2007-02-23 15:23
Funny web applications
When you’ve signed up for a new online service and you’re exploring the interface, you’re not first and foremost expecting humor — which is probably why it works.
Today I’ve signed up for two online services, Picnik and FeedBurner, and in both cases they brought a smile to my face. Here’s why:
Picnic’s loading progress bar
Reminiscent of The Sims’ progress bar while loading (“Reticulating splines” etc.), Picnik’s progress bar signals that the application is setting up a perfect day out:
FeedBurner’s info boxes
When you log on to FeedBurner before your feed has gone live, you’re faced with this message, which made me laugh a lot:
Also, if you try and look at stuff that’s only included in their pro package, you get this:
Informal != unprofessional
There’s enough seriousness in the world as it is, and a little lightheartedness is often a good thing. Being informal and funny doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll come off as unprofessional, so go ahead and make me laugh a little! Of course, at some point you might want to start looking around for that thin line and make sure you don’t cross it …
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2007-02-23 14:56
Online photo editor: Picnik
Today, Photojojo praises a new online application for photo editing called Picnik, and I can understand why. It’s an extremely slick web application which works in a very intuitive and user friendly way. For example, getting it to work with my Flickr account was a breeze.
But getting it to work after getting it to work with Flickr wasn’t as easy. I tried editing a couple of my badly color balanced mobile pictures, and while the resulting pictures look much better, it caused my browser to hang several times during processing (and I even tested in Safari after Firefox hung twice, with the same result), requiring me to restart the browser. That said, full props to Picnik for getting me right back where I left, with almost no work lost.
I’m looking forward to when it’s getting more stable. To be fair, it’s not much more than a month old, and has the all too common “beta” tag in the upper left corner. So while I won’t be using it much right now, I’ll be following their blog to see how it comes along. And I suspect it might work better in Windows, so if you’re a Windows user, go ahead and check out Picnik and judge for yourself.
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