photography — 1 comment
20
Jun 09
About 2 years ago, I sold my Canon 20D and bought a Nikon D80, largely because I wanted the versatility of the Nikon 18-200 lens. I also appreciated the uncrippled nature of the D80′s semipro feature set in a size and weight more comparable to a Canon Rebel. I also loved the vastly superior Nikon AF system, which lets you designate one of 11 AF points with your thumb and meter from that point, lets me take pictures like this.  I loved just about everything about the D80 except for its markedly inferior performance in low light/high ISO to the Canon SLR’s.
The D80 was superseded by the D90 about a year ago and a lot of attention was placed on its HD movie recording mode. Unfortunately there were a number of well documented and dealbreaking issues with movies on the D90, which overshadowed many of the meaningful improvements this camera has over the D90. When I got my camera, I did what I suspect many have done before- took pictures of my old camera to unload on eBay:
One feature Nikon’s marketeers really need to tout is the D90′s ability to take great pictures of your old camera so you can sell it for big bucks on eBay. This is the photo as it came from the camera with no post production other than a resize. The Active D-Lighting feature automatically adjusts the shadow and highlight levels of your camera- this means that you can capture good detail in the dark parts of your photos without overexposing the bright parts. It’s a great feature for casual photographers who don’t want to spend a lot of time tweaking photos. ADL does its magic on the raw data from the imager before it gets converted to JPEG, resulting in minimal impact to image quality. Of course, you could get similar results with more control if you shot RAW and did the manipulation yourself, but only if you’re willing to invest the time.
This feature wouldn’t be nearly as useful on the D80 because that camera still uses the old CCD based sensor which was known for being noisy in low light. The D90 captures way more detail in low light and high ISO than the D80. I can shoot usable photos at web resolution at up to ISO 3200 where ISO 800 on the D80 was already pretty dodgy. Kudos also to Nikon for not pushing resolution too far on the D90. With only a small bump to 12 from 10 on the D80, this was a wise choice as the low light performance of this camera is considered to be much better than the latest 15 megapixel Canon SLR’s with the cropped sensors.
Other things I love about the D90 are the VGA display- a 3 inch display with twice the resolution of an iPhone (and 4x the resolution of the D80) is a sight to behold with incredible detail and good color accuracy. It makes reviewing photos for exposure and focus much easier than before. Live view is also handy for short folks like myself, though I suggest shooting in manual focus mode because Live View AF is very slow. If you’re shooting something far away, it’s usually not an issue.
I purchased my D90 for $700 refurbished from J&R Music World and received it in a couple of days. Unfortunately, they seemed to sell out in a couple of hours but it’s worth keeping an eye on them to see if they get more. I sold my D80 for $500 and got a huge upgrade for $200. Even at $400, I’d still do it, but at $200 it’s a no brainer for a camera that is significantly better at still photography while having the bonus feature of 720P video recording.
mozilla / product management — 2 comments
10
Jun 09
Lots of late night coding, testing, pondering and pushing has resulted in the birth of a healthy baby-blue AMO! Lots of people worked hard on this release and I’m incredibly proud of what we launched.
Beauty, in this case, is much more than skin deep as we’ve also released Collections, a new feature that allows our users to share their favorite add-ons with the entire Mozilla community- because you don’t have to be a developer to be a valuable part of our ecosystem. Next up- add-on contributions and tagging. This train isn’t stopping anywhere…
A big thanks to the AMO team (you know who you are) and the design team at Clearleft for their hard work!
mozilla — 3 comments
08
Jun 09
We moved into a new office today, for those of you who watch our weekly updates, you can see what it’s like for us speakers.
For more pictures, check out my set on Flickr. Now I have to get back to work…
Uncategorized / jetpack / mozilla — No comments
20
May 09
Today, Mozilla Labs announced Jetpack, a new and experimental way of creating add-ons in Firefox. The best way to explain the Jetpack experience is by showing how add-ons are created using the new platform.
To get started, install the new Jetpack Extension and restart the browser (this will be the only time you’ll need to restart when doing development). When Jetpack installs, you’ll be taken to the about:jetpack page, which contains a couple of sample Jetpacks (the name for extensions created with the Jetpack API).
Install some demos and check them out! For the time being, the experiment is limited to status bar widgets, but I was able to put together a Delicious Notifier Jetpack Feature in less than an hour using simple JQuery, CSS, and html. All I did was install the GMail Notifier widget and pasted it into Bespin, read the 20 lines of code that made it work, and started hacking away to get the information i wanted. Since I didn’t have to restart and could inspect and debug via Firebug, development was painless.
If you have Jetpack installed, check out my Delicious Notifier, I find it incredibly useful when browsing the web, as the count of saves in Delicious is a great indicator of how interesting a particular page on the internet can be.
As with all experiments, there’s a lot of polishing to do with Jetpack, but we felt that it was true to Mozilla’s values to get this out early and involve the community in determining its future- please let us know what you think!
mozilla / product management / work — 1 comment
11
May 09
For the company all-hands, I made this presentation about the future of Add-ons for Mozilla.
This was an fun presentation to create and give because I’m incredibly excited about the future of add-ons. To me, add-ons are the ultimate form of user-generated content, created by a group of users who are more passionate, intelligent, and principled than any user communitv I’ve seen. It’s an honor to help give them exposure to the massive Mozilla user base.
Many thanks to the entire team (credited in the presentation, and I’m sure I missed some people), and also to Jeff Bonforte, my Keynote muse, who blogs lots of useful and actionable advice on making non-sucky presentations.
mozilla / product management — 4 comments
01
Apr 09
I’m thrilled to announce that after testing 41 different synonyms for “Add-ons”, we’ve determined that “Change-Arounds” is the winner by an amazing margin of .006%.
WIth “Change” coming to Washington in 2009, we also felt that we could take advantage of the goodwill that this word generates in the hearts and minds of Firefox users everywhere.
So rejoice and Change Around your life on the internet with Firefox Change-Arounds!
Uncategorized / mozilla / product management — 2 comments
09
Feb 09
Seriously. Think about this- addons.mozilla.org has over 6,000 add-ons and add-on developers. Our add-ons are created by large corporations as well as people with day jobs. Our number 1 add-on was created by a hobbyist in his spare time and has been downloaded 40 million times. Our add-ons can turn Firefox into a kid-friendly browser or a Twitter application. Like the Renegade Craft Fair, we’ve got an amazing array of stuff but we fall short in one key way- we’re not as fun. We want to change that- we want to replicate the excitement of finding the unexpected so that our visitors always something they want, even if it’s not something they expect. We want to make “serendipitous discovery” the way most people interact with AMO. Any ideas?
mozilla / product management — No comments
28
Jan 09
Tomorrow, the AMO team will be presenting our 2009 plan. It’s something that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and it’s time we shared with the community that has made us who we are today.
Come to air.mozilla.com tomorrow at 12:30 PM PST and watch it live. You’ll also be able to ask questions live via the website.
In a nutshell, our thesis is that AMO is an incubator for innovation, and our goal is to help developers on our platforms succeed. We can provide the audience, support, and data that can help users and developers get the best possible experience.
We have the technology, we can rebuild AMO.
Thoughts?
-Nick
mozilla — 2 comments
15
Jan 09
Rey, our stalwart AMO Community Mobilizer, has managed to rope me into this- so here goes.
- I won the sixth grade spelling bee and was carried on the shoulders of my classmates. It’s all been downhill since then.
- I got the PM job at Yahoo! Answers because I was the #1 user on the site during our internal alpha, and my management (wisely) figured that my hobby would better serve them if it was my official job.
- My father, brother, and sister-in-law are all doctors. I was also pre-med in undergrad but after a couple crappy years of mediocre grades, I realized it wasn’t in the cards for me.
- My first computer was an Atari 400, and I secretly wanted a Coleco Adam. Fortunately my parents, in a surprising bit of technological savvy, decided to get me an Apple IIc instead.
- I live the life I wanted when I was 12 years old. I live in a futuristic house, married to a person much cooler than I am, have pets, and play lots of video games.
- My wife attended Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. I tagged along and worked at Ford for 2 years. I love cars, but hated working in the auto industry.
- If I wasn’t doing product management right now, I think I’d like being a general contractor. I like making things better.
And Rey, I’m your Boss In Name Only. Nobody tells Rey Bango what to do. Nobody.
7 victims:
1. Dave Dash (for commenting first)
Uncategorized — No comments
31
Dec 08
Via Autoblog, I found this article in the Detroit News, which says that Japanese automakers are worried about sales in Japan because young people are shifting their interest away from cars and towards gadgets.
The appeal of driving yourself boils down to personal space and freedom. But nowadays we spent most of our driving going to one of two places, and portable devices allow you to create a personal space virtually anywhere. While they don’t erect a physical barrier with the outside world, an iPod or Kindle allows its user to effectively shut out the outside world, even in the middle of a crowded train.
Technology has also diminished the significance of physical location; half of Mozilla’s employees are remote and they seem to have no trouble getting as much done as the rest of us. How long will it be until commuting and travel become obsolete altogether?
