An inevitable question I’ll hear over the next few weeks or months will be “So, Where Do You See Yourself, Five Years From Now?”. There are many answers to that, and it would take too long to list them here.
So here’s one of the answers, focusing on “my personal tech projects”, as opposed to “getting a degree” or “travel” or “write a book”, etc. …
I’ve written about FlexiPhoto quite a bit. What I haven’t gone into is how ThereThen Addresses and Sub-posts tie in. The condensed version is: They Do! There’s an overall concept of being able to click on a link, and have a draggable window pop up that has multiple choices of where to go next, where those choices have to do with relevant Locations and/or Time.
Here’s an example to help out. We’ll deal with looking up photos:
- Click on a location within Google Maps
- That pops up a draggable window with a photo from FlexiPhoto .. one that is closest to that location, and closest to the current time
- The window has a few controls in it, which allow searching by date, or a range of dates, or keywords/phrases, etc.
To sum up, over the next few years, I’d like to work on two front ends for searching photos: one is by Map, and one is by Calendar. The two complement each other very well:
- Map - clicking on a point brings up a Calendar with days/date-ranges indicated. The hotspots on the calendar have photos, collections, or exhibits
- Calendar - clicking on a day brings up a Map of points that indicate relevant photos, collections, etc.
Of course, with a grant, this will take a year or less, and then I’ll have another 4 years left to answer the question! Nah, I don’t seriously believe that. There will be iterations on the theme. My thought is that combining the elements of Location and Time for searching in a web app (and my keen interest is for searching photos) is something that hasn’t been explored enough. A lot will done outside of the context of traditonal forms.
Slight update: obviously a prototype or draft version of all the functionality bundled together isn’t going to take a full-time year. I’m thinking of production quality AJAX & Flash front ends, testing, docs, and so on — that’ll take some time.
