#project

Un Canapé à Orléans – Expérience photographique aléatoire

Un jour de 2013, je passe à côté d'un vieux canapé, abandonné, au coin de la rue d'Alibert. J'étais dans une période résolument "photographique" : en tant que nouvel orléanais, quoi de mieux que la Street Photography pour découvrir une ville et ses habitants ? Je décide donc de chercher mon appareil, et dix minutes plus tard, me voilà installé à attendre les passants et leur suggérer de prendre la pose (pause ?) sur ce canapé.

A ma grande surprise, les personnes étaient majoritairement volontaires pour se préter au jeu. La question "Mais dans quel but ?" avait pour réponse "Simplement pour une photo, et éventuellement pour une expo", chose qui fut réalisée au festival Les Ingrédients (Ingré) l'année suivante et au bar L'Escargot (Place de Loire, Orléans).

Au fil des jours, je déposais donc les nouveaux clichés sur la page Un Canapé A Orléans, et de nouvelles personnes arrivaient – soit de simples passants ou des gens qui avaient vu la page sur internet.

Merci aux personnes du service voirie de la ville qui ont accepté de retarder l'enlèvement du-dit canapé de quelques jours, à la République du Centre pour leurs articles, à la parution Publicités sur canapé du magazine Arrêt sur Images, et bien sûr, à toutes les personnes photographiées!

Writing, a text-editor in the browser

Since I've started using StackOverflow, I've always loved their text editor (the one you use when writing a question/answer), because it supports Markdown syntax (a very elegant markup language to add bold, italic, titles, links, itemization, etc.), and even MathJax (which is more or less LaTeX syntax in the browser). I've always wanted to use such an editor for my own documents.

After some research, I found a few existing tools, but:

• half of them don't support LaTeX / MathJax (for math formulas)
• some of them do, but have a 1-sec delay between keypress and display, and I find this annoying, see e.g. StackEdit
• some of them have annoying flickering each time you write new text, once math is present on the page
• most of them are not minimalist / distraction-free enough for me

Let's go and actual build one! Here is the result, Writing:

Here's the source: https://github.com/josephernest/writing

For sure you'll like it!

If you really like that, you can donate here: 1NkhiexP8NgKadN7yPrKg26Y4DN4hTsXbz

One day, one photo

A few years ago I started the photography project PeopleOfMyLife and published one photo per day during around six months.

Every single day I meet people that I probably won't see again. Here they are.

See the BigPicture — a zooming user interface

This topic has been present in my thoughts for a long time, probably years:

“How to be able to think/write about lots of unrelated various topics, and still have a way to look at the big picture of what you’re doing?”

Here is my contribution about this:

1. bigpictu.re, a ready-to-use infinite notepad (infinite zooming and panning)
2. bigpicture.js, a JavaScript open-source library that you can use in various projects
3. A standalone version of 1. (so you can take notes offline) is also available here: bigpicture-editor
4. AReallyBigPage, an infinite collaborative notepad. It has been a real chaos once hundreds of people joined in. Probably internet’s deepest page ;)

Such an interface is called a Zooming User Interface (interesting reading: The humane interface by Jef Raskin, one of the creators of the Apple Macintosh), and strangely, ZUI has been very few used in modern interfaces.

As of 2017, nearly every software interface uses a 2D, or even a 1D navigation process: a web page only offers two scrolling directions: north and south. Even nowadays's apps famous for their "new kind of interface" still use a 1-axis navigation: "Swipe left or right".

Is there a future made of new interfaces?

TinyAnalytics

After having tested many open-source website analytics tool, and haven't found exactly what I was looking for, I started a minimalist project (coded in PHP) that only does this:

• number of visits per day

• display the referrers (i.e. the people who have a link to your website)

If you're looking for a tool lighter than Piwik, Open Web Analytics or Google Analytics, then TinyAnalytics might be what you're looking for.