Interesting little ‘feature’ on Flickr. You can’t write all capital letters. Aye, tis be true, try it. It’ll convert it to properly capitalized sentences…
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This is Binary Bonsai, the online journal of Michael Heilemann — a Danish expat Interface Director at Squarespace, ex-Computer Game Developer and Film Lover — coming to you out of New York. It contains thoughts on games, interface design, movies, books, science fiction, Star Wars and various other subjects as befits the author, who is available for comment on Twitter.
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It’s a nice little touch. However, if there is just one lowercase letter (LIKE tHIS) then Flickr leaves the case alone. I’m not sure how they could fix that kind of user annoyance without ignoring the input letter case completely, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Stephen brings up a good point. Forget about solid caps; go after the people wHo TyPe LiKe ThIs. Much more annoying, if you ask me.
THAT’S REALLY GREAT. I’M GLAD THEY DO THAT.
think of the old folks Michael, ISN’T THAT RIGHT POPS?
sometimes you just have to shout on flickr… the amount of times i’ve had to yell at uploaders of MySpace-esque self portraits. :D (doing my bit for the community)
oh, how did you discover this ‘feature’. did someone post some Superman / Star Wars prints you’d never seen and you went all loud & happy “OMG! RARE RALPH McQuaray!” etc.
Hey, that’s cool!
Time that someone actually imposed proper netiquette. Kudos to Flickr
Sounds really cool ;)
I noticed this right after they went to Gamma. I find it terrifically annoying. However, I did find that if you type your all-caps message, then hit a couple of line breaks, then type some non-all-caps text, it’ll leave that first line of all-caps alone.
Please, Flickr. Don’t correct my capitalization.
The geek in me says, “Cool!” but the writer in me says “How dare they?” I don’t like all caps at all, but I don’t think they have any business editing people’s content unless it is harmful. All caps is annoying, but not harmful. A bad job.
yeah, I noticed that too…strange but kinda cool. however sometimes all-caps are perfectly harmless; I don’t notice too many people using them on Flickr anyway.
I noticed this a while ago. I made a comment in all caps for comedic effect, and when flickr changed it, it sort of lost its point. Disappointing.
Dave — same thing happened to me, twice; I filed a bug about it in fact!
“I don’t notice too many people using them on Flickr anyway.”
haha. um…
ha?
NERDS!
Yes, bad job. It would be cool, and often helpful if the social institutions we’re members of found ways to modulate our voices to one volume. But would it be right?
This has been known for a while.
Bugs have been brought up too, stating that a user should be able to title their own photos howver they want.
http://www.flickr.com/forums/help/16318/
and links at the bottom.
It’s been that way since at least 2004, when I noticed it & also found it odd.
Yeah…I realised that, its annoying when you’re trying to leave notes on pictures and you want to highlight certain words (you cant use HTML or anything).
According to the Flick Forums (linked above), this is a bug, rather than intentional “feature”.
I caught this some time back, I tried to Post the comment “OMG!!!PONIES!!!!1111” and it turned it into Omg!!!Ponies!!!!1111 which I thought simply did not carry the semantic meaning I intended.
It’s a nice feature.
Stay classy, flickr.
what about a compromise: if the system detects shouting it wants to prevent, you get a warning dialog: “ACHTUNG! you might come across as an idiot.” with a link to an explanation about netiquette and readability. and of course it should catch much more than just all-caps writing. now you can select “please help me” from the dialog and allow the conversion to better type, but you can also still select “I AM AN IDIOT” and your comment/description will be left alone. unless you run out of your monthly quota of upper case characters; then you’ll have to buy a pro account to get more :-)
WHO NEEDS ALL CAPS WHEN THERE’S <STRONG>?
H’mm, this may have saved a lot of headaches for me. I get a lot of old timers sending me word docoments written all in caps. Always had to retype the docs in order to cut and paste the content into websites.
Flickr may have unintentionally supplied me with a quick way to cut and paste the garbage and then copy and paste the perfection! I guess I can stop waiting for MS to create the fix on word.