Photo software focuses on masses. Dan Slavin is confident he has the answer for bringing digital photography to a mainstream audience: photo software for people who don't like to use photo software. [CNET News.com]
This is the sort of software - that we're working on. The idea is to take a series of tasks - in this case: a) import images from a camera, b) touch up those images up, c) input them into a photo album and d) create hard copy of those photos.
By combining all of these tasks into one 'gesture' (see my post below on that word) this software greatly simplifies this overall activity, as end-users would normally have to know how to use several products to get all this done.
Don Norman, in his book The Invisble Computer discusses a concept called Activity Based Computing (ABC) - which was originally developed at Apple in the early 90's. I remember being at Kaleida Labs at that time (working with ScriptX) and hearing about a revolutionary way of using computers - that Apple had developed.
Well lots of academics have talked about it - but I've never seen any examples in real products - available for use by real humans. Well this photo product Photolighting may be the first.
We describe ABC (in our business plan) as 'constraining end-users choices by helping them through the maze of decisions required to complete a series of tasks in a particular activity domain."
Here's some excerpts from the book. Congrats to the folks at Photolighting.
