Better photography, a well known photography magazine of India organizes the “Photographer of the year” competition every year. And year after year, they have organized it successfully offline, accepting entries from the best photographers across India and abroad. This year, however they decided to take this online and canvera.com being the associate partner had to come up with a web application that would enable photographers to submit their entries through a brand new site.

Three weeks was the allotted time for the completion of the project in which the design (and its thousand iterations), development, and QA and all the tweaks would all had to be completed. And my team, i.e. Mayur (a.k.a the designer), Kanupriya (product manager) and myself (the developer) were given the responsibility for the web application. It was definitely a roller coaster ride; new designs being discussed (and partly implemented) daily, new functional requirements and the architecture slowly but surely building up.

I had an option of choosing Ruby on Rails or php or Java EE to build this application, and for a two weeks time frame the former two would have definitely been faster. But we decided for Java, and built the entire application using jsp/struts/tiles/spring/hibernate/postgresql/jboss. It’s a standard web application: A home page which briefly introduces the application, some static pages which explain the competition in the detail, a registration page (with forgot password functionality), login, user profile page, category page, theme page and upload image page. Image storage and thumbnail generation have been given a lot of importance, and is pretty scalable. But to get the thing work in IE6 was a real pain. IE7 didn’t play too nice either but they all eventually fell in place

A javascript library is needed in every modern application, and although a big fan of YUI I decided on jquery this time. And I am amazed by the variety and support in jquery plugins, and slowly becoming my favorite. Although this is the first application where I hadn’t used any AJAX in the whole application, the whole experience is pretty smooth in my opinion. The image upload could have been a little smoother(and it will be, I promise ) with the flash uploader. Some more small features like an ajax feedback modal dialog box and editing image details might follow soon.

Coming to the competition, there are actually three of those. Photographer of the year(POY for brief), Young photographer of the year(YPOY), and Wedding photographer of the year(WPOY). YPOY and WPOY are being organized for the first time this year, and as you’d have guessed, YPOY is only for people under 18.

There are eight themes each for the photographer/young photographer of the year: Family and friends, Natural elements, life on streets, man/environment, twilight magic, still life, wild life and landscapes and a maximum of four photographs can be uploaded in each theme. For wedding photographer of the year, the themes are: Bridal portraits, couple portraits, family and friends, behind the scenes, emotions and photo series of a single wedding. All competitions are open for amateurs and professionals alike, so just pick up your camera, shoot some cool shots and go uploading!

All in all, it was a very fulfilling experience developing the application, in which arguably the best Indian photographers, young photographers and wedding photographers will upload their best shots! I hope that the best photographers in India would find participating in the contest simple and enjoyable.

After writing a previous blog post on naming asklaila.com, I was thinking more and more about how do companies name their products. And does this name have anything to do with the success of the product? If the answer is ‘yes’, I fail to understand how in the world has Hero Honda succeeded in becoming the numero uno in motorbikes five years in a row!

According to me, Hero Honda has come up with the stupidest names ever for bikes. Now, what kind of a loser names his bike Achiever? No seriously! Why would anyone in the world want to buy a bike which is named Achiever? Ditto for Glamour, unless you are a yellow-pants-orange-shirts wearing Govinda yourself. With Hunk, they reached a new low, which I didn’t even think was possible. Well, maybe they thought of building an hunky Indian version of the Harley Davidson, but named it so that everyone understands what the name stands for.
Ambition, in my guess would be for the 50 year old virgin who still thinks he could marry a princess, but manages only to buy an Ambition in the end. And don’t even get me started on Splendor(and the thousand versions of it: Splendor plus, super Splendor, Splendor NXG)!

Glamour might be for Hunks who have the Ambition of being Achievers of Priyanka Chopra. Speaking of bollywood and HH’s naming of bikes, I think there is a definite correlation. In my opinion, Hero Honda names most of its bikes keeping one bollywood star in mind. If Glamour=Priyanka Chopra, Hunk=Hrithik Roshan, Joy=Joy Mukherjee, Ambition=Imran Hashmi, no points for guessing what’s Karizma for. I can actually read through the mind of the person responsible for Karizma. “Hmm.. I need to name this bike in English… I think Charisma is a good word, which although I don’t understand, would look nice. Moreover it sounds like Karishma Kapoor (big grin). But people would think it’s a lengthy version of “chashma”, so let me make it more like Karishma.” Hence the name Karizma.

With Passion, they forgot that they are selling a bike and not viagra on wheels. And I can only assume that Passion Plus would be an ideal name for a stronger medication.

Maybe I was a little harsh on Hero Honda, because other companies like Bajaj, TVS, even Yamaha sometimes name their bikes idiotically. Like Dawn or Boxer etc, but come on. You have to give it to Hero Honda for the maximum number of ridiculous names.

When Hero met Honda, a cycle company met a motorbikes company, and you can only be sure that cyclists are nothing more than stupid people, hence the awesome bike names. I could go on and an, and take a dig at pleasure, sleek, street, and the endless other ludicrous names, but I should just stop and let you know that such names not only grind my gears, but make my blood boil.

p.s.: I ride an Avenger, and if you think the name is awful, you are wrong.