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Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

popped.at

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Re: Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

#21

Post by wicknicks »

Cool project! Here are a couple of suggestions which may help me as a user better understand the "breaking events, popular trends, cultural attitudes, and individual expression":

1. If photos have a hashtag, display it alongside an image. Text is the underestimated medium of non-personal image interpretation. Especially, when the data rate is so high, there needs to be some more precise clue about what the images are actually trying to convey.

2. Aggregate photos with similar intent. Group them into a box or color code their borders. Many tweets have GPS tags. Use them to provide a map interface to either filter some or just add a tag indicating the place of origin.

3. Most people who can only read 2-3 languages, and tweets in other languages will be treated as noise, no matter how relevant. The only alternative is combine them with a similar tweet in a language the user can understand.

4. Is there any reason photos change randomly across cells, and not in any order (as compared to say raster scanning the table and replacing photos)? Personally think that changing photos in some order is less painful on the eyes. I get the feeling that I am missing out an a lot of content because of this. Maybe replace only one section of the table at at time?

Good luck!

Re: Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

#23

Post by adrianwaj »

Finally launched!

can't seem to get it to pause ...should be a keypress..?

when photos are lightboxed, maybe pause background?

set time between pic changes?

Maybe have entire screen change its photos at once, or have the layout behave like a scrolling view (ie movie credits)? see: http://desandro.github.io/imagesloaded/

Would be interesting to link to http://www.photosugar.com/ to see all a user's photos.

Lastly, there was an item recently that laid out different sized photos based on their size so that there was no gap between the images. That'd be awesome.

Re: Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

#24

Post by geuis »

Anyone still reading this later, here's some more info. I took a nap so am just getting back.

The photos are real time. There's no caching on my part. As they are coming in from Twitter, they go right back out.

The time of day has the biggest effect on the types of images shared. For example, during peak Japan/Korea hours you see lots of anime, food, cute pets, and jpop singers. When it's America time, it's largely food, porn, penis photos, fucked up images, and cute cats.

After watching this for well over a year, I'm seriously concerned about America. We are really a fucked up people.

For technical questions, I would advise people to seriously take a look at the code. There are a ton of optimizations in there. At a high level, an in-memory array of image objects prevents a massive memory leak I found in every tested browser last year in regards to garbage collecting image objects. Also, using in-memory canvas objects before drawing them to the display canvas gives a really nice performance boost.

I experimented with different display styles. A fixed random pattern provided the nicest display vs time on screen for images. Basically, the old image stays on screen as long as the stream is fast.

There are some UI features that need tweaking, so leave comments about good/bad stuff and I'll take a look.

If you swipe up/down or hit the space bar it will pause the stream.

Re: Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

#26

Post by Mankhool »

I like this idea, and the others referenced, very much. I think there is a huge opportunity here for all photos (and eventually video?) that are geo-tagged. What I would like to see, and what would be valuable to journalists or media organizations would be a real-time stream based on geo-location. Simply: a map interface that I can choose a point on to see a real-time stream from (I should be able to select the "nearest" data (which might be best in remote locations) or define data based on a "radius" that I draw or otherwise define (which might be best for urban areas)). Imagine something happening somewhere and being able to see all the photos/videos from RIGHT THERE in real-time. Valuable?

Re: Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

#27

Post by geuis »

ux-app wrote: post #5

Interesting project. Would be keen to hear about technical details. How real-time is the data? I noticed a lot of repeating images so I'm assuming the data is collected and batch processed? Or are the images being fetched directly using the twitpic API? Any reason for using canvas element instead of images or CSS backgrounds? My gut would suggest that loading an image and then painting to the canvas would incur a gre…

Data comes directly from twitter live. Canvas is much more performant. Your gut is wrong =). Look at the network tab. All data is delivered from the source. I've thought about more features. Stay tuned.

Re: Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

#28

Post by geuis »

jacquesm wrote: post #7

Here's a few more: http://www.pingwire.com/ (now defunct, but it was pretty good) http://jellibug.com/ http://picfog.com/ (live stream seems down) http://gimmeshiny.com/ (other sources than twitter) http://twicsy.com/ http://twitcaps.com/ (defunct) These usually don't live long, I'm not sure why. Pingwire was by far my favorite, mesmerizing.

I've had popped.at running for over a year and a half and in a different form since the earthquake in Japan. It was originally tensecondstotokyo.com and focused on Japan.

Re: Show HN: Popped At, my many, many weekends realtime photo project

#30

Post by dnautics »

geuis wrote: post #24

Anyone still reading this later, here's some more info. I took a nap so am just getting back. The photos are real time. There's no caching on my part. As they are coming in from Twitter, they go right back out. The time of day has the biggest effect on the types of images shared. For example, during peak Japan/Korea hours you see lots of anime, food, cute pets, and jpop singers. When it's America time, it's largely f…

haha slow down... You should be really concerned about america's twitter users (actually the subset of twitter users that share pictures), not necessarily america's people.
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