Ingenious

One of the nice things about this platform is that there are so many neat things tucked away around the place. The same cannot be said of any PC I have ever owned or used. Microsoft is not all bad, and certainly has available sufficient intelligence and expertise to do many things well, but it places no evident value on wit and elegance and those little laugh out loud moments that a really clever hack inspires. Perhaps the company's position as leader of the pack is partly to blame for this, but I suspect there's more to the philistine corporate culture than mere defensiveness: a calculated appeal to the hoi polloi, perhaps, an explicit disavowal of airs and graces.

Eh, who knows what goes on over there in Redmond? Who even wants to know?

Apple, in any case, retains at least a modicum of respect for outright cleverness, of which the following is a delightful example:

I've been dimly aware of the Photo Booth application for yonks, but never had any occasion to use it. Tonight was no exception, but I was at a loose end. Rummaging through my Applications folder for things to delete, I came across Photo Booth and thought that, since achilles has a built-in camera, I really ought to see what it could do.

Which turned out to be: not very much. Photo Booth is not a complicated application, doing just what its name suggests. But it uses a fantastically neat trick that took me a couple of goes to recognise: like every photo booth you've ever used, it has a flash.

Implemented -- since the computer itself is obviously not equipped with a dedicated flash unit -- using the screen. And it works amazingly well: the above picture was taken in a room full of lights, but the dominant light source is from the front. I reckon Photo Booth would take a decent snap in pitch darkness.

Ain't that just darlin'?
Posted by matt at February 4, 2008 09:58 PM