Tag Archives: Android (operating system)

Kodak introduces Ektra: a 21 MP camera with Android smart phone

This is a smart phone designed specifically for photography enthusiasts, with a 21 megapixel f/2.0 rear camera and a 13 megapixel front camera, plus 4K video. Kodak calls it a “photography first” smart phone. It even includes an actual shutter button.

?A Kodak smartphone aimed at photographers has gone on sale at a pop-up store in London.

Source: Kodak Ektra ‘photography first’ smartphone goes on sale – The Irish News

This phone actually looks very interesting for those of us who like to take pictures and video. Plus it features a 10-core processor, which presumably aids not only high performance applications, but also helps to reduce power. Multi-core systems reduce power by enabling basic functions to run on just one processor, and only powering up additional cores, as needed.

Learn a lot more at the Kodak Phones web site.

Flickr acknowledges – finally – that photo upload has not been working

Flickr has finally acknowledged that their new software update on their web site has broken photo uploads. Flickr Help Forum user comments.

Update: Official Flickr Forum thread on the upload failure. Apparently Flickr released a new “auto upload” feature in their Flickr apps that attempts to upload every picture on your device, by default (even if you do not want it uploaded). It seems this has overloaded the Flickr network (duh!) and Flickr was unprepared for the deluge they themselves unleashed as every device attempted to upload massive numbers of photos.

The symptom is that photo uploads time out – and you are unable to upload photos. Obviously, uploads work for some, but also did not work for many.

There are some neat features in the new software including automatic tag generation (for some of my photos, it did a surprisingly good job), and their new “Magic” album that automatically organizes photos by subjects. (It works really well!)

Google intros subtle “three dimensionality” to Android user interface

It’s subtle – page to the bottom to see the sample user interface: What is Google’s Material Design for Android? Appvigil – Android App Security Scanner.

The software API’s provide new “shadow” features to enhance the Z-axis “elevation” dimension of a control or window. Details of the feature are available from Google.

These effects are – so far – very subtle. I am not sure of the point of this –  its a basic element of graphic design that was used in software more than 25 years ago.

An “API” is an “application programming interface”. Operating systems – such as Android, Windows or Mac OS X – expose features to application programs through an interface, known as an “application programming interface” or just API.