On this week’s show: taking risks and trusting our gut on big decisions, and avoiding the immeasurable danger of small, everyday distractions.
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Flickr shipped a massive update to their iPhone app just a few days ago. As an avid user of both Flickr and an iPhone, I wanted to share my thoughts about their new app and bit about the state of Flickr in general.
In short, it’s a fantastic app sporting one of the best iOS 7 updates I’ve seen. It has many visual tie-ins with the also-recently-updated Flickr website. All in all, I am encouraged about the future of Flickr and their resolve to avoid obsolescence.
There is a lot of Instagram-type inspiration going on, and I like it. When scrolling down the main timeline view you can double-tap on an image favorite it; all images in your main timeline view are shown as edge-to-edge squares even if the image itself is a different aspect ratio.
The notifications screen that shows all the activity happening on your account (people who have liked your images, favorited them, and/or new followers) is also reminiscent of the Instagram notification screen.
In the main photo stream timeline, when someone has uploaded several photos, you see them as a collage of 2 or 3. You can tap on one of the photos you see to bring that photo’s detail view, or you can tap the button to “view all photos” and you’re taken to a gallery-type view showing all the photos in that set.
Virtually everything within the app is tappable as a link, which is great. It’s very easy to find and explore new photos and photographers, and thus it’s easy to drill down deep within the app.
Alas, there is no shortcut to get back to any of the top level tabs of the app. Suppose you tap on someone’s photo, then go to their profile timeline page, then tap onto another photo in their timeline, tap onto the comments of that photo, and then tap onto the someone who left a comment to view their profile timeline. Well, now you’re 5 layers deep into the app and it will take 5 taps to get back to the top. And, to add some lemon juice, to exit out of an individual photo view, you have to tap the “x” that’s in the top-right corner of the screen, but to go back a level when you’re on someone’s profile page, you have to tap the back arrow that is on the top-left of the screen. Moreover, since the Flickr app doesn’t have any gestural-based navigation (you can’t swipe from left-to-right to go back), the only way to navigate out of someone’s profile photo stream view is to scroll to the top to reveal the back button.
Overall, the app is extremely well designed and easy to navigate and figure out. The nature of the design and content encourage (in a good way) getting lost in the app and discovering photos and photographers. Just an easier way to get back to the trail head is all I’m asking for.
The pull-to-refresh animation is quite clever. If you’re at the top of the main timeline view, pulling down reveals a white dot. As you continue to pull down to refresh, the white dot gradually turns pink as it simultaneously gets surrounded by a thick blue line (the two colors of the Flick logo). Then the blue line and pink dot separate to form the the two-dot Flickr logo and they sort of spin/orbit around one another.
This animation is even cooler when you pull to refresh from someone’s profile page. The blue line forms around the person’s circle avatar, and those two dots orbit around one another as the page refreshes and then the avatar sort of slingshots back up to where it was.
The Flickr app can auto-upload your iPhone photos just like Dropbox does.
So far as I can tell, once you’ve enabled the app’s auto-uploading feature, only your preceding photographs (and screenshots) will be uploaded to Flickr. It won’t begin uploading your whole iPhone Camera Roll.
All your auto-uploaded photos are automatically set to private. This is, in fact, a setting that you cannot change. I like that it’s a non-adjustable setting because it means nobody will accidentally set all their uploads to be public.
Photos that are set to private won’t show up in any public timelines and they are hidden from anyone who views your Flickr profile. You, however, will see the photos the same way all other photos appear in your timeline, and you can set any image to be public if you wish.
Within the iPhone app, photos that are set to private have a little lock icon in their top-left corner. On the Flickr website, the only way to know if a photo is set to private or not is by going to the image’s permalink page where you can see a lock icon.
On the left is what my Flickr photo stream looks like to me, and on the right is what it looks like to others.
p.s. Here’s what it looks like in a web browser.
For photos that you upload manually from the Flickr app, you are given the option to set the photo’s visibility to Public, Private, Friends only, Family only, or Friends and Family only. (For those not familiar with how Friends and Family works in Flickr, when you chose to follow someone you can define if they are a friend or a family member. Thus, you’re given the option to also set a photo’s visibility to only those groups. Which is actually really great.)
You can also share the upload to Twitter, Facebook, and/or Tumblr. As well as adding the photo to a location (via the Foursquare API), and adding to any of your Flickr Albums (or create a new Album).
Flickr gives you 1TB (!) of free photo storage, which is pretty amazing.
That amount of storage is certainly enticing when trying to consider a photo backup service to use, but I see two downsides:
While there are some cool possibilities with using Flickr as a hub for photo sharing and syncing, it’s still not there yet.
The Flickr app continues to let you take and edit photos as well.
Below is an image of my wife, Anna, holding our new nephew, Simon. The image itself was shot with my E-M10. In clockwise starting with the top-left image: (1) the original out-of-camera JPG; (2) a version edited with the new Flickr app using the Brooklyn filter; (3) edited on the iPhone VSCO Cam app using the F2 filter; and (4) a version edited in Lightroom on my Mac using the VSCO Film 05, Agfa Vista 100 preset.
(Tap the image to bring up an enlarged view.)
I tried to pick the filter in each app that I liked best for this photograph. Here, comparing them side-by-side here, the Flickr version looks the most dramatic and “cheesy”. I think the VSCO Film version looks the most natural and nice. The VSCO Cam version looks great as well, though it too — for a one-tap filter application on an iPhone, I’m impressed.
When you’re in the detail view of a photograph, you can “toss it around” just like you can with Tweetbot 3 for iPhone. This is a neat and fun touch. However, it’s also the only way to exit the detail view aside from tapping the “x” in the upper-right corner.
When you tap a photo, it brings up that image in full-view. Tap it again and all the text and photo info on the screen disappears, giving you the “lightbox” mode. Tap in lightbox mode to go back to image-only view with the relevant text again.
The new Flickr app is one of the nicest iOS 7 apps I’ve seen. Its links and tappable areas are clear, it does a great job using blur effects, and it’s easy and delightful to use.
Flickr has so many things right. The whole way the site works is clever, thought through, and useful. But times are changing and so there is still much that Flickr needs to catch up on. But I love that it’s making serious strides forward, and that Yahoo is taking the service seriously. I’ve been a Flickr user for years and I use it now more than I ever have. It’s encouraging and exciting to see these improvements to their website, service, and mobile apps.
CJ Chilvers:
It may not please the geeks, but the best solution I’ve found for all this is the humble book. Making a collection of photos into a book (even if it’s just a year book of miscellaneous shots) solves several problems.
Making a photo book through iPhoto has become one of our favorite things to do as well, and I highly recommend it. It’s super easy and affordable.
For the last two years now, after Thanksgiving weekend, I place all of my favorite photos from the past 12 months into a new iPhoto library. The software will auto-generate the layout of the book (it puts them in chronological order), and then I just tweak it and send to print. The quality is fantastic and it’s one of the best ways to have your favorite photos all in one place.
I linked to Kidpost back in February, but it seems relevant again considering the aforelinked. Basically, Kidpost rounds up all the photos of your kids that you post on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Instagram and then sends them in an email to your extended family.
The service is still in beta, and I haven’t seen it or tried it myself, but it looks like a promising and clever solution to the problem of photo sharing.
Justin Williams on the different options available for both backing up our photos and sharing them with friends and family. He looks at Dropbox’s Carousel, Apple’s Photo Stream, and Google+ Cloud Backup, and email.
Aside from my writing, I really can’t think of anything else I make that is as important to me than the photos I am taking. If you’re casual about your photos and only care about sharing the most recent snapshot and then you never really care about that photo again, then things aren’t that bad. You take a picture, upload it to Instagram/Facebook/Twitter and/or email it/text message it to your friends or family and you’re done.
But once you start caring. Once you realize that you want your favorite photos in some sort of album for easy trips through memory lane, and that you want all your photos to be available on all your devices, and that you want to more easily define who you share what photos with, and that you want all your photos to be safely backed up in case your toddler tosses your iPhone into the potty, well… that’s when you realize the state of photo sharing and backup in 2014 is still a confusing mess.
I touched on this yesterday in my link to Federico Viticci’s iOS 8 Wish List article. While pontificating what Apple has in store for the future of iOS, surely improvements to Photo Stream and iCloud storage are on the list. With how aggressive Apple is when it comes to enhancing the iPhone’s physical camera and the software that drive is, it’s mind boggling how much they’ve neglected the storage, syncing, and sharing of those photos.
Ben Thompson:
The future of the iPad is not to be a better Mac. That may happen by accident, just as the Mac eventually superseded the Apple II, but to pursue that explicitly would be to sacrifice what the iPad might become, and, more importantly, what it already is.
Federico Viticci:
With iOS 7, Apple profoundly altered the foundations of their mobile operating system’s design and functionality, and I want to believe that iOS 8, likely due later this year, will allow them to keep building towards new heights of user enjoyment, design refinement, and exploration of features suitable for the post-PC era. The transition to iOS 7 hasn’t been perfectly smooth, but, less than two months away from WWDC, there’s clear, promising potential on the horizon: plenty of new iOS low-hanging fruit.
A great list of feature ideas and suggestions. I too would love to see a more comprehensive and useful Today view in Notification Center and a way to customize the apps accessible via Control Center.
And surely improvements to Photo Stream and iCloud storage are on Apple’s radar on the “We Really Need to Get These Working Better ASAP” list. Every single iPhone and iPad owner is taking photos and using iCloud — these have got to be two of the most-used built-in features of iOS and they are showing serious signs of aging. With how aggressive Apple is when it comes to enhancing the iPhone’s physical camera and the software that drive is, it’s mind boggling how much they’ve neglected the storage, syncing, and sharing of those photos.
My favorite bit:
The key thing that…for us, is to stay focused on things that we can do best and that we can perform at a really high level of quality that our customers have come to expect.
And so we currently feel comfortable in expanding the number of things we’re working on. We’ve been doing that in the background, and we’re not ready yet to pull the string on the curtain.
But we’ve got some great things there that we’re working on that I’m very very proud of and very, very excited about.
But for us, we care about every detail, and when you care about every detail and getting it right, it takes a bit longer to do that. And that’s always been the case—that’s not something that just occurred, you know.
As you probably know from following us for a long time, we didn’t ship the first MP3 player, nor the first smartphone, nor the first tablet. In fact, there were tablets being shipped a decade or so before then, but arguably we shipped the first successful modern tablet, the first successful modern smartphone, and the first successful modern MP3 player. And so it means much more to us to get it right, than to be first.
I think you can see so many examples out in the marketplace where it’s clear that the objective has been to be first. But customers, at the end of the day, don’t care about that, or that’s not what they look for from Apple—they want great, insanely great, and that’s what we want to deliver. And so that’s the way we look at it.
With the recent post and podcast talking about kids and screentime and just the prevalence of touch screens in our day to day lives and relationships, here are two incredible illustrations on the topic that speak volumes.
First is this cover from The New Yorker’s 2009 Halloween edition. This artwork is from half a decade ago, and it’s just as relevant today if not more so.
And here’s something new. It’s the latest piece of street art from London’s famous graffiti artist, Banksy.
Perhaps these two pieces are part of the same story. After taking the kids out trick or treating, mom and dad come home where they can be alone with their phones.
Josh Ginter:
Surprising to me is the fact that some apps have far superior swiping experiences. Some apps require a swipe from off-screen to go back a menu while others allow for swipes to begin in the middle of the screen.
Yes! Sloppy swiping is a superior experience.
Try this: swipe from left-to-right in Unread, Paper (so I hear), Agenda calendar, Reeder, or Check the Weather. In those apps you’ll notice that you can start your swipe from just about anywhere and it works. Just like moving between Home screens doesn’t require a specific off-screen starting point.
Now try the same thing in Apple’s Mail app, Messages app, or Tweetbot. The requirement to begin the swipe off the left-most edge of the screen just doesn’t feel as generous when you’re used to an app that allows the sloppy swipe.
Now, I get why this is important in certain cases. In Tweetbot, for example, a left-to-right swipe on a tweet is a shortcut for quickly replying to that Tweet. Tweetbot could allow sloppy swiping when on a screen that doesn’t use gesture shortcuts, and then require non-sloppy swiping when in the Timeline view, but then you’ve chosen to have an inconsistent gesture experience. However, that’s exactly the implementation Day One uses.
Day One allows half sloppy swiping, half not. When viewing an individual entry, a sloppy swipe will take you back to the Timeline view. But on the timeline view, a sloppy swipe is actually how you get to the individual quick action menu for an entry. And so to go back to the main menu from Day One’s timeline view, you have to do a traditional swipe.
And then there’s another type of swiping transition that is just all wrong. It’s most prevalent in OmniFocus 2 for iPhone and Simplenote. In OmniFocus 2 for iPhone, a left-to-right swipe from the Forecast view, Inbox view, etc. will take you back to the main menu screen. However, the transition to the main menu screen is one where the latter closes in from top and from bottom. Moreover it closes over the top of the Forecast view.
And it’s a similar transition effect in Simplenote. When swiping left-to-right out of an individual note to go back to the main notes list, the current note fades away and the notes list comes in from both top and bottom edges. These transitions are neat in theory, but they are jarring in actual use. Because the gesture is the same as used by all other iOS apps, yet the animation completely breaks the illusion that you are “swiping this screen away to go back to another screen”.
Underscore David Smith proposes 14 steps to a better App store:
The App Store has (in part) driven the wild success of the iPhone. Having a great user App Store experience helps everyone. It helps Apple sell more iPhones. It helps customers enjoy their iPhones. It helps developers sustain their development.
Agreed. The App Store is in dire need of improvement.
From where I’m sitting (which is at home, at my desk, if you’re curious), the two biggest issues I see facing the App Store are search/discoverability (for customers) and financial incentive (for developers).
Regarding search, I almost never use the actual App Stores to search for an iOS or Mac. Rather, I use Google. If I’m looking for a specific app, I can find it faster through Google. And if I’m looking for the best within a category, Google will help me find reviews and roundups that have already been written. The App Store is just the last step for me — it’s where I land when I’m ready to buy the app I’ve already found.
Another cool idea along the lines of search and discoverability is an App Store-centric social network of sorts. A way to follow folks and see the apps that are on their home screen. Because, honestly, the vast majority of apps I find are thanks to the word-of-mouth recommendations of my friends.
Secondly, regarding financial incentive for developers, I’ve said before that I think apps like Diet Coda, Editorial, 1Password, Fantastical, OmniFocus, Day One, 53’s Paper, PDF Expert 5, et al. are some of the quintessential examples of apps that really push the boundaries of what iOS devices can be capable of doing. I sometimes worry if the financial incentive will remain for a developer to spend the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours it takes to build a powerful, thoughtful, delightful app. And, what is Apple doing to educate its user-base that these apps are worth their “whopping” $3 price tag?
Our latest app review on The Sweet Setup is for the best password manager (and why you need one in the first place). Robert McGinley Myers, Stephen Hackett, and myself looked at 5 of the most popular Mac / iOS password managers to see if 1Password really is the best. In short, it is. We also hit on how 1Password and iCloud Keychain can work in tandem, and why the latter is not a full-on replacement for the former.
And, as it turns out, there is a huge update to 1Password for iOS today. I’m with Federico Viticci, that the best part of the iOS update (aside from the massive design refresh, of course) is the persistent search field.
If you’re already using 1Password, then the iOS and Mac updates are free. If you’re not, well, check out our review and then snatch up the apps while they’re half off this week:
I really enjoyed reading Robert’s home screen interview on David Sparks’ site. Robert shares excellent thoughts and concepts related answering a deeper philosophical “why” regarding some of the apps he uses.
This is a fantastic review on so many levels. For one, Jared hits the nail on the head when discussing one of Glassboard’s unique features: that messages can have comments. The hierarchy design has also confused me, but, as Jared points out, it would be a shame to do away with that hierarchy all together. Some friends and I use GroupMe for our group discussions. And while it’s nice, it also has some significant draw backs, in that it’s nearly impossible to respond to a comment made by someone once the groups’s conversation has moved on.
Also, Jared shares some excellent input on design and branding, with some advice that’s relevant to anyone, not just Justin Williams. Both Riposte and Unread sit as some of my all-time favorite apps for the iPhone. Jared has some strong opinions and sometimes wild ideas, but his work speaks for itself. I think developers and designers would do well to listen to Jared’s thoughts.
