CTOForADay

I’ve seen some strangeness lately, brought on by the fact that we’re no longer making direct use of Flickr’s interestingness to choose which photo to show.

These essentially all boil down to the same issue - search quality.  I need to do more filtering of results to try to wipe out irrelevant or unwanted photos.

My current thoughts go like this:

• Add “underwear” to the negative keywords list.  I don’t really want to see people in their undies on my phone.
• Add “indoors” to the negative keywords list.
• Remove images that weren’t given proper titles by the person who uploaded them.  If you didn’t care enough to name your photo, I don’t care enough to see it.  This includes all-numeric titles, and titles which contain only IMG_XXXX.

There’ll be an update this weekend if all goes well.

So I’ve made a few more small tweaks since the 2.x series started, the biggest of which is in who provides our weather data.

Yahoo’s feed is damn good; it has flaws, but it also has huge benefits to us - the most important of which is that Yahoo’s weather API provides current conditions and the sunrise/sunset times in your location.  This means that as of 2.4, we started preferring photographs of sunrises and sunsets whenever the weather was clear or cloudy.

As of 2.5, we’re again increasing the number of queries we perform on a search, and that’s going to increase the amount of time we spend updating; but the upside is that we’ve got more images to choose from, and as of now, we’re going to stop preferring what Flickr thinks is interesting, and start randomly selecting from the set of selections we have at the nearest location to you we can get them.

For a while, I was seeing the same photos, day after day - now, I don’t think I’ve seen the same thing twice.  At the moment, I have a particularly beautiful view of Leicester Square, taken by maistora.

I look forward to hearing your opinions on the new version.

Three more releases since I last posted; each picked up on small feature requests and things on my TODO list.

First, foremost, and most recent is the change to Flickr’s weather API.  Google’s is free-text, and there’s no clear listing of what, exactly, it returns.  Yahoo has a nice, clean API and a simple enumeration of possible conditions, making my life much, much easier when it comes matching conditions to an appropriate set of search terms.

Changes to the “about this image” view when you double-tap the screen now shows the weather conditions at the moment the image was gathered, which should help me diagnose when people see volcanos.  Also, the weather condition associated with a volcano is now “Imminent volcanic death”.  I look forward to seeing that bug report.

Last, there have been some changes to the way preview works.  People expect an instantaneous preview, but as of right now, the process of fetching an image is anything but instant; also, we use lots of data, and Flickr’s APIs are blocked by some carriers.  I’ve replaced preview with a carefully rendered view explaining these and other issues to users.

I’ve got some very positive feedback as of late, but as always, more is better.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Update on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 6:49AM by Gregory Block

Bah.  I just woke up to imminent volcanic death as a weather condition.  It looks like Yahoo’s service also has problems providing reliable current conditions.  I can always treat “unknown” in their current conditions as “clear”, or something, I guess.

Funny photo, tho.

Weathrman 2 is out.  This release includes improvements pretty much all over the place, from what we search for on Flickr, how we search for it, which images we choose, what minimum image quality we’re willing to accept, new UI elements to help surface more detailed information, and lots more.

It also takes the text off of the background image, which leaves a prettier desktop, and we improve the image quality while we’re at it.

I look forward to your comments, which you can send using the support form, or on Flickr.

Update on Monday, January 18, 2010 at 5:14PM by Gregory Block

Updated to 2.1 due to outrage over the use of a permanent notification icon.  Also added a rough progress bar.

Shadow Complex is done; and while I’m happy that I’ve managed to take another game off of the pile of shame, which is currently shrinking faster than its rate of growth, I feel a bit funny about playing an Orson Scott Card title, given his political slant.  I wish Chair wouldn’t do that; it’s not like that ending was so good that they needed OSC’s involvement - that was one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen in a videogame.

You’re forgiven for thinking that there’s been no progress on Weathrman as of late; in fact, there’s quite a bit going on behind the scenes, including:

• Translated search terms, to pick up tourist photos.  EFIGS first.
• Status bar notification while the desktop is visible to provide better UI discoverability
• UI showing details of the current photo and linking to it on Flickr
• Some kind of resolution to the updater problem

I still need some kind of resolution to the updater problem, but that might not happen until 3.  At worst, I’ll build an intent that explains the nature of the application and gives the user a one-button way of udpating wallpaper.

But first, I need a haircut.  And to start Darksiders.