about
pickpic

page under construction

Pickpic is a tool that aims to help a collaborative design research.

It allows you to save any image on a webpage into a web board. For each image you can define a comma separated list of tags and a description. The description will stay and other users, ideally your workmates can read your description and add their own one.

Pickpic becomes helpful in the first phase of the traditional design process.

| RESEARCH | > | CONCEPT | > | DESIGN | > | REVISION |

From my personal experience I know that before starting any projects I like to research a bit about what have been done before, normally I look for inspiration on any kind of aspects, material, colors, visual solution, type, shapes and I collect all these resources in a folder, on my computer.

With Pickpic I'm now able to share my resources with my workmates, to show them what kind of solutions I start to consider and they can do the same, commenting on my picture or adding more pictures, starting from my suggestion or from their own idea of the project we are going to do.

The idea behind this tool and this shared research is that being able to see what kind of solutions the others are pointing out I can start to think about aspects that I would never consider by myself. I know that every time you have to start a project you come up with an ideas of how the final product should look like, but being able to see each others thoughts can start an interesting loop of reciprocal influences.

Install
greasemonkey

more info on installing Greasemonkey can be found here

1. Visit the Greasemonkey home page.

2. Click the link titled “Add to Firefox”.

3. Firefox will pop-up: "Install add-ons only from authors whom you trust". Gresemonkey won't damage your computer or violate your privacy, you can go on with the installation.

4. Wait a few seconds for the install button to enable, then click Install now.

5. Restart your browser.

Once you restart your browser, select the Tools menu. You should see three new menu items: Install User Script..., Manage User Scripts..., and User Script Commands. Only Manage User Scripts... will be enabled, but that's OK. The others only become enabled under special circumstances.

By default, installing Greasemonkey does not add any functionality to your browser (other than those three menu items). All it does it enable you to install additional items, called “user scripts”, which customize specific web pages.

Install
pickpic

version updated @ wed 16th dec

Greasemonkey required
more info on installing user script can be found here

1. Go to the script page to see the Pickpic's code

2. In the Tools menu, the Install User Script... item should now be enabled. Select it.

3. Firefox will warn you, once again you do trust the source ;)

4. Wait a few seconds for the install button to enable, then click Install now.

If all went well, Greasemonkey will show a message saying “Success! Refresh page to see changes.” (In my case it happens at the bottom of the window, next to the monkey icon)

You are now ready to use Pickpic, start browsing, everytime that you roll over an image a form will appear on top of it. You can now fill the form in order to save the image and to share it on the imageboard

To do
list

Pickpic is an unfinished project, at the moment it still has some bugs and some features need to be implemented, if you have any feature that you would like to see in the next release feel free to drop an email to emanuele.bonetti[at]yahoo.it

New features:

1. At the moment all the images are saved on the same board, for the next release I would like to have the user able to set his own board for his project. At this point since it's still a test all the pictures together don't make a lot of sense, in the future you'll be able to set up your own space that you can share with your peers.

2. At the moment the images can be seen only in one way. For the next release I would like to provide for different possible ways, for example a more detailed, like the one you get now, versus one that present only the image without any comments.

3. At the moment you can add a description but you won't be able to see any difference in between descriptions added in different time. For the next release I would like to somehow identify the different descriptions for the same image.

4. Tagging is a really tricky topic, people tag in so many different ways and seems that tagging work perfectly just individually since everyone knows exactly what he means with a certain tags which is not that obvious for the others. For the next release I would like, for example, to show in the form which tags have already been used in order to help the users using the same "language" without making up every time a new word unless is really necessary.

Bugs in the current version:

1. Pickpic is currently not working on every website as it should, some websites don't allow the script to show the form correctly. That probably depend on how the page is structured, mainly on which tags are parent of the image. After fixing the problem of the image within a hyperlink tag I've found that funny things happen even when the image is within an iframe.

If you find a webpage where the script is not working feel free to send the URL of the page with a short description of the problem at emanuele.bonetti[at]yahoo.it

2. In some cases is not possible yet to get the remote URL of an image, at this point the url is obtained with some string operations on the value found in the "src" attribute of the img tag combining it, when necessary with the url of the page. This method is not always working, there's should be an easier way to get the complete URL of an image which I still need to find.

bug fixed!

If you find a webpage where the form is shown but the image is not saved to the board feel free to send the URL of the page with a short description of the problem at emanuele.bonetti[at]yahoo.it

about pickpic

Install greasemonkey

Install pickpic

To do list

about
pickpic

Install
greasemonkey

Install
pickpic

To do
list