Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Gruber confirms that iPad 2 rear camera is 960x720?
John Gruber of Daring Fireball linked to a photo he took with the iPad 2 while at the event. If we take at the look at the original size of the photo he took, it's 960x720, just as one would expect. While it's possible that Gruber resized the photo before uploading it, that seems unlikely given that he had only a few minutes with the device and I can't see him wasting time with that.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
iPad 2 Camera A World's First?
Although the details of the iPad 2's rear camera are still vague, Apple might have created the first digital camera in history that has a higher-resolution LCD display than the camera's sensor!All we know so far is this tidbit from Apple's site:
Back camera: Video recording, HD (720p) up to 30 frames per second with audio; still camera with 5x digital zoomWe can infer from this that the rear camera sensor is capable of at least 1280x720 pixel resolution. However, it's reasonable to assume that still photos will be cropped to 960x720 (like the current generation iPod Touch) to make them the ratio common for digital photos (4:3).
If that's true, then the iPad will have a higher resolution LCD display (1024x768) than the photos it takes (960x720). This is almost certainly a first. Camera sensors have always had a much higher pixel density than LCD displays. The iPhone 4's display might be impressive at more than 300 pixels per inch, but even the first consumer digital camera sensors had much higher pixel density than 300dpi.
Thus, an early DSLR like the Nikon D1 had a 2.7 megapixel (2,000×1,312) sensor but a puny 120,000 dot (400x300) rear LCD. The very first digital camera marketed to consumers in the US, the Apple QuickTake 100, didn't even have an LCD display because small LCDs at the time were prohibitively expensive.
Are the photos taken with the iPad 2 going to display with black bars at the top, bottom, and sides? Normally one needs to dramatically downscale digital photos to display them on the LCD of the device that took the photo (I can't even display full-resolution photos from my iPhone 4 using my 27" Apple Cinema Display).
Apple are certainly pioneers in digital photography, but in this case that's not a positive thing.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Update of Russian localization
We're undertaking a comprehensive review of the translations on Nelso.ru, and adding thousands of new translations for categories that have been added recently. You can see some of the improvements by browsing our Prague listings in Russian (most of our Russian-language traffic is for Prague).
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Luxury brands and local search
Take a look at the top 15 search terms on Google sending traffic to Nelso.cz for the month of February, 2011. Notice a pattern?
- louis vuitton praha
Luxury luggage and other leather goods - iworld praha
Mac, iPhone, and iPad dealer, i.e. luxury computers - burberry praha
Luxury clothing - swarovski praha
Jewelry and crystal - hlavní nádraží praha
Prague main train station - big sister
Famous Prague brothel - gucci praha
World famous luxury brand - h&m praha
Clothing - pekařství paul
Luxury bakery - frey wille bratislava
Luxury watches and jewelry - fendi praha
World famous luxury brand - hapu bar
Cocktail bar - prada praha
Luxury women's clothing - sushi palladium
Sushi - jazz praha
I'm assuming this is a search for live jazz in Prague, rather than a search for stores selling jazz music
Monday, February 14, 2011
Amsterdam listings now 3,622 strong
Which might sound impressive, but a complete Amsterdam business listing set will have at least 30,000 listings when complete.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Demand Media (DMD) Rises 37 Percent on First Trading Day
Demand Media (DMD), famously called "The Answer Factory" in a Wired article, rose 37 percent on its first trading day, closing with a market cap of $1.87 billion. Seems investors are still not too worried that Google will classify Demand Media's content as spam and remove it from the first page of search results.
Update: Businessweek has a long piece on DMD today.
Update: Businessweek has a long piece on DMD today.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
The Problem of Local Search Has Been Solved
From an article on ReadWriteWeb:
Much like place databases are used by so many location-based technologies today. If you want to build an app that talks about different places around the world, you don't have to create a brand new map of places from scratch. That problem has been solved.
The Problem with a "Retina" Display on the iPad 2: Lack of Content
Update: This post was mentioned on Crunchgear and AppleInsider, and it seems many of the commenters didn't understand the point of the original post.
At this point I wish I'd never mentioned video in the post (or had relegated it to less than a paragraph).
My point was not that you won't be able to watch DVD resolution content on some future 7,680 x 4,320 pixel HD TV (1080p x 16) - the point was that additional resolution is only worth paying for if you're going to use it (and to answer the question of many commenters - yes, I have heard of upscaling video).
Of course user interface elements and text will look amazing on the super high-res iPad 2 (or iPad 3). But almost no content (forget about video for a second) is currently created with a 3 megapixel, 260 dpi display in mind. This is especially true of most graphics and photos used on the web. So, the home page of the New York Times will have print-quality text (in Safari for iPad 2) while all the rest of the graphics will be of much lower resolution and have to be upscaled (the main home page image is only 330 pixels wide). The effect will be a bit jarring. On the current iPhone 4 I can tell at a glance that an app hasn't been updated for the new retina display - the app icon even looks out of place on the home screen surrounded by high-res icons from other apps.
And yes, yes, I know that it's possible to use the web on a 30" monitor that has a resolution greater than this hypothetical iPad 2. But this works because a 27" iMac (for example) uses the additional pixels to create a physically larger display, not to increase the pixel density. Graphics that were designed on a 20" monitor and assumed a ~ 100 dpi display look fine on a 27" monitor - they are the same physical size on screen and are not pixel-doubled.
And what about iOS apps? I write offline travel apps for the iPhone, and because they don't require an internet connection, I include all the images in the app. The next update of my Prague guide will contain more than 10,000 images (at 300x200). Can I use these in a universal app that runs on an iPad 2? Sure, but the result won't be very satisfactory - blurry, massively upscaled images on the same screen as razor-sharp text and UI elements just won't look good. I'll be forced to include much higher resolution images in the app, and that will mean leaving most of the images out of the app entirely (I can't expect users to download a 5GB travel guide).
So, again, yes - I do understand the concept of upscaling. The point wasn't that you can't use the current web or a 2011 iOS app on the 2020 gigapixel 100" wall-mounted iPad 11. The point was that users are going to expect all the elements on screen to be of the same resolution, and that means the creation of a massive amount of new content (thus the "Lack of Content" part of my post title).
And did I mention that I understand the concept of upscaling video? Because I do.
The original post:
The iPad 2 will be announced soon, and thus there are a lot of rumors floating around as to the second-generation iPad's technical specs. Some of the new features are almost inevitable (front and rear cameras, more RAM) and some are less likely (SD card slot, new processor). But the real wildcard is the iPad 2's display. Both the iPod Touch and iPhone got 960x640 "retina" (i.e. more than 300dpi) displays in their latest versions, and there is a growing consensus on gadget blogs that the iPad 2 will have a similar "ultra high-res" display. Even John Gruber of Daring Fireball isn't dismissing the possibility of a 2048x1536 display on the iPad 2. We're talking about an iPad with nearly the resolution of a 30" desktop display.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that all of the usual problems with such a display have been solved (battery life, cost, speed, etc.). Even if the iPad 2 comes out in a 16GB WiFi version for $499 with a 2048x1536 display (four times the pixels of the original iPad, which is 1024x768), where is the content going to come from?
Take a look at the graphic I created showing the relative sizes of popular video formats in relation to this theoretical iPad 2 "retina" display. Forget about DVD (Standard Definition) video, which if displayed at native resolution would be little bigger than a postage stamp on this new display. 720p HD video (the highest resolution sold on iTunes) would fill only a quarter of the screen, and 1080p video would have black bars not only along the top and bottom, but also along the sides of the screen. Of course, Apple will scale up these videos to fill the screen, but most people don't expect pixel-doubling when watching HD video.
And what about on-line photos? Are web site owners now expected to post two or three megapixel photos on their sites to support Safari on iPad? Will the Photos application for iPad import full resolution photos when syncing to your computer? How big will games be if they fully support the 3,145,728 pixels of such a display?
I'm not arguing that Apple won't include such a display on the iPad 2, but if they do, I hope there's a 128GB version so that I can load more than one movie on it at a time (assuming a few apps, some photos, some music, and 1080p video, the 16GB version would hold about one 90 minute film).
I guess my next purchase is a RED camera to shoot home videos that will support the iPad 2's display.
At this point I wish I'd never mentioned video in the post (or had relegated it to less than a paragraph).
My point was not that you won't be able to watch DVD resolution content on some future 7,680 x 4,320 pixel HD TV (1080p x 16) - the point was that additional resolution is only worth paying for if you're going to use it (and to answer the question of many commenters - yes, I have heard of upscaling video).
Of course user interface elements and text will look amazing on the super high-res iPad 2 (or iPad 3). But almost no content (forget about video for a second) is currently created with a 3 megapixel, 260 dpi display in mind. This is especially true of most graphics and photos used on the web. So, the home page of the New York Times will have print-quality text (in Safari for iPad 2) while all the rest of the graphics will be of much lower resolution and have to be upscaled (the main home page image is only 330 pixels wide). The effect will be a bit jarring. On the current iPhone 4 I can tell at a glance that an app hasn't been updated for the new retina display - the app icon even looks out of place on the home screen surrounded by high-res icons from other apps.
And yes, yes, I know that it's possible to use the web on a 30" monitor that has a resolution greater than this hypothetical iPad 2. But this works because a 27" iMac (for example) uses the additional pixels to create a physically larger display, not to increase the pixel density. Graphics that were designed on a 20" monitor and assumed a ~ 100 dpi display look fine on a 27" monitor - they are the same physical size on screen and are not pixel-doubled.
And what about iOS apps? I write offline travel apps for the iPhone, and because they don't require an internet connection, I include all the images in the app. The next update of my Prague guide will contain more than 10,000 images (at 300x200). Can I use these in a universal app that runs on an iPad 2? Sure, but the result won't be very satisfactory - blurry, massively upscaled images on the same screen as razor-sharp text and UI elements just won't look good. I'll be forced to include much higher resolution images in the app, and that will mean leaving most of the images out of the app entirely (I can't expect users to download a 5GB travel guide).
So, again, yes - I do understand the concept of upscaling. The point wasn't that you can't use the current web or a 2011 iOS app on the 2020 gigapixel 100" wall-mounted iPad 11. The point was that users are going to expect all the elements on screen to be of the same resolution, and that means the creation of a massive amount of new content (thus the "Lack of Content" part of my post title).
And did I mention that I understand the concept of upscaling video? Because I do.
The original post:
The iPad 2 will be announced soon, and thus there are a lot of rumors floating around as to the second-generation iPad's technical specs. Some of the new features are almost inevitable (front and rear cameras, more RAM) and some are less likely (SD card slot, new processor). But the real wildcard is the iPad 2's display. Both the iPod Touch and iPhone got 960x640 "retina" (i.e. more than 300dpi) displays in their latest versions, and there is a growing consensus on gadget blogs that the iPad 2 will have a similar "ultra high-res" display. Even John Gruber of Daring Fireball isn't dismissing the possibility of a 2048x1536 display on the iPad 2. We're talking about an iPad with nearly the resolution of a 30" desktop display.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that all of the usual problems with such a display have been solved (battery life, cost, speed, etc.). Even if the iPad 2 comes out in a 16GB WiFi version for $499 with a 2048x1536 display (four times the pixels of the original iPad, which is 1024x768), where is the content going to come from? Take a look at the graphic I created showing the relative sizes of popular video formats in relation to this theoretical iPad 2 "retina" display. Forget about DVD (Standard Definition) video, which if displayed at native resolution would be little bigger than a postage stamp on this new display. 720p HD video (the highest resolution sold on iTunes) would fill only a quarter of the screen, and 1080p video would have black bars not only along the top and bottom, but also along the sides of the screen. Of course, Apple will scale up these videos to fill the screen, but most people don't expect pixel-doubling when watching HD video.
And what about on-line photos? Are web site owners now expected to post two or three megapixel photos on their sites to support Safari on iPad? Will the Photos application for iPad import full resolution photos when syncing to your computer? How big will games be if they fully support the 3,145,728 pixels of such a display?
I'm not arguing that Apple won't include such a display on the iPad 2, but if they do, I hope there's a 128GB version so that I can load more than one movie on it at a time (assuming a few apps, some photos, some music, and 1080p video, the 16GB version would hold about one 90 minute film).
I guess my next purchase is a RED camera to shoot home videos that will support the iPad 2's display.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Amsterdam City Center Complete
We've completed processing of our photos for the Amsterdam city center, and we now have over 2,000 (2,202 to be exact) verified listings on the site. You can see the listings in English, in Dutch, in German, in Czech, in Danish, in Polish, and a whole bunch of other languages.
We'll be releasing a new Amsterdam iPhone app based on these listings in the next few weeks (shame we couldn't get it out before Christmas).
And in case you were wondering - yes, we covered all the "coffee shops"1.
1 Why the double quotes? As Wikipedia will tell you, most people don't go to these places for the coffee.
We'll be releasing a new Amsterdam iPhone app based on these listings in the next few weeks (shame we couldn't get it out before Christmas).
And in case you were wondering - yes, we covered all the "coffee shops"1.
1 Why the double quotes? As Wikipedia will tell you, most people don't go to these places for the coffee.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Title Junk
John Gruber recently posted a long-ish item about the "Title Junk" that he finds on many websites.
The gist of the argument is that many sites knowingly or unknowingly use overly complex or just plain confusing page titles (e.g. "'2001' — the Monolith and the Message :: rogerebert.com :: News & Comment") for web pages, which then end up as the name of the link on bookmarking sites, in your browser history, etc. He suggests using much simpler and clearer titles to make life easier for users.
I'd have to agree that page titles are for the most part overly long, and often packed full of SEO keywords. So why do CMS systems and website designers insist on using these kinds of page titles? Because the real audience for these page titles is not the end user, but rather the GoogleBot.
According to Gruber, we webmasters shouldn't worry about this:
While I agree with most of Gruber's article, I'm not sure I agree with this part. At Nelso, we try to keep the length of page titles to a minimum, but we do also try to make them useful for search engine crawlers. Some of the page titles are longer than we'd use if there was no such thing as a search crawler.
I have no special knowledge of the algorithm that Bing, Google, Yandex, Seznam, et al use to rank pages in the index, but it really seems to matter what one puts in page titles.
Take a look at a Google search for "Sushi Prague 6". The majority of the pages that appear in the top ten results for that search have all the keywords in the page title. One of the top results for that search, Mashhana Sushi House, has a title on our site of "Mashhana Sushi House - Prague 6, Czech Republic (Sushi, Japanese Cuisine, Korean Cuisine)". Sure, the title could be a lot shorter, but I'm not convinced that we'd rank so well if we shortened the page title to just the name of the business.
So, until we have evidence that page titles really don't matter to search engines, we'll continue to balance both the needs of users and search engines when creating page titles.
I'd have to agree that page titles are for the most part overly long, and often packed full of SEO keywords. So why do CMS systems and website designers insist on using these kinds of page titles? Because the real audience for these page titles is not the end user, but rather the GoogleBot.
According to Gruber, we webmasters shouldn't worry about this:
So make titles useful. Write them for humans, not search engine spiders. Putting SEO keywords in the page title (a) doesn’t actually help your page’s rank in search engine indexes, and (b) makes things harder for people trying to tweet a link, bookmark your page, or scan it from a list of currently open windows and tabs in their browser. Trust the Googlebot to figure it out.
While I agree with most of Gruber's article, I'm not sure I agree with this part. At Nelso, we try to keep the length of page titles to a minimum, but we do also try to make them useful for search engine crawlers. Some of the page titles are longer than we'd use if there was no such thing as a search crawler.
I have no special knowledge of the algorithm that Bing, Google, Yandex, Seznam, et al use to rank pages in the index, but it really seems to matter what one puts in page titles.
Take a look at a Google search for "Sushi Prague 6". The majority of the pages that appear in the top ten results for that search have all the keywords in the page title. One of the top results for that search, Mashhana Sushi House, has a title on our site of "Mashhana Sushi House - Prague 6, Czech Republic (Sushi, Japanese Cuisine, Korean Cuisine)". Sure, the title could be a lot shorter, but I'm not convinced that we'd rank so well if we shortened the page title to just the name of the business.
So, until we have evidence that page titles really don't matter to search engines, we'll continue to balance both the needs of users and search engines when creating page titles.
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