Google Photos is overcompensating for the Daylight Saving Time switch on yesterday’s pictures. Photos taken at 6:00pm are labeled as 7:00pm. Everything from this summer/early fall (which might as well have been summer) is off, in the app anyway (the website shows the right time in PDT), which at least makes more sense than if it had only been one day. The weird thing: it’s not even showing the time in today’s timezone by mistake. It’s adjusting it the other way.
My best guess: There used to be a DST bug in Google Photos, but they adjusted for it. Now the bug’s been fixed, but the adjustment is still there.
Google Photos has been sending me its usual “Rediscover this day!” collages from Comic-Con 2013. On Tuesday it sent me a collage built from July 18, and on Thursday it sent me a collage built from July 20, marking Thursday and Saturday of the event.
I’d like to think someone programmed the algorithm to skip photos tagged for hospitals. Imagine if it was my wife’s photo collection, and I hadn’t made it — “Rediscover this day” would have been rather cruel in that case.
The more likely explanation is that I don’t have very many photos from that day for it to pick from, at least not on the account. On my computer I have 19 photos from my phone, 19 from my camera, and 5 from Katie’s phone. Of those, I picked 21 for my Flickr album. In Google Photos, I only have six from that day, all from my phone — and they don’t include the ER wristband shot.
My best guess is that I cleared most of them from my phone sometime before I started using the cloud backup feature… but I can’t figure out why I would have kept the photos that are there, and not some of the photos that aren’t.
Here are the photos that are on there:
There were some other good parodies, but these were the best.
This is the only Flash I ended up seeing that night.
It’s an odd collection, isn’t it? The three individual frames from the GoT protester collage are in there, so maybe the collage app saved extra copies of the sources, and Photos found the folder. I can see deliberately keeping the view of the blimp from the convention floor (literally the floor), but if I’d done that, I don’t know why I wouldn’t have saved the wristband shot as well. And why save the Duplo Enterprise, but not the photos of my son playing at the LEGO booth?
Phone cameras and cloud storage are supposed to augment our memory. But sometimes the context is just missing.
Google has released the first taste of what will become a larger Google+ API for third-party applications built on their social network. So far, all you can do is authenticate, retrieve someone’s public profile, and read their public activities. That doesn’t sound like much, does it?
Well, here are some ideas I came up with over lunch:
Add Google+ activity to a lifestream.
Allow someone to comment on your blog using their Google+ identity.
Create a map of movements of based on public checkins.
Analyze posting frequency & times.
Analyze most popular posts based on reshares, +1s, replies (basically: add Google+ to Klout [Update:That was fast!])
Associate a person with other profiles you might have from other social networks, based on their profile URLs.
Build a list of people who work at an organization and speak a particular language.
Of course, it’ll really start taking off when they enable write access and the link-sharing and cross-posting services can get in on the act.
So, how about you? What else do you think can be done with the limited API released today?
I use navigation on my Android phone to pick out the best route to work each morning. The problem is, it bases time estimates on traffic conditions now — not traffic conditions as they’ll be when I get to each point along the route. I’ve gotten used to the morning drive taking at least 15 minutes* longer and the evening drive taking around 10 minutes less than predicted, but a little more precision would be helpful.
Obviously, Google isn’t psychic. They can’t predict where and when car crashes will happen. But they do have historical traffic data. If you go to Google Maps on the web and display traffic, you can switch between live data and an average for a given time and day of the week.
It would be fantastic if Google used that data to predict how much slower (or faster) traffic will be moving at each point along each projected route, and use that for the time estimates. It would be nice for the “Are we there yet?” factor, but it would be incredibly useful for route planning!
*Sometimes more. This morning, it predicted a 55-minute trip. It took me an hour and 35 minutes.
Android and Me is reporting that all Android phones in the U.S. will get Android 2.1 updates — even the G1 — but that they may be missing some features and some models will need to be wiped as part of the installation.
That makes sense, because it would allow developers to reassign some of the space set aside for over-the-air updates and use it for a larger system instead — and maybe more space for apps.
The possibility that the G1 was headed for obsolescence before my 2-year contract was up didn’t bother me much at first, but I’ve watched as even Google has released high-profile apps that required Android 2. Sure, I doubt the hardware can handle Google Earth, and Buzz turned out to be a dud, but they’re signs that Android 1.6 isn’t going to cut it for much longer.
If it does require a wipe and re-install, I can deal with that. A lot of the key data is either synced with the cloud or stored on the SD card. With luck, T-Mobile and HTC will build a decent backup and restore into the process and I won’t have to reinstall all my apps, bookmarks, etc.
Update August 2010: This is looking less and less likely as time goes on.
So, Google has announced the Nexus One phone. Let’s see how it stacks up against what I want in my next phone:
Mainstream Android (i.e., not overcustomized like Motoblur)? Check.
Faster than what I’ve got (a G1)? Check.
More memory & storage? Check.
Better camera? Check.
Longer battery life? Check.
Less clunky? Check.
Available on my current provider? Check.
Sounds great!
Only one problem: there’s no keyboard. Android’s on-screen keyboard is decent enough, but I’m not quite ready to give up that physical keyboard just yet. (OTOH, I don’t want the Droid. I played with the keyboard a little at Best Buy a couple of weeks ago, and really didn’t like it.)
I’ll have to practice with the virtual keyboard on the G1 some more. If I can get used to it, this might be worth the upgrade.
