My image manipulation needs are fairly basic. If an application can crop, resize, and convert image file types, it would fulfill 80% of my needs. Add the fact that it's a free hosted application and you have a winner.
This weekend, I came across cellsea, an online image manipulation application. Although it's feature-rich in terms of its competitors, it is by no means going to replace Photoshop or GIMP. Yet, that's the beauty of web 2.0 applications -- their simplicity. You don't need thick manuals nor extensive help files to use it. Just about everything is obvious and the feature set is intentionally small. I must admit that both Photoshop and GIMP overwhelm me with features.
Monday, January 22, 2007
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But what about stability?
I don't trust that cellsea.com will be around in 3 years, but less in one year. It is a dependency for a product that is untrustworthy.
In "The Two Income Trap", the author writes about how two income families get into finicial trouble more often than single income families because there are twice as many potential points of failure (i.e. two people who could get laid off), and they spend monthly greater then the higher of the two individual incomes.
That's my largest Web 2.0 concern. If my mashup used 5 services... oi!
ImageMagick was around in 1999. ImageMagick is around today. ImageMagick has a perl wrapper, a java wrapper and a ruby wrapper. You can download it, and once you have a version, that version will not be changing, going down, or going out of business. There is a piece of code still running on www.webshots.com that resizes images via ImageMagick that was written in 2000. I will wager $20 that in 2014, cellsea.com does not exist with the same interface as today. I forsee a maintenance nightmare coming over the horizon.
Oh. You are talking about for your use, not for a mashup style automated use. My bad. :P
that is a good point though, especially with api changes and service changes and variable levels of reliability - the mashup has more in common with the "Two Income Trap" than I would have thought.
but even with a simple tool - you're still going to need someone to teach you how to clip an image that doesn't have straight lines (ie, how to use clipping paths). with any image manipulation tool, there's still some skill involved...
I played around with cellsea just now. It's cool to see the web as an application -- like the equivalent of Google docs but with a graphics program. However, I found that just cropping my picture was awkward. It was jerky and didn't always realize what I was dragging. Surely that will be cured as web speeds increase. Thanks for the tip.
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