what we've got

I’m going to take one seemingly independent observation, then another, and then make an obvious one of my own (I call it iSynthesis).

Apple is likely to announce the launch of a new tablet-based Mac, probably called (if you are to believe the hype) either the iPad or the iTablet. No real news there – you knew this already. But the thought preoccupying everyone is: no one knows what we’re meant to be doing with it. Charles Arthur in The Guardian echoes the sentiment:

Here’s a story from the near future. It’s been a long day. Finally throwing aside the cares of work, you slump down on your sofa and pick up that shiny new device you bought the other day. […] it’s Apple’s stylish new iPad (iTablet? iSlate?) – a smooth 10in screen with no keyboard, like an iPhone on steroids. You pick it up, turn it on with one swipe of a finger, and begin to . . .

At this point, the picture goes hazy and freezes. The reason: […] still no one is certain what the hell their creation is actually going to be for…

There, that’s the first of the observations. Many people will want one, many will buy one, but if we’re going to justify the price – thought to be around £1000 – we better know how we’re going to use it.

Now for the second, seemingly unrelated observation. In another section of The Guardian, (the wonderfully-named) Mercedes Bunz tells us how iTunes might save the publishing world through simplifying the ‘micropayments’ approach for buying newspaper content:

Payment has to be simple and elegant. Click and run, and don’t think about it. Apple can offer that: there are more than 100 million iTunes accounts with credit cards already. If the transactions are batched so that the fixed cost is amortised across multiple articles, iTunes can offer readers a simple and elegant way to pay, and readers like that.

Now, for the third and final observation, my own. No doubt you’ve already guessed it: what we’re going to do on the iTablet is subscribe and purchase electronically-published content through iTunes.

The signs are there: The New York Times is considering switching to a micro-payment system; I understand from Bunz’s article that various publishers have been in talks with Apple about distributing their content; some newspapers are already using alternative methods of creating revenue through such approaches as the aforementioned The Guardian‘s iPhone app.

I’m not the first to put two-and-two together and I won’t be the last. iTunes might be the future, whether you like it or not, of some types of publishing.

This is my take on how to create a HDR-type image using a single photo. It’s written for beginners, and will take you through the process from beginning to end. It’s likely to take 30 minutes or so first time, but you’ll get quicker as you repeat it. If you want to know what a HDR image is, there’s an excellent demonstration over at Wikipedia.

First of all, so you have an idea of the kind of thing that can be achieved, here’s the image I made earlier today, followed by the original.

This is the original photo, a JPEG of a round 3Mb in size, taken with a Canon Ixus 80 point-and-shoot:

I think this illustrates the first rule of HDR processing – start with a decent photo! It won’t transform a bad photo into a good one, but it might make a good one even better. (Bear in my that these images are downsized and saved into different formats so I can add them to this blog: trust me when I say they look better in their original, high-definition formats!)

What you’ll need

This isn’t a completely automated process, but it doesn’t take very long. You will need the following:

• A photo you’re happy with. It can be in almost any format. If you’ve already seen some HDR images, you’ll know the kinds of things that work well – high contrast landscapes, with dramatic skies and water are common – but try different images, see how well they work.
• Adobe Photoshop CS2. I understand the latest versions of Photoshop cannot generate HDR images out of the box. There are other HDR rendering software out there: many use and enjoy Photomatix, for example.
• I used iPhoto to adjust the exposure settings for the images, since it’s quick and easy and I’m familiar with it. Photoshop will do it too.
• A bit of time, since – depending on your computer’s processing power – these images can take a little while to render. I’m using an iMac running Photoshop through VMWare and it only took a couple of minutes.

Getting started

First you’ll need to generate three copies of a single photo with three different exposures (different levels of light and dark).

• If you’re using iPhoto this is easy. Open the photo in iPhoto and duplicate it twice so you have three photos in total. I prefer to make a new album or new event and put them in that so it’s clear what I’m doing.
• Now click on ‘Edit’ then bring up the ‘Adjust’ set of histograms (the graphs which show the different levels of exposure, contrast and so on).
• Set exposure for the first photo to -3; leave the second photo at 0; set the third one to +3. That is:  the first one is dark (-3); second one is normal (0); third one is light (3).

Now you’re going to need to start Photoshop for the next bit.

• Open Photoshop and open each image all together (select them all from the File / Open menu). They should by default cascade (organise) themselves onto the screen.
• With the photo open, choose File / Save for Web (it doesn’t matter where you start, just use the first one that you see).
• When you’re done with the first one, close it and start on the second. As you close it, Photoshop will ask you to save it: don’t: click ‘No’. You should have already saved it as ‘Save for web’. Save each each in turn like this.
• I make a new folder for ‘Save for web’ images, so I know what I’m doing – I usually add ‘_HDR’ to the end of the folder name and/or photos, so I can differentiate them from the originals.

If you want to know why we had to save them for the web, read the section ”Why save the files for web?’ below.

But for now -  you’re ready to make a HDR!

Using Photoshop’s ‘Merge to HDR’ to create your image

• With Photoshop open, choose File / Automate / Merge to HDR in the menu.
• It will ask you to find the images you wish to merge. Add the three that you have saved above. You don’t need to check the ‘Alignment’ checkbox since all images are the same.
• A dialogue box may appear which says ‘Manually set EV’. If it does, you’re going to need to set the levels for each photo manually in the ‘EV’ value box.
• To manually set levels, click on the ‘EV’ button. It will be active, ready for you to enter the levels. For the under exposed / dark photo, enter ‘-3′; for the normal photo, enter ’0′ (zero); for the over exposed / bright photo, enter ’3′.

When you’ve done that, hit enter. The dialogue box will disappear and another new one will appear in the top right.

• You can just hit enter here – don’t be disappointed with the image since it might not look much different – we’re not done yet!
• Now, go to the pull down menu and choose Image / Mode and then adjust the bit rate to 16.
• A histogram should appear, in a box titled ‘HDR Conversion’ (if it doesn’t, click the down arrow to open the part of the box). Now you’ll need to make some adjustments – this is the fun bit, and you’re getting nearer to the end result.
• From the pull down menu , choose ‘Local Adaptation’. The image will likely go very bright at this point.
• There is a point at the bottom left-hand corner of the histogram. Drag this point until it it meets the first of the major ‘spikes’ on the graph. As you move the point from left to right the image should become darker. Adjust the image to find the best balance of light and dark.

When you’re done, click ‘Ok’. The image will run through a final, brief conversion and voila – there it is.

Hopefully you’ll be overwhelmed with the result!

What to do next: improving and sharing your images

If you’re less than overwhelmed, this might be for a number of reasons. One is that the photos do not have sufficient levels of dark and light. To change these levels, go through the process from ‘Using Photoshop’s ‘Merge to HDR’ to create your image’ above, and choose a broader range for your values. So, rather than choose -3, 0, 3 try choosing -5, 0, 5 instead.

You might also try more photos at different exposures, to see if this improves the overall effect. You can make adjustments in Photoshop, including some of the automated ones if you’re uncertain what you’re looking for: use the Image / Adjustments menu and choose an automated adjustment there.

Experiment with different images. Some lend themselves better to this treatment than others. Try ones with quite a bit of contrast, natural scenes outdoors, perhaps some city lighting at night.

Look for subtle changes. Not all HDR images have to look completely different – sometimes the additional changes in texture can really improve a photo. Have a look here, first at the HDR image and then the original:

The image above has subtle changes in vibrancy, as well as major changes in the texture, giving it a more full-bodied feel when compared to the original, below:

When you’ve tried this, why not share your experiences below in the comments and add links to your images – I would be really interested to see how you’ve used this process, or tailored it to your needs and resources.

Follow me on Flickr (click here). I post often, including HDR images. This is one of the best ways of getting to see what other people are doing and asking questions, as well as sharing your work.

Why use this method?

We’re not creating a true HDR image using the technique I’ve outlined above but one that approximates its effects. The best way to take a true HDR image is to set up your camera on a tripod and take three or more shots of an identical image with different exposures. Even better – use a DSLR camera and set the file type to ‘RAW’. Only then will you achieve some of the amazing results you’ve probably seen online.

However, that is not always possible or even desirable. Sometimes we want to take shots with movement – perhaps they’ve got people in them, or traffic – and so using three or more images will be problematic, since we need them to be the same. What’s more, you can convert some of those old favourites you took before you knew anything about HDR!

Why save files for the web?

The problem we have is that Photoshop uses the EXIF data – the camera settings, date and time it was taken, etc – to help it decide how to automatically render the images to HDR. If you don’t strip out the EXIF data it will return an error, telling you there’s not enough range to create a ‘useful’ image. That’s because you’ve simply duplicated the photo and therefore all its EXIF data, and manually changed its exposure: each photo, although they look very different, will have identical EXIF data. So, we need to strip that out. There are several ways of doing this: I used Photoshop to do it.

Outline of this approach

If you know how to use Photoshop and iPhoto or just want a reminder, this is what I did in outline:

• Used iPhoto to adjust the exposure of three different images, from -3 to +3
• Save these three photos in ‘For the web’ format using Photoshop CS2, stripping out the EXIF data
• Rendered using Photoshop’s ‘Merge to HDR’ automated process
• Saved to 16 / 8 bit and adjusted the ‘Local Adaptation’ to improve the image.

Acknowledgments

Two websites were especially useful when going through this process: this one and this one. Without them, I wouldn’t have known where to start. Thanks!

Hmmm. A history of web browsers – that’s not a promising title, you might think. Well, you might be right. But whilst glancing through the browsers in this short well-presented history, I started to remember when I first use the web.

Ah, my first time: I used Netscape, probably around 1995 or so, where I used to work. We had a single PC – despite the fact that we sold and repaired them – sat on its own in the corner, as if on an altar. It was on dial up I think. Colleagues asked if I knew about the ‘world wide web’ – so revered was it back then that we often used its full title – and saying ‘no’, they invited me to have a go. The cursor blinked in a little box onscreen. ‘Just type in anything’, they said. So I did. I typed in ‘monkeys’.

Before long (although longer than we’re used to now) a list of monkey-related websites appeared. Nowadays, this event is forgettably commonplace, but then it felt an almost overwhelming experience. I tried again, thinking it might be a ruse. But no, entering something else – I have forgotten what I typed – worked just the same. We all looked at each. Nobody said anything.

And so looking through the list of browsers I’ve used is part informative, part nostalgia. There is probably a rule for technology nostalgia somewhere, following the numerous rules that have sprung up, but I’d like to suggest a new one: the cultural value of a new piece of technology can be measured in the length of time it takes to become nostalgic about it. The shorter the length of time the more valuable.

You can’t fool nostalgia – it’s red in tooth and claw when it comes to the survival of the fittest memory, an instinctively-driven evolution to save and remember those things that mean the most to us. For me, it was Netscape and the wonder of world wide web. What about you?

We’ve seen the trouble that newspapers are in, but unlike the recording industry who appear to be in more or less in the same boat, newspapers and their journalists seem to be doing something positive about it. Or at least they would do if their ideas were taken up. I spotted this article by Dan Gillmour in The Guardian which gets to grips with the real problems of fitting journalism into the post-social media landscape, in which he outlines 22 ideas that he would employ if he was in charge. We all think we can run the organisation that we love better. This is Gillmour’s version.

It does not (nor does it aim to) pose a complete solution to the problems that newspapers face since sales were challenged by the availability of news online and the changes in the ways that information is accessed and distributed. But some of it clearly takes on the influence of social media (or new media, if you prefer to underscore the opposition between the old and new). His second point, for example, incorporates crowd journalism into Gilmour’s idealised newspaper; later in Point 5, there is an emphasis on ‘conversation’ between writers and readers, that golden rule of contemporary social networking tools like Twitter:

5. We’d make conversation an essential element of our mission. Among other things:

- If we were a local newspaper, the editorial pages would publish the best of, and be a guide to, conversation the community was having with itself online and in other public forums, whether hosted by the news organization or someone else.

- Editorials would appear in blog format, as would letters to the editor.

- We would encourage comments and forums, but in moderated spaces that encouraged the use of real names and insisted on (and enforced) civility.

- Comments from people using verified real names would be listed first.

There is still an element of ‘interference’ rather than a wholesale laissez faire approach – someone has to judge the most valuable conversations, moderate forums, and so on – so some might feel it doesn’t go far enough. But this utopian view of post-social media newspapers represents a step in the right direction, even if its ideas remain, for now at least, just that.

Who else but Google would try to re-invent email? If you’re using Twitter you would have noticed that Google’s new innovation, called Wave, has been a trending topic for a what is forever in Twitter-time (a few days to you and me). After watching Google’s keynote presentation a couple of months ago, I was none the wiser – it was too long and I drif… hey, look, there’s a squirrel outside! Anyway, here’s something that lasts for a couple of minutes that will explain all for those in a hurry.

I like the idea of Wave. I’ve found that social networks like Twitter and Facebook offer lots of things that email no longer does. The notion of a public conversation clearly isn’t appropriate for all matters, and email is so embedded in many of our working practices that it will take a while to overhaul, but being able to collect and then replay conversations sounds fantastic, almost like twisting time itself. The subtle change in the interface that’s important: we’ve been able to track messages over time for a while, but using the slider bar means that you can see conversations evolve. I haven’t an invitation yet – it’s invite only – but I look forward to learning more when it’s made public. I’m especially interested how it might encourage learners to collaborate.

What this represents more broadly is another way in which we are using new forms of communication. Not just revisions to existing forms, but new ways of speaking to and reaching out to one another. And as Clay Shirky tells us wisely, when we change the way we communicate, we change society.

I’ve just finished the final of three courses in my masters in online and distance education (MAODE) from The Open University (pending failure and resit, which right now seems horribly pessimistic). It feels good to finish, especially as I got married half-way through the first course and moved from the UK to Switzerland and then France at the beginning of the third course. My background is in American short story minimalism, so learning the approach, methods and practices – immersing myself in the new discourse, one might say – was in itself fascinating, before I even got started on the subject-related stuff.

Study can become addictive, so I’m wondering what I can study next. Perhaps a geology course might interest me, since I’ve become a bit obsessed by mountains; or there’s always photography? Or perhaps abandon formal study altogether. I’ve certainly decided to do this for the subjects that are central to my academic and work life. Not that there isn’t any more to learn: but I want to write and research independently. Shorter courses can broaden my learning in those areas that I’m inexperienced in. I might even doth some maths.

But for now, I’m weaning myself off study with the lighter but by no means less interesting The Great Courses ‘Museum Masterpieces: The Louvre’ DVD set, which discusses a selection of some of the great artists and their work. Then I’ve got their ‘How to Listen to and Understand Great Music’. And there’s French, too – and… well, almost everything I do seems to involve learning at some level.

I’ve my peers on H800 to thank for making it such a happy, interesting and useful experience. Many of us used Twitter for sharing ideas, tips and support. Now it’s a bittersweet feeling to symbolically close the Tweetdeck tab where I had kept a search for the hashtag ‘H800′ so I could follow what people were writing about it. Bye bye MAODE, hello everything else.

I am an aspiring amateur photographer who sometimes wonders whether he wants to join a club that would have him as a member.

I am concerned at times about the current state of photography, professional or otherwise. On the one hand, I am awestruck by the talent demonstrated in some of the photos on Flickr – amazing shots that are scarily intimidating, as well as inspiring.

At the same time, I wonder about the qualities required to take good photos now digital cameras are everywhere. I picked up a copy of ‘The Digital Photography Book’ by Scott Kelby. What’s the first thing he says to do? Buy more equipment: the better the equipment, the better your photos will be. What started as the democratisation of photography (following its predecessor rock ‘n’ roll, made with home recording equipment) seems less democratic than ever.

There seems something disingenuous with this model because it appears to replace talent with technology (and concomitant economics). It needn’t apply, and doesn’t work for many things. There’s a joke on the golf course that the new guy: ‘Has a 400 dollar golf club and a ten dollar game’. As a novice (and even later) you can’t simply improve your game by buying a better club.

When technology does make a difference – you’ll find it easier, most likely, to write something on a computer where you can re-order, copy and paste, etc than you would with a pen – you are still left with a gnawing hole where the writing should be. I’m not sure this is a problem facing photographers, as the disciplines differ by degree.

Even if you struggle to point and click you can improve your efforts afterward to such a degree that they’re largely unrecognizable from the original. For example, as a novice you learn quickly that taking shots in RAW format (if you have a digital SLR camera capable of doing this) means you can radically change photos using tools such as Photoshop. So can you tell the difference between a ‘real’ (untouched by tools such as Photoshop) and a ‘fake’ photograph? Try the Pepsi challenge here.

I hope you did better than me. What was interesting was that so many people couldn’t spot the difference. Some were more obviously fake than others but often a photograph split opinion: you can see the results by completing the challenge.

But does it matter that the photo is real or fake? Here, the recent issue of Robert Capa’s ‘faking’ of his famous ‘Falling solider‘ photo is illustrative. It has since come to light that this shot was staged, taken outside of a combat zone according to newspaper reports. For years this has been considered a definitive statement on the personal horrors of war, a visceral reminder of the individual cost of combat.

Is the appreciation of Capa’s photo – and by extension, photography in general – any less real or fake since we failed its Pepsi challenge?

Photo credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pepsi_Challenge.jpg

One of the (happily few) disappointments of living in France is the difficulty and expense of buying an English newspaper. In time, I hope to read Le Monde and perhaps even Le Figaro. But until then, I’m happy to be reliant on ‘journaux anglais’ – a phrase I know well because I’ve said it in many tabacs in both France and Switzerland to little avail.

We live a little out of town, so the local tabac doesn’t sell an English language newspaper. We could go into Geneva, where several shops sell them – but not as many as you’d think, since the Swiss enjoy a Sunday free from shopping, and even smaller shops close. And it’s the weekend newspapers I miss most. I’ve used the web for news, and WRS (World Radio Switzerland) is in English, and both have served me well. Accepting that I wouldn’t have something to read in the garden away from a computer, I thought I’d try the digital editions offered by The Times and The Guardian.

Both use a more or less identical engine for the main functionality of the paper, provided by NewspaperDirect.inc. You can turn pages, zoom, copy articles, email them, all the things you would expect in a front end that does its best to approximate the real thing. What’s striking is the difference that the format makes. Sure, you could get more or less the same content via an RSS feed or through the newspaper website. But seeing the news in high-res spread across a large-ish screen is very satisfying and it’s one of the reasons I’ll subscribe.

The right-hand navigation panel gives useful previews of pages and means you can navigate the paper quickly. If it all looks a bit busy, you can minimise the clutter and just look at the pages. I found moving within the page a bit difficult and the mouse movements counter-intuitive. It just takes getting used to and others might find it suits them. You can open an article and read it in a non-newspaper box, which looks more like the website and undermines the illusion a bit. There’s lots of other things you can do with an electronic newspaper, too – like search, or just look at the pictures.

Where The Guardian group’s Digital Edition adds further value (The Times call it their e-paper) is the ability to share content through a variety of social networking tools. Articles can be saved to Delicious, shared on Facebook or blogged and so on. The latter function has it for me: it makes sharing the content much easier, something that I hope will prompt a some sharing on this humble blog. It is illustrative, I think, of The Guardian Group’s growing embrace of the web, although the sticky subject of how old media will survive or not is still unresolved.

Both are relative cheap services, too. You can pay a whopping 7.50CHF (Swiss Francs) for a bonafide paper copy, which is about £4 for a Sunday paper that’s sometimes incomplete, with often the best supplements are missing (meaning it lacks the heft of a Sunday paper and therefore one of its most attractive qualities). It will cost only £4.99 a month for The Observer; £3.99 for a month’s worth of The Sunday Times. I guess the extra pound pays for all that social networking goodness. Both have mobile-friendly editions, so you can use your mobile device for the odd read although like many things the screen might be too small for prolonged reading. You can also download if you plan to be offline.

Despite this, I’d really like to see some of the excellent multi-media material we find on both news websites (and especially The Guardian’s) integrated into the editions. Although you can listen to the Guardian’s stories (a function I’ve been unable to get to work), in an ideal world both could follow the example of ‘electric!’, a rich media publication from Virgin Media, which uses the Ceros engine. Superb interaction, although quite unlike a conventional newspaper reading experience and appealing to different markets, a hybird which incorporates existing audio/video from the sites seems possible (from this distance). The image below offers video playback embedded in the publication, and there’s audio too. Try ‘electric!’, you might like it, if not the name.

So, I’ll have to compromise: I won’t be able to shape a paper copy to my whim, read it in the garden or at the cafe. Lamenting this, in the never ending pursuit for that elusive hardcopy,  I ventured out to the Swiss / French border near Perly following a rumour that they sold English newspapers. Success of sorts: I did find a single copy of the Sunday Mail. It may still be there for all I know: there are standards.

A perceived weakness of the social bookmarking tool Delicious might otherwise be considered a strength. It may be criticized for failing to encourage the kind of participation or sense of community that alternatives such as Digg or StumbleUpon facilitate, but this has its benefits: Delicious might just be the right tool for those learners who struggle with active participation and collaboration.

Collecting and sharing links, perhaps with a common purpose in mind – an assignment, or project – is a more neutral activity than, say, contributing to an article on a wiki or discussing a topic in a forum. As such, this might be helpful in controlling the anxiety that is often associated with participation online – that our point might be undermined by our would-be ‘smarter’, better-informed peers. Sharing links requires no carefully expressed validation, no editing of others’ work or the offering of an opinion which may be gainsayed. The user is offering little more than ‘I found this useful, and you might, too’ when they share the link, yet their participation is tangible and calls for a direct engagement with the activity.

Paradoxically, it’s Delicious’ paucity of collaborative features, combined with its ability to do its task well, that makes it a good place to start to collaborate. As a tool primarily dedicated to the collection of shared links, Delicious does not have the functionality to discuss the idea further: the user can use ‘comments’ to add notes, but there need be nothing more than the kinds of metadata that make the links more specifically focussed, and it can’t sustain a complex dialogue.

That said, finding and sharing links is not entirely free from value: no choice is, no matter how innocent we may think of it. Even tags are an evaluation of sorts. As a result, those concerned with their choice of tags may be anxious that they’re finding the right bookmarks and tagging them in the ‘correct’ way. Here, the idiosyncratic nature of folksonomies could be positively employed. The learner can tag their bookmark with a word or phrase grounded in their personal way of organising links, but which also might be useful for others, helping offsetting arguments about which are the ‘correct’ tags. If it works for you, it might work for others. What’s more, there are often suggested tags when bookmarking, which is instructive in helping the learner understand how bookmarks might be classified. This could be usefully accompanied by a set of agreed tags for the group, a process that so often brings order to the potential chaos.

There’s a limit to how far this might be called a rich collaborative activity and such a process does not capture the flavour of much meaningful online participation we find elsewhere. However, using Delicious to encourage participation in those learners reticent to engage might not be an end to online collaboration, but it might be a beginning.

How did people emigrate before the web? With difficulty, surely. It’s been useful for almost every step and some of our move would have been impossible I feel without it, at least in the time we had. Of course, underpinning all the technology were two people filling boxes, completing forms, driving miles and pulling the levers and pressing the buttons. But the web has been outstandingly useful for several particular reasons. Here’s a quick fire list in no particular order – I’m certain I’ve left some things out – but like Kane’s gang (as if you’ve forgotten!) it’s what we’ve got:

Interviewed for job online. Without Jennie getting a job for the UN none of this would have happened. In her application she sent all documents online; underwent a test that was performed over the net; was interviewed via web-based video conferencing; and finally sent the medical / admin documents in PDF form to Kuala Lumpar for processing.

Google Docs for a to-do/resources list. This was invaluable and still is. It’s not as complex as something like specific to-do collaborative tools like RemembertheMilk, but it worked beautifully. Simple crossing things out with strikethrough was enough to say they’ve been done. We also collected resources, figures, phone numbers and so on here and worked on independently and together.

Synchronising weblinks using FoxMarks. We independently found various links as we browsed the web, hungry for a fix on our new country. I set up all computers with the favourites tool Foxmarks, regardless of operating system, to synchronise the links we dropped into a ‘Moving on’ folder in our browser. Worked well when Google Docs (eventually) became swamped. Sometimes we used Delicious, but not as often as I thought we would.

Sign-up service for moving. There are a handful of agencies online who make it easier to move by you entering some details and they doing some work for you, like letting the gas company know you need a meter reading and so on. We used these with partial success – sometimes the manual way is best.

Royal Mail’s redirection service. We have mail redirected and using this service meant we didn’t need to trundle down to the post office and take our identity documents, they check details online. We’d need the legs for the thousands of times we climbed the ladder to the loft to pack its contents.

Skype telephony. We bought a UK online number, so our friends and family in the UK would only need to call a local (to them) phone number. Skype has worked really well so far and since we’re not settled for a few months, goes where we go. It also works nicely on my iPhone, which saves us a fortune. We were able to stay in touch with our regi (estate agent) easily and without incurring further mobile phone costs.

Keeping the social network alive. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, this blog – all are things we use to share our experiences here and keep in contact with others. This is important when you’re away from home, and I’ve found it really useful to have some sense of continuity in terms of who I’m speaking with (especially when discussing the cricket, which is only available online here via the BBC’s wonderful TMS – this feels like I’ve never left!).

Transferring money. We now have to work with several currencies – US dollar, Swiss francs, Euro and GB sterling – and so being able to transfer them quickly online (and often without charge) helped us enormously. Of course, this isn’t just something you need when you move. What’s more, currency conversion rates online are always up-to-date.

Checking in online when flying. You’ve used this already, maybe, but printing out a boarding pass for flying seems novel still, and helped get things going when we were a rush: Jennie flew to Geneva and back the same day to secure our place in France.

Google chat. Sometimes email isn’t enough, and you need to make decisions through synchronous discussion. Google’s online chat, via GoogleMail, was vital for the hundreds of discussions we had when not together.

Removal quotes online. You enter your details and you get quotes from multiple removal companies. This helps get the best price of course, and is also a necessary part of claiming for expenses.

Google Maps and Google Earth. Knowing where you’re going to live and its local amenities used to something you needed to find out when you turn up. And although it’s still a thrill to find new restaurants and bars, knowing where the bank or petrol station is not so much fun. What’s more, we used Google Maps to find directions. If only it plugged into…

Satellite navigation. We bought a TomTom One XL, and this has the advantage of connecting to the web and downloading changes that users have made to the maps. In short, it corrects the errors that sat navs are annoyingly prone to, especially in areas under construction. Worked like a dream, although I wouldn’t say that it’s perfect even now.

It has helped me learn a new language. There is an embarrassment of excellent online resources for learning French. Some of the best are About.com‘s guide (with the inaptly named – for a grammarian at least – Laura Lawless); and the BBC comes up trumps again. Although not an online app per se, Genius (for the Mac, free download) helped with remembering verbs.

The web helped us find a place to live. We searched a variety of sites to find somewhere temporary in Geneva, and later, more permanent in France. In the case of the temporary accommodation, the website came with an interactive 3D tour of the apartment. Whilst this is pretty advanced I admit, all the websites we used to find a home had pictures. The difference was that we could save time and money using this process.

Hi-resolution floor plans. Houses in many European countries – alas, but excluding the UK it seems – come with detailed architectural plans, even those you just plan to rent. They locate plug sockets, light switches and so on and give precise details of every measurement both interior and exterior. Not sure if your sofa is going to fit? The plans will help tell you. These took seconds to send over email and illustrate how the communication between people in different countries is made so much easier.

Shopping. Inevitably we had to buy several things, oddments which we’d never got before or those things we needed to replace and pack. Ikea figured heavily in equipping our new place. Their website – intuitive, well-organised and with clear illustrations, it’s a good example of how we saved hours browsing online rather than visiting stores. What’s more, it provides real-time stock levels, is an example of how you can use the web to plan your deliveries or visits.

Freecycle. Even if you’re moving up the road you’ll still have a lot of stuff you’ll want to recycle. We used Freecycle online to invite people to collect some of the stuff we didn’t need or couldn’t find room for. They came in the night and collected, as if whisked away by recycling fairies, without us even knowing.

It would be no surprise to learn that one of the first things we did in Geneva was buy a 3G USB dongle to get us online (expensive but very fast).

Do you only use these things when emigrating? No, we use them now for a variety of reasons. It’s only together that they make sense as vital tools for moving country. Did we still print stuff out? Sure we did. Somewhere we’ve got a file with print outs of architectural plans, photos and the like. But this was as much as habit and security than anything: some lay untouched and unread. Is there anything I’ve missed – I expect so – even as I write I think of all the music and podcasts I’ve downloaded, some of which are about Geneva, or local news programmes and such. And booking tickets and… well, all those things we use the web for all of the time.

Now, if the BBC can get iPlayer available outside of the UK I’d pay the licence fee happily…