a brand new deck), but most importantly you need to tell Anki which fields are import.

Here’s a typical line from a list I imported:

“JMDICT 1431110 直接ちょくせつ direct, immediate, personal, firsthand L41-50″

In other words:

“1. [Junk] 2. [Junk] 3. Expression 4. Reading 5. Meaning 6. [Junk]”

On this screen in Anki, hit the Change button for fields 1, 2, and 6, and be sure to tell Anki to ignore them. For the rest of the fields, match them up appropriately (Field 3 is Expression, Field 4 is Reading, Field 5 is Meaning).

Now click the Import button, and you magically have a new Anki deck to work through!

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Japan: from miniature train to bullet train

January 29th, 2013

(view the full image, image credit)

A long time ago, four black ships appeared off the coast of Japan, which had closed itself off from the world and its influences. These ships were from the US, and commanding them was Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who was instrumental in reopening Japan to the rest of the world.

As a result of this, and to promote a goodwill between the two countries, Perry gave various gifts to Japan, one of which was a one-fourth scale model train, in order to convincingly demonstrate the benefit of adopting Western technology:

Perry’s gifts aimed to foster trade and good relations between America and Japan by displaying the goodwill of the U.S. as well as its technological and cultural power. This fully operational Norris Works, one-fourth scale model train, complete with 350 feet of 18-gauge track, engine, tender, and car, represented one of these “triumphs of civilization”, which Perry used to influence the Japanese. Behind the Yokohama reception hall, the Americans assembled and operated the locomotive for the Japanese officials, some of whom rode by sitting on top of the car. (source)

Of course one of the things modern Japan is now famous for is its great rail system, the epitome of which is the world-renowned Shinkansen bullet train.

In contrast, being born and raised in Los Angeles, I’m painfully aware at America’s recent lack of progress in rail transportation, compared to Japan and the rest of the world. Part of this can be blamed on GM and other companies, which in the 1930s and 1940s purchased streetcar companies only to dismantle them. It’s the classic tradition of the big corporation buying up the smaller competition in order to stifle it. Unfortunately, as a result of this corporate selfishness, Los Angeles transportation is perhaps permanently handicapped. And currently it’s nearly impossible to live in LA without owning a car. And one of the wonderful benefits of owning a car is of course participating in the great modern innovation known as the traffic jam.

Thankfully, there are finally concrete plans of bringing a bullet train to California, to span Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Of course all of this comes decades behind the progress of the rest of the world, and far behind Japan, a country which we were so proud to introduce rail transportation to back in the day.

Perhaps Darth Vader, his own mask being Japanese-inspired, said it best: “The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master.”

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