Tarot's Digital Evolution. Call for Ideas, Suggestions, Likes & Dislikes

Callanish

Reversed cards in Digital Tarot

Ever since I started the Phuture website I've been asked to support reversed Tarot cards.
I've always said "no" due to the technical limitations of Digital Tarot but I've just had an idea which I'd like to share with everyone on how it could be done digitally.

Since you are not physically shuffling the cards in a Digital Deck, the software jumbles them up for you, you have no control over the dignity of the cards.
Picking the cards, if all cards are presented anonymously and equally to the user, nullifies the technology used in the shuffling but not the technology's choice of card dignity.

I've always used, on the website and the App, a grid layout of all 78 cards face down.
The user clicks (or taps) on their card choices.

I recently started playing around the the "Coverflow" or "Carousel" method of picking cards from a Digital Deck. It's a nice alternative.
The idea I have, to get around the problem of allowing the user to influence the card dignity, it to make use of the smart phone or tablets gesture controls.
So to pick a card you don't just tap on it you swipe your finger up the screen or down the screen.
That way you are not just picking the card but you are also changing the dignity of the card (the card may already be undignified and your swipe gesture could return it to up right).

Thoughts?

Callanish
 

ficbot

I really dislike apps which make you sign in or create an account for basic use. I will never download these on purpose, and if I get one by accident, I delete it.

Features I like so far:

- Draw a random card. The Fool's Dog app has this. Another app I have, which has many spread (a good feature!) does not have this one basic feature.

- Ability to go back and look again. I had one app which auto-advanced to the next part every time you tapped the screen. A few times, I tapped by accident and it moved on and would not let me go back and read what I missed.

- A card browser. Especially if there are multiple decks, these are like art to me. I like to be able to just look and enjoy.
 

Callanish

Thanks for re-starting this thread ficbot.
I'm not sure if you've tried my own App from what you've written but it does do all 3 things you've listed.
The carousel card picker I mentioned also allows visual browsing by card suite.

I recently approached a rival App developer asking if they collaborate on creating some technical standards for Tarot Apps.

Why?
One very good reason why we need some standardisation in digital tarot is Tarot Decks for in-app purchase.
See my recent post here.
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=241294

This current model of a unique App for each deck is madness.
A book author wouldn't sell their book in just one shop.
You wouldn't buy a new smart phone, or iPod, because it came with a song pre-loaded and that was the only way to get the song.
(read my post in that thread for more on this)

The internet only exists because a group of rival IT companies got together and developed, jointly, open industry standards. e.g. TCP/IP, HTML, FTP, etc, etc (see http://ietf.org)
This working together led to greater things and to the benefit of all of us.
It's why the internet continue's to grow and evolve, because it's based on inter-operable standards.

I'd like to see a standard for packaging up a Tarot Deck in a single file which can then be sold by any digital platform, in-app, which would be to the benefit of digital tarot users, artists and developers.
Perhaps then the publishing houses (LoScarabeo & US Games) might consider opening up their vast collection of decks to be sold digitally. They haven't shown any interest in creating their own apps for them.
They probably don't want to become developers just as I don't want to become a publisher.

There are other things we could look at standardising, e.g. a spread layout description file format. Allowing users to find new spreads and load them into their app, or design their own and exchange them with others.

Callanish
 

ficbot

Callanish, I do have your app and have been playing around with it. Two suggestions I have for you:

1) I think the Create Your Own Deck feature would be a lot more useful if there was a minimal crop feature built into the in-app camera. It would be so fast to just zip through the deck, pick the next face-up card, snap it, crop and done. In the absence of a crop feature, I had to take ALL the pictures first, crop them in the Photos app, and then try and add them to the app by squinting at the tiny thumbnails in the in-app camera roll browser. This added many steps and much time. I got halfway through one of my paper decks and then gave up. I really need to be able to snap a picture, crop it on the spot and be done.

2) I would love to have a deck comparison feature where I can choose a card, and browse/see all the versions of it for every deck I have installed. I am still learning all the symbols and imagery. It would be so helpful to be able to pick a card and compare the different versions of it.

It is a great start for a tarot app. I just was really disappointed with the app creation feature. Way too much going back and forth between different windows, losing my spot and having to go back to where I was. Could be much better.
 

Callanish

Love getting feedback on how to improve! :)

1) Adding each card can already be done with the device camera.
You just snap, select "use photo" and then when you see the card window with your new photo you crop, rotate etc and save. It's been like that since it's first release. Please PM me or send me an email (george at phuture [dot] me).
I'd like to add that I purposely don't make it -too easy- to add decks to the App.
What i don't want this App turning into is a Tarot "MP3 Player" which fuels a Tarot deck piracy industry.

2) Now that's a very nice and original idea! I'll add that to my list of things for the next release.

Callanish, I do have your app and have been playing around with it. Two suggestions I have for you:

1) I think the Create Your Own Deck feature would be a lot more useful if there was a minimal crop feature built into the in-app camera. It would be so fast to just zip through the deck, pick the next face-up card, snap it, crop and done. In the absence of a crop feature, I had to take ALL the pictures first, crop them in the Photos app, and then try and add them to the app by squinting at the tiny thumbnails in the in-app camera roll browser. This added many steps and much time. I got halfway through one of my paper decks and then gave up. I really need to be able to snap a picture, crop it on the spot and be done.

2) I would love to have a deck comparison feature where I can choose a card, and browse/see all the versions of it for every deck I have installed. I am still learning all the symbols and imagery. It would be so helpful to be able to pick a card and compare the different versions of it.

It is a great start for a tarot app. I just was really disappointed with the app creation feature. Way too much going back and forth between different windows, losing my spot and having to go back to where I was. Could be much better.
 

ficbot

That is odd, I could not find a crop command anywhere. All you could do was pinch to zoom. I could not see how to crop it :)
 

Callanish

That is odd, I could not find a crop command anywhere. All you could do was pinch to zoom. I could not see how to crop it :)

The "pinch to zoom" is part of the cropping.
When you zoom/move/rotate, whatever is within the red rectangular template view when you hit save is what is cropped as the card image.
Is there some functionality of cropping I've missed in this?

Callanish
 

ficbot

By cropping, I mean being able to trim the borders. In the photos app, choosing this function puts grab bars on the pic and you can trim off the sides. I could not find a way to photograph the cards which did not include the table or whatever it is photographed on. What you describe is not cropping where you can remove the image. It is merely centering and zooming :) This does not solve the cropping issue I speak of.
 

Callanish

By cropping, I mean being able to trim the borders. In the photos app, choosing this function puts grab bars on the pic and you can trim off the sides. I could not find a way to photograph the cards which did not include the table or whatever it is photographed on. What you describe is not cropping where you can remove the image. It is merely centering and zooming :) This does not solve the cropping issue I speak of.

I've designed everything on both the App and the Website to use a fixed ratio for card sizes.
The ratio of height to width I've used is the "Golden Ratio" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio).
Which is why the free in-app "Tarocco Soprafino" deck is on a background. It's cards are long and thin. (H/W ratio of 2.1)

As for corners I've not been very consistent, it's something I need to re-visit.
The software will round off corners depending on the view.

These design constraints will limit the usefulness of advanced cropping techniques.
It's something that I will return to and re-work in the future if card dimensions become an issue.
So far it hasn't been the case as most decks do use an approximation of the golden ratio.

If there's something I'm missing in this conversation send me an email with an example of the cropping you desire.
A picture is worth a thousand words after all... :)

Callanish
 

ficbot

I don't want to crop the card though. I want to trim off the non-card parts. I put the card on the table, I snap the pic, you can see the table. I have tried zooming in with the camera, zooming out, trying different angles. It still happens. I need to manually trim the sides. Doing it through the camera app makes importing into your app very slow and clunky. This seems like such a simple thing to me :)

Your app does have some nice features but the killer one to me would be to be able to scan my decks and use them on the go. A simple grab bar to let me trim the borders in-app would make your app my go-to. It's not quite there yet but it could be.