Please. Fix. That.

Flickr and self-favoriting

I've been a Flickr user for years and love the service, but if I could be the Flickr product manager for a day, I'd fix this:

I can't favorite my own photos. And you can't favorite your own photos. There is no technical reason for this. Flickr has simply decided that a user cannot favorite their own pictures, and that is that.

"Oh, silly user -- you can just make a set and put your favorite pictures in that!" No. It's not the same thing. When other people view my favorite pictures under my profile, I want them to see all of my favorite pictures on Flickr, even if some of them happen to be my own pictures. No, I don't want to futz around with photo set management to corral my own pictures into a "Favorites" set. I want to click that little star button and mark it as a favorite.

Another problem with the "just use a set" solution is that Flickr doesn't let me put other people's photos into a set. So that won't let me combine favorites from my photos and from others into a common place either.

Mac OS X screen grab coordinate bug

UPDATE: Fixed in OS X Mountain Lion (10.8).

Hey, this may be an educational post for some. When you press "Cmd+Shift+4", Mac OS X will enter into a screen grab mode, where you can select a rectangular area of the screen. The cursor changes to a crosshair and then you click and hold to begin selecting, drag the cursor to select the area you want to capture and finally release the mouse/trackpad button to capture it. The resulting image is saved to your desktop.

When you first hit "Cmd+Shift+4", the cursor shows a pair of numbers which are screen coordinates of the cursor's position. The top one is the X coordinate in pixels, relative to the left of the screen. The bottom one is the Y coordinate, relative to the top of the screen.

Then, while you are holding down the button, the cursor shows a different pair of numbers. These are the size of the region you are selecting, in pixels. The top one is the width of the region and the bottom one is the height. But, sometimes those numbers change back to the screen coordinates of the cursor. Therein lies the usability problem. Observe the behavior:

Now if you're trying to grab an area of the screen of an exact size, like 100x100 or something, having the size of the region toggle like this is extremely annoying. Oh, and I have further discovered that this seems to only be happening with the MacBook trackpad. This doesn't seem to happen when selecting the area with a mouse.

This is something I fight with for each screen shot I take for this blog, so keep that in mind, won't you?