Ten Photo Assignments: A Review

I recently signed up to O'Reilly's blogger review program. It seems like an ideal arrangement: I get free books (I love reading and learning new stuff), I read them and then write about them (which I want to do more of). It's a little crazy though, because I have an O'Reilly Safari subscription and can get all the books I please from them. Nonetheless, I thought it would be good fun to restrict myself to one of their offered books and give my opinion of it.

Despite there being some interesting technical titles, the first book I chose is called Ten Photo Assignments by Amanda Quintenz-Fiedler. I chose this because i'd like to improve my photography a little and, based on he title, this seemed ideal. I've read books before that give you advice on how to use your camera and take better photos but thought this one would teach me using a different approach. I imagined myself being given projects to romp around town and country taking photos of wild rabbits and road signs and somehow becoming a better photographer in the process.

It's worth noting that my preferred photographic weapon of choice was to be my new iPhone. I have a DSLR and a point and shoot but my iPhone is always with me and I want to use it to take more photos so that I don't have to lug around either of the other devices. That said, I didn't want or expect that there would be anything iPhone specific in the book. Indeed I had a vain hope that the book would start with the premise that the best camera is the one that's available and go from there.

Disappointment set in soon after reading the introduction where it was explained that ideally you should be using a camera with many knobs, buttons and interchangeable lenses. Fair enough, many people want to know about how to use their camera but this hinted that the contents would be more aimed at the equipment rather than the composition.

The first two chapters re-affirmed the feeling that this book wouldn't be exactly what I wanted it to be. It called for a myriad of equipment including a variety of lenses, light meter, tripod and grey scale card. Not the kind of equipment I owned or wanted to carry with me. On the plus side I enjoyed the focus of the book on being about taking photos correctly with the camera and not relying on either automatic camera settings or post processing.

The book continued with sections on colour and exposure, again seemingly as much to do with equipment as taking photographs themselves. Of course, taking great photos is as much about knowing how to use your equipment and what will happen when you press the shutter button.

Things started to get more interesting (for me) just over half way through the book when the subject turned to composition. This is the kind of thing that I was looking for and wasn't disappointed. The chapters on composition, getting closer to your subject and finding the right light were all useful.

Despite a lot of the content not being exactly what I wanted to get out of a photography book at this time I felt that this was a good book. The structure of the book takes you from learning how to use your equipment to how to compose better photos. The focus is on taking good photos in the first place and not on post processing. The book also advocates experimentation and learning from mistakes which feels like a good and honest approach and better than suggesting that simply reading a book and following a few recipes will make you into a better photographer. The information is also very well conveyed in simple steps.

The main criticism I have of the book is that you seem to need a lot of equipment (by a lot I mean more than simply a camera) before you can get the best out of it. That said, for a beginner wanting to learn more about their equipment and how to take great photographs this would be an excellent start.

How to cope if you find yourself speaking at a conference and aren't sure how to proceed

Last weekend I spoke at PHP North West. It was my first time speaking at a conference and a great experience in many ways, from the preparation, to being part of the conference as a delegate and finally delivering my talk. I'd like to share some of the ways in which I prepared in case it is useful for anyone else.

I was most nervous about speaking right after I found out my talk had been accepted. It took a few days to calm the nerves and was clear that if I was that nervous when I actually came to talk while feeling that nervous I would bomb. I read around a bit and came up with my own strategy that made me feel more comfortable about the whole thing. Here are the things I did.

1. Learn from books, courses, online advice

There has been a lot written about doing presentations, from how to make a good presentation, how to build a slide deck in Powerpoint or Keynote to how to overcome nerves and fear of public speaking. The first thing I did, which may be suitable for others with a predilection for reading, is to read a bunch of books and articles to pick up any advice about what I might be in for. At the very least this gives a grounding about what you're expected to do.

2. Watch speakers that you enjoy listening to

This can have two effects, so it's best to go into watching other people speak knowing what you want to get out of it. One thing that could happen is that you see someone speak and think how great they are and how you can never match up to them - demotivating. A better approach is to watch other people speak, be critical and analytical and see what it is you like about them. Thinking about what they are doing should inject some of their qualities into your speaking.

3. Prepare

The preparation portion will be the most time consuming part of giving a talk. It's where you do the research, decide what you're going to say and create the slide deck. The amount of preparation you have to do will probably depend on how well you know your subject (which should hopefully be pretty well in the first place!). It may be that you can simply brain dump what you know, organise it into something coherent and design some appropriate slides. There may also be a significant amount of research around the subject you do to make sure you know your subject inside out.

4. Practise

Nothing will get you through your talk more than practise. When you're particularly nervous or there is no time to think about your talk directly before you give it the practise you did will get you through. It will allow you to go in to auto pilot, get lost in the talk and distance yourself from any nerves. This will be the most important thing you do.

5. Get feedback

Your friends lie. You will do the presentation for them and they will say it's good or fine and that's no help at all. They are bad judges because they don't want to hurt your feelings. They also hear you speak all the time and therefore may not be able to assess you properly. Even if you ask them to be honest it's unlikely you will get any useful feedback. Sure they might offer some pointers for improvements here and there but this will be nothing like the feedback you get from the conference goers. Try getting in front of people you don't know, maybe at a local user group.

iPhone 4S

I don't believe it's justified to be disappointed that an iPhone 5 wasn't announced yesterday rather than a 4S. The updated specs are worthy of the new release so it appears that what people really wanted to see was a newly designed enclosure. Perhaps this is understandable given that Apple is as well loved, for it's design output, if not more so, as anything else. Whether there was a new design or not the internal update would have been the same and surely that's what makes an upgrade an upgrade.

Easy to say in retrospect but a new enclosure design seemed unlikely with the iPhone 4 only being released last year. The redesign of the iPhone with iPhone 4 came 3 years after the original so to expect a new design after a single year is expecting too much. Despite their secretive nature, perhaps Apple would do well to set certain expectations to prevent disappointment and allow people to concentrate on what has been released instead of what hasn't. On the other hand Apple promised or hinted at nothing so it is as much the critics, pundits, prediction makers that whip up the frenzy of possibility. At least now this release is out of the way the likelihood of a new design next year will be greater, at which time we can complain about the insignificant technical advances.

Hello, Trello

Trello was launched a couple of weeks ago and I've been using it every day for a number of projects. To do list or task management applications are ten a penny and I must have tried them all. I typically use them for a week or so and then revert to my go to application, TaskPaper. However to pigeon hole Trello as another to do list manager would be a grave injustice. For a start its biggest differentiating feature is how teams can use Trello to collaborate.

Trello's approach is simple but it's aim is audacious. A project is represented by a board (analogous to a white board) divided into lists and onto each list cards can be added. That's Trello at the most basic level, a digital version of a white board and sticky notes. The idea is expanded in a few ways: people can be invited to view a board and modify it and each can can have "stuff" put on it. Stuff being comments, check lists, labels, attachments and a few other things. All this is wrapped up in a simple, to look at and use, interface.

There are lots of nice touches to Trello - those little things that would be easy to overlook when developing the application but blend in so seamlessly that it shows how much care has been taken over the features and interface. To start with a non-interface thing, everything you do with Trello is over https. This removes the question about what should and shouldn't be on a secure connection. When you register with Trello and when you create a new board you get an example board which gets you going much faster than if you were presented with a blank screen. The avatars come through from Gravatar. On the one hand this is great because if you already have a Gravatar image linked to the email address you signed up with Trello with, your photo is pulled into Trello - zero friction. If you don't have a Gravatar account then it could feel like something of a faff to have to go create an account on another service. If you don't have a Gravatar account or linking photo then your initials appear instead of an image which is a simple yet very effective way of identifying board members.

Trello is audacious because it doesn't target a particular niche and aims to appeal and be useful to a broad audience. This is audacious and risky because by appealing to lots of people it is in danger of not having the depth of features of other task management applications. Collaboration is certainly the killer feature and will make it popular. On the surface Trello is a very general application however its origins in a software company and ability to mimic a typical white board software process are obvious. Maybe only to anyone who has stood in front of a white board and moved sticky notes around!

Despite being a serviceable to do list application for a single person, Trello really shines when used by a team. The high level, dashboard, approach to the interface makes seeing the status of a project - should the lists be set up appropriately - easy. The information brought through from the "back" of a card - number of tasks complete / remaining, votes, attachments, comments - is also very nice. One thing I'm still unsure of is how useful Trello will be when a board has hundreds of cards. Prioritisation and familiarity may help but it would still be a lot of information to take in. No worse than the aforementioned white board and sticky notes though. Features such as filtering could help with this.

The service so far has been highly dependable. There is the occasional interface niggle, for example no visual indication when a user is made an admin of a board, but overall the experience has been positive. I've also found that people added to Trello cold, i.e. without any particular foreknowledge of the application or time taken learning what it can do, have taken to it easily. It will be interesting to see how long the novelty of Trello will remain fresh and whether it will go the way of most task manager applications. Certainly a continuous supply of updates and new features, being careful not to add bloat, will help but one would assume that there has to be a point at which Trello reaches maturity and has enough users to be sustainable.

Perhaps the greatest part of Trello is how it came to being and what it says of Fogcreek as a company. Trello was born from a desire to give the Fogcreek developers a new challenge and, I expect, have a chance to use some recent technologies that might not have existed or being particularly mature a few years ago. Despite being a huge motivator not many development companies can simply let a number of their developers spend nine month (Trello's development time) doing something new with the latest technologies. This speaks of a company that exists almost solely for the purpose of giving developers something great to work on. Profit will still be a priority, as an enabler, but it's like profit isn't sole the purpose for Fogcreek's existence. With this vision for creating a great company and great products it will be interesting to see where Fogcreek take Trello and what they come up with in the future.

iPad Board Gaming

Board gaming is a great hobby to geek out with. Putting aside the actual playing of a game there is a lot to get in to: the mechanics of games, components, component quality, themes, game designers. Of course most board games require other people to play with and for someone who likes playing board games a lot it can be difficult to get the required play time to scratch the itch.

iPad is a great platform for board games: small enough to be portable but large enough to provide a good playing experience for most games. iPad board games are much cheaper than their physical counterparts. This makes it attractive to buy a digital copy of a game you already own or just try something out. Like other genre of computer games virtual board games benefit from being able to play other people online as well as providing an AI to practise against or for when there are no other humans around.

There can be down sides to electronic versions of games. Although advantageous in that there are no pieces to set up or put away, games on the iPad can be less tactile and lose something over the physical experience. Weak or poorly implemented AIs can be frustrating to play against. Also the very fact of having the ability to play a board game any time or any where can sometimes be a detriment, leading to over familiarity and either dulling the fun and freshness of the game or improving one's ability to such an extent that playing with others becomes unfulfilling.

When talking about board games i'm not talking about the likes of Monopoly and Scrabble which might be the first such games that come to mind. Rather, a more niche area of games, often called designer board games, so called because the games themselves are more often than not credited to a particular person. A further subset of board games are euro games. Although the origin of these games is given away in the name, it is the features and mechanics of these games that are most worthy of the title. Euro games generally focus more on skill than luck, keep everyone playing until the end and provide a more social, interactive experience.

A number of designer board games have been recreated on iPad. In a future post i'll give an overview of what some of them are about and what the iPad implementations are like. For now, here's a short list of some of the games available.

• The Settlers of Catan 
• Ticket to Ride
• Puerto Rico
• Neuroshima Hex
• Samurai
• Small World
• Carcassonne
• Through the Desert
• Ra
• Battleline

More information about board games can be found at the Mecca of board gaming sites boardgamegeek.com and reviews of iPad games can be found at ipadboardgames.org.

Speaking at PHPNW

I'm speaking at PHPNW next month. This will be my first time speaking at a conference. I've spoken at weddings and in team meetings at work before but this will be the first time that people can choose whether to hear me speak, or not.

I'll be speaking about Phalanger and compiling PHP to .Net. Jadu have been using Phalanger for a number of years now and it saves us a lot of time and effort in maintaining a product supported on PHP and .Net stacks. My talk will be about how Jadu came to use Phalanger, why it's right for us and an introduction to mixing PHP and .Net.

The thought of doing the talk has become less daunting over time. I submitted the paper fairly close to the deadline and didn't really hold out much hope of getting it accepted. Lo and behold it was accepted and I felt the most nervous right after finding out. Could I coherently talk for almost an hour and get across how useful Phalanger can be?

After giving the idea of actually having to do the talk a couple of weeks to settle in I started to plan what I was going to talk about. I had approximately three months to prepare. I had a general plan to spend a month researching and putting together a first draft presentation. I would then practise and refine the presentation for a month and spend the final month practising, practising and practising.  Three months feels like a long time but it soon flies by. Having a plan and sticking to it as well as the process and feeling of progression over time has really helped to ease the nerves and get used to the fact that I can do it.

I'm now into the final month and it's mostly practising with a little refining here and there. It feels like it's been a long process and I sure will be pleased when I can come home at night and not think about, plan or have to practise any more. While not particularly nervous about having to do the actual speaking, after all the time I have put into the presentation I hope it at least goes reasonably well and that people get something from it.