Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com ]

07/02/07 Pixenate Tyre Kicking

Walter has asked for us to kick the tyres on Pixenate.com. New features have been added including a preview, text, oil painting filter & charcoal filter. These effects work well - although I’d be a fan of a zoom function on the preview for an overview rather than scrolling around it.

I do devils advocate best, so here’s a run down of Pixenate, and my thoughts. First off, as per usual let me state I think Pixenate is great (especially great as it’s Irish), otherwise I wouldn’t even bother reviewing it.

I can’t see myself ever using the zoom (without interpolation and scrolling) and a number of the other filters, for these I would use photoshop - but then again, I’m not your average user. Where Pixenate blows photoshop away is speed for blogging. When I want to insert an image in my blog I use Walter’s bookmarklet to quickly import an image from online. (Walter, please note: this has stopped working since your mod re-write changes today). I then resize/crop the image to fit my blog and then hit the upload to webshots button. Bingo, this is the fastest way to get an image on your blog from someone else’s page.

The only error I can generate on the system (except for the import one above) is if you try to upload an image to webshots without making any edits, you get back an error. I’ve already reported this one to Sxoop.

There are a number of features that I think could make Pixenate a real killer app -

Text Memory
The new ability to add text labels to images is very handy. Although, I’d like to see my text held for the next time I add some so I don’t have to repeatedly type it and select its colour. The option to add text below the image on a background of choice would also be very useful.

Macros
I’d really like to see this one, and have already talked to Walter about it. The power of being able to save a macro/action would be incredible. Picture this - I create a bookmarklet for each macro I want. Selecting it from my toolbar shows all the images from the page I’m on and automatically imports the one I click. It then resizes it to my pre-defined width, rounds the corners off, throws on the text of my URL/copyright to the bottom of it, saves it to Webshots, returns the saved image location to me in a pop-up JS alert, and then returns to the page I started from. How amazing would that be!?

Minor Issues
-Enable the key to cancel any selection boxes.
-If I make a [Select All] crop box, then apply a filter, I expect it to only apply it within those coordinates.
-Modify the toolbar layout so the four most used tools are at the top - crop, resize & rotate. Dump all the others under ‘filters’ and ‘fun’ sub menus.

Tags: General, Observations, Web Usability Engineering

1 Comment

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07/02/07 walter

Hi Robin,
Thanks for the feedback. I’ve just fixed the bookmarklet link but now there are a couple of dead bookmarklets on toolbars in the wild (note to self - make bookmarklets more permanent !).
The macro feature would be pretty cool - it’s something I’ve been thinking about since you first suggested it.

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