I think I got to sourceforge a few times a month for one software or another.

But this week when you try to download they have started showing a big ad-intersticial page.
And 80% of the page is about the advertiser, good luck finding the link to download... At least for me the ad stays there forever, there is no automatic start of the download. It even freezes my opera for something like 20 seconds.

I find this extremely annoying, enough that it just put me off downloading something because I just didnt want to risk a crash again.

When did this start?

check the screenie - found the download link yet?

I try so many sites as part of my work, and most of the time I find them lacking - I have registered to literally hundreds at one time or another and I haven't gotten stuck and participated in any of them the way I do in forums or newsgroups.

Until last weekend. This little one is clearly a labour of love and well suited to its planned purpose, and as a web application it is near perfect in delivering what it wants to deliver and nothing more.

http://www.blipfoto.com/

What is it
it is a simple, no frills, 1-a-day photoblog type service.

Sign up - human checked - upload one photo a day (which goes up for the day you took it, thats the one rule), put a bit of text with it. Receive nice welcome comments. Go around and get amused, impressed and probably inspired by all the weird and wonderful things other people have come up with that day. Want to go out and take yet more pictures.

The challenge is to try to do something daily. It's easy and yet it is fun, and because it is so minimalistic it doens't feel as self centered as the classic blog/diary thing.

I mentioned it elsewhere https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=12671.msg109694#msg109694 with screenshots, but I thought that some people in DC might enjoy that little creative challenge every day so I would point it out again.

Why it works
- it is easy. the site is easy to use, upload takes 2 steps and no time at all... and we're talking 1 pic a day
- it feels accessible - most of the pictures are nice but normal. some frome expensive kit, some from mobile phone cameras. The community is all about positive pats on the back
- the design enhances the message - it is simple and keeps the images to a small size, which reinforces the message that it is about seeing and capturing life in its variety rather than a contest of impressive images.
- it is inspiring - I was very surprised that something so simple can get the creative juices flowing, i just love checking the site at random in the evenings
- it is a bit of a challenge, but one that you can achieve (besides there is no problem in not posting every day, many don't).
- there is no pressure. you dont have to be technically great, or original, to get a bit of feedback and recognition
- there is nothing unneccessary (a big thing for me, i have trouble with websites with too much stuff)

What it is not
- you wont get improve-your-photography criticism
- theres no competition
- not the best place to show off your best pictures

What could be better (for me)
- i would love a way to mark/remember specific pics i liked, to find them easily later
- it would be nice to have some form of conversation support across comments
but i suspect these might take away some of the simplicity of the concept and break some of the magic, and I dont really miss it that much.

What it did to me in one week:

Now I have always carried a pocket camera around, with the intention of taking more pictures, but I often didn't. This has managed to give me the little kick to try - snap something...  Take more risks (I come from film, I just didnt snap like mad) I just try to actually extract something out of whatever pictures I manage to take that day.

This week I have taken pictures of bits of plants, even though I thought my camera probably wouldnt cope (it did, better than i would have thought). I have taken pictures of my coworkers (who never want to) using the excuse that I am trying to get more photos for that photoblog challenge (and they let me get away with it). I have had people chat with me on the street because they saw me take a photo of a flower/brick/bit of sidewalk and tell me how they try to take pictures and how fun it is now that you can fix it on the computer and I have just made them think they will take their camera with them tomorrow...

I have had a blast offline and online  :Thmbsup:

I have been more and more conscious lately that I am a lazy software user.

By that I mean that I often use only a small fraction of a tool's capabilities, and that, very often, if those capabilities need a lot of configuration, or scripting, or even a lot of reading... then I often don't do the necessary legwork. I might even end up looking for a tool to do something that a program I already own would be able to do with some configuration or scripting.

Now I am sure I am not alone in this, but the strange thing is I ought to be perfectly capable of learning these and doing it (after all I made a good living as a developer before I started making a good living creating and running development teams), but in truth I don't.

Some examples:

Total Commander is my file manager of choice, and it has quite a powerful set of scripting and extension possibilities. I have seen what can be done with it. Yet in 10 years I have never tried to understand it, I had even never (until December 2006) bothered to create a custom menu in it, and never gone beyond installing a few of the plugins... I finally looked a tiny bit in December after someone posted some screenshots in here that showed some capabilities - but even then it was a few hours and then I parked it.

I have the wirekeys tool, which has a lot of features. Again, it can also be scripted. And yet, in the 3 or more years I have owned it I have never started to use more than a tiny fraction of the features, never written anything in it, and never done much more than trawling the help file for a few tweaks (like the file open/save dialog improvement plug in). There are zillions of shortcuts that I ought to try to remember because they would save me a lot of time and hassle, yet I dont. I know I ought to create a "cheat sheet" and learn a few ones every week... but I haven't.

Opera is highly customisable yet I only bothered once to download alternate menus/toolbars - at the moment the most customisation I do is changing the search.

I had ahk installed for about 2 months and did exactly nothing with it, so I removed it. I didn't even install some of the great ahk scripts available here, although I downloaded about 20  :o

When I was looking at time tracking software I had to settle on one that would spy and record on my active windows, and then I would tag them, because no way I was going to set up all the kind of clients, categories etc. that the normal time trackers seemed to expect. I tested quite a few before realising that!

I own the stardock object desktop, and have had for years, but I have only once or twice tried to customise DesktopX or objectbar to create an environment that would suit my work and tasks. I know if I did it could be very cool and useful, but it is just a lot of work, so I haven't (actually i did an objectbar once and kept it for 2 months until I had to reinstall windows and realised I had never backed this bar config up).

...

You get the picture, it's just quite pathetic!

I guess I am at one extreme of the developer scale - the one who doesnt want his/her personal computer time to feel even remotely like work and likes simple tools that dont require too much configuration etc. The other extreme of the scale is the developer who likes to customise or write everything he/she uses.

I want my tool to be immediately useful out of the box, with a few simple adjustments. In all these cases and many others the tool is either good enough in its "immediate" form I will just stop using it, it will not give me the kick to learn it... If it is good enough out of the box I am more likely to never scratch the surface of what it could do with tweaking...

Launchers are a similar case. I have farr, and use it more as a search tool. I think I even installed and downloaded some of the plugins but never use them. And just like total commander and wirekeys, if I bothered to get used to using some of the features I am sure I would benefit. But I don't  :o Similarly I could set up a menu in Total Commander, but I dont (I started once, but too many programs). Or I could set them up in wirekeys (or stardock's keyboard launchpad and right click commander, i own that too) to make them into launch keys and right click menu. Or I could do an objectbar or desktopX instance. Or reinstall ahk. But instead I have gone out and found a launcher tool which suits lazy people like me, because it builds its menu by watching what i run, from all sources. Finally a menu that doesnt need work.

I do feel a bit ashamed that I am that lazy, but I guess I have so many other projects that I dont want tools that turn in projects. That's my excuse  :Thmbsup: