The new iMac 27″ display

By Junjie | Published: August 3, 2010

This is the 27″ iMac display. Check out how little adjustment is needed out of box and the gamut.

The New iMac 27-inch Display

The New iMac 27-inch Display

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iPhone/iPad Calendar Bug Report

By Junjie | Published: June 21, 2010

Always irks me that the Mac OS X, iPhone and now iPad thinks that Singaporeans start their week on Sunday instead of Monday. I was finally motivated enough to submit a bug report last week, and in less than 2 days I received a reply from Apple for a followup on the issue. Pretty impressive for a big company like Apple. The last time I got a direct response from a tech company for a bug report was from Omni Group for their OmniOutliner software.

If you’re keen to read the report, see: Bug Report for Calendar in iPhone & iPad

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“Ridiculous” to optimise sites for iPhone

By Junjie | Published: May 5, 2010

Rob Haggart of the blog A Photo Editor and professional photography portfolio software A Photo Folio, wrote in 2008:

A reader asked me awhile back about optimizing websites for the iPhone which I immediately dismissed as ridiculous and then, what do you know, I was out of the office later that day and tried to access a photographers contact info by going to their website on my palm phone because I didn’t have it in my database and couldn’t do it because of the flash so I thought ok, maybe there’s something to this.
In the larger scheme of things nobody will ever receive or lose a job based on the ability of their portfolio to render on a palm phone or iphone but more and more I find myself using google as a phone book instead of carefully entering photographers contact info into my database like I used to do.

Today, A Photo Folio portfolio sites support not only the iPhone (albeit rudimentary), but is boasting to be the first to deliver iPad sites on their portfolio.

Given the popularity and ubiquity of the iPhone among editors, art directors and clients, it is possible that you will receive or lose jobs based on the ability of your portfolio to render on the iPhone/iPad.

Earlier today, Kottke points out the fact that the websites of the top 10 luxury brands don’t work on the iPad reflect poorly on the industry, and that “If I were Anna Wintour, I would be screaming at these companies to fix these sites”.

I don’t know if Anna Wintour is using an iPhone or an iPad, but I’d bet it’s one of the many smartphones—of which none of them supports Flash.

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UOB and Mobile Internet Banking

By Junjie | Published: April 12, 2010

Just last month, DBS/POSB finally removed Java from its iBanking site, thus allowing iPhone/iPod Touch users to connect directly to their iBanking site from Safari. And this month, it rolled out its own iPhone app for DBS and POSB mobile banking.

I tried out the POSB app, and it’s really good. For those of you on UOB, internet banking remains elusive. You could badger them to improve support on iPhone/iPad and other mobile devices by removing Java and/or making their own app.

Send them an email via “Contact Us” link under Personal Banking: http://www.uob.com.sg/contact/index.html

Select: General / Website Feedback

Here’s the message I sent:

Hi,

Most major banks like Citibank, StanChart, OCBC and now DBS/POSB support internet banking on popular mobile devices such as the iPhone/iPad. OCBC and DBS/POSB even have their own apps on the iPhone to facilitate internet banking.

However, UOB continues to use Java as part of its login mechanism for internet banking, which locks out the iPhone/iPad and other mobile devices that do not support Java—a legacy and unnecessary technology for internet banking.

When would UOB remove Java as part of its login mechanism so that your customers could easily do internet banking via their mobile devices?

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Pulitzer-Winning Photojournalist Slams World Press Photo Awards

By Junjie | Published: March 6, 2010

Pulitzer-winning photojournalist, and winner of several World Press Photo Awards (19751, 19862) slams the selection of the 2009 World Press Photo winners:

The World Press Photo of the Year is stunning for its lack of content or any other journalistic values. The jury’s selection is yet another setback for a profession that is already in deep trouble. If that was the best of the best, they should have made no selection at all, and I’m hoping next year will bring a more professional group of jurors.
‘The photo shows the beginning of something, the beginning of a huge story,’ jury chair Ayperi Karabuda Ecer said of the photo. Right. Well how about showing pictures of the story itself, and there were plenty of powerful images from the Iranian protests, if that was what they wanted to show.
A fellow photographer said it was like seeing a photo of Paul Revere putting on his shoes before his midnight ride. There are those of us who still want to see the ride, not the’haunting and eerily prescient’ prelude.

Kennerly further elaborated in a later comment:

To further amplify my thoughts on the Photo of the Year… This is nothing personal about the photographer who won, he was there, and I admire him for it, but in my estimation there were other way more worthy photographs. If you just scan the other categories, there were ample opportunities to choose a great photograph from among them.
If the judges wanted to recognize Iran upheaval coverage, they had only to look at AFP photographer Olivier Laban-Mattel’s 2nd place Spot News Story for a winner. He was right there on top of it, wide angle in hand, putting his life on the line, and has fantastic photos to show for his courage. Any of his were better than what was chosen, and oh yes, they told the story, as opposed to being some ambiguous moment taken from afar of people doing who knows what on the top of a darkened roof above Tehran.
And there were many other strong contenders among the other categories’Charles Ommanney’s wonderful Obama photo as he waited, eyes closed, to make entrance for his swearing-in, Julie Jacobson’s dying Marine in Afghanistan, David Guttenfelder’s soldiers under fire, Walter Astrada’s bloodbath in Magagascar, and on and on. The photos were there, honored as winners in the specialized categories, but overlooked by a jury who might as well have been judges from another planet.

About time someone spoke up on the quality of the awards.

  1. 1st prize News Features, 1st prize People in the News ↩

  2. 3rd prize News Features ↩

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Missing the point

By Junjie | Published: February 20, 2010

Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov muses about chess and computers:

The moment I became the youngest world chess champion in history at the age of twenty-two in 1985, I began receiving endless questions about the secret of my success and the nature of my talent. Instead of asking about Sicilian Defenses, journalists wanted to know about my diet, my personal life, how many moves ahead I saw, and how many games I held in my memory. I soon realized that my answers were disappointing. I didn’t eat anything special. I worked hard because my mother had taught me to. My memory was good, but hardly photographic… It’s the equivalent of asking Lance Armstrong how many times he shifts gears during the Tour de France.

Garry’s comments resonated strongly with me as I recall how many beginning photographers would obsess themselves over what f/stop, which lens, what camera model, what lighting setup was used to achieve a great photograph. More often than not, these factors have little to do with what made the photograph great in the first place.

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Annie Leibovitz’s “Rail Love” for Vogue February 2010

By Junjie | Published: February 14, 2010

Annie Leibovitz’s “Rail Love” for Vogue February 2010

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A Classroom Divided

By Junjie | Published: February 13, 2010

Watch A Classroom Divided

Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination.

Every student should go through this lesson.

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Aperture 3: I’ll Pass

By Junjie | Published: February 13, 2010

No tethering support for Canon 5D2, or for that matter, any Canon cameras newer than the 350D.

Even the inelegant workaround, the Hot Folder Import Script doesn’t work. And even when it does, it is still more clumsy than Lightroom 2 or Lightroom 3′s implementation of Auto Import, requiring an additional script to work.

As much as I want to like using Aperture (hell, it’s almost S$200 cheaper than Lightroom 3), I’m going to have to pass.

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What Google’s Nexus One and Custom Made PCs have in common

By Junjie | Published: February 10, 2010

The other reason why I stop buying PCs custom made from Sim Lim is because no one wants to honour the warranty when things go wrong. It’s pretty much the same deal with Google’s Nexus One. Oh, it’s a hardware problem, go to HTC; HTC says no it’s a software problem, go to Google.

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