Digg (yes, that Digg) has released a new RSS Reader for the web, iPhone, and iPad (Android coming soon). The design is sleek and clean, and the apps are speedy and efficient.
Whether you’re a hardcore RSS junky or simply want all your favorite online reading in one place, Digg Reader is for you. It’s free and available today!
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My thanks to Digg Reader for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.
It’s been about 9 months since I bought my Olympus E-PL5, and there is still one thing I’m not satisfied with. That is the final step of my photography workflow: posting and sharing pictures.
It was my iPhone that led me to buy a better camera. Nearly all of my “best” and “favorite” shots over the past 9 months have been taken with the Olympus and now reside on my Flickr page. The iPhone, however, is still the clear winner when it comes to sharing and enjoying photographs and moments between friends and family. Primarily this happens through Instagram and iMessage — it’s easy and it’s where everyone already is.
My iPhone photography “workflow” looks mostly like this: Snap a picture → launch VSCO or Instagram → import the image → apply a filter → maybe also apply a blur → share on Instagram → get several “hearts” and maybe a comment or two.
My Olympus photography workflow looks something like this: Snap pictures → import from SD card into Lightroom 4 → delete the blurry ones → pick out my favorites from the bunch → make edits and adjustments → upload to Flickr → cricket noises.
From an artistic standpoint, I am far more satisfied and excited about the photographs I’m taking with the Olympus.
Shots like this one of Noah and Anna reading or this picture of my iPhone taking a picture of Moscone are just two examples of some really great photographs I’ve gotten with my Olympus over the past 9 months.
And I want to share these photographs with people. I am proud of them and I enjoy looking at them, and I want others to see them and appreciate them as well. But unless one of my Flickr images makes it onto Explore (which has happened twice), I get very little feedback or activity.
On Flickr I have 885 contacts following me. On Instagram I have 2,235. Yet my Instagram photos get far more than just 2.5 times the activity than my Flickr photos.
Here’s a shot I posted to Flickr on June 30. As of this writing the photo has been up for 2 weeks and has received 7 Faves and 1 comment. Which is already more than most of my photos on Flickr gets.
As a little experiment, this morning, while writing this article, I posted that same image to Instagram (which is totally cheating, I know). Within 10 minutes it had the same number of likes as its 2-week-old Flickr counterpart, and within 5 hours it had nearly 8 times the “likes” (55) and thrice as many comments (3).
In short, my Instagram snapshots spark far more feedback, interaction, and conversation than my Flickr photos do. And I bet anyone reading this who has an Instagram and a Flickr account would say the same thing.
The conundrum, for me, at least, is that my Flickr photos — my best photos and the ones I am most proud of — are the shots I want to share with people so we can both appreciate them together. These are the ones I most want conversations to spark around, and yet these are the ones which get the least interaction.
One of my favorite parts of editing through a batch of images is at the end. I’ll ask Anna if she wants to come into the office and see all the best shots (usually they’re mostly pictures of Noah). I enjoy looking over the pictures with Anna because it brings a feeling of satisfaction to my photographic work. I feel closure when an image I’ve taken receives feedback and/or accolades from others (especially friends and family members).
Which is why I feel a bit of pain right now as a hobbyist photographer. My best photos all go to Flickr, yet they sit there, unnoticed, slowly collecting imaginary dust.
Fortunately, Flickr has been doing much to increase the vibrancy of their network. Last December they released a awesome update to their iPhone app. And a few months ago they redesigned their website and added new pricing structures.
Though the activity and interaction of Flickr’s network has clearly grown at least a little bit, it hasn’t grown that much (at least from where I’m shooting in my small corner of the network). It’s been an uphill battle.
After the new version of the Flickr iPhone app shipped, Khoi Vinh wrote about Flickr’s long road back to relevancy:
[Flickr is] not just an additional place to post photos, but a different kind of venue for different kinds of expressions and interactions. In fact, it’s a reminder that competition, when it is robust, directly translates into added functionality at the consumer’s disposal.
I agree. Flickr doesn’t need to replace or clone Instagram. But if Flickr is where we’re posting our “best” and “favorite” photos, it can be anticlimactic when those photos go mostly unnoticed and unappreciated.
In short, the activity I see on Flickr is disproportionate compared to that of Instagram when I compare the quality of the images on the two networks.
There are, of course, other outlets I have for my favorite photographs. Around our house we have several picture frames, and every few months we’ll swap out the photos with new prints from Shutterfly. And Apple’s photo book proved to be a fantastic Christmas gift for parents and grandparents last year that we’ll no doubt do again.
While those are both extremely satisfying final steps to my photography, they only consist of a fraction of the photos I shoot throughout the year. I’ve considered building my own website where I can post my favorite images, but I’m not sure that’s the answer either.
At the end of the day, Flickr is the only place I’ve got to put my best photographic work. But it doesn’t feel like the right place. As much as I love the service, it’s just not cutting it. And I suspect I’m not alone.
The little bits of animation here and whimsey there are simply fantastic. I love how the IFTTT logo gets mirrored when app’s main screen flips over to the settings pane.
Take Control of LaunchBar is an in-depth “user’s guide” for LaunchBar by Kirk McElhearn that’s part of TidBITS always-amazing Take Control series.
If you use LaunchBar, you’re going to want this book. I’ve been reading through it over the past few days and have learned several new things that I’m putting to good use already. I don’t tinker as much as I used to. Instead I prefer to learn new things about the tools I already use day in and day out.
Also, the Objective Development guys are running a deal: get McElhearn’s book for free if you buy LaunchBar.
The Prompt is one of the coolest new podcasts around. (They also have the most number of unique accents amongst any podcast I’m familiar with.) Yesterday they asked me to join them as a correspondent for one of their segments where we nerded out about photography gear, workflows, and photo management.
Yesterday, Day One for Mac got a significant update. It’s now on feature parity with the iOS version, which means on the Mac you can now add photos, your current location and weather, tags, and more.
I’m personally a huge fan of Day One, and I wrote a review of the 3-app suite last fall. Ever since the iOS app added the ability to include photos in journal entries I now use it often to record memories and moments. The Mac app’s ability to now add photos makes it much easier for me to log and save some of my favorite shots from the E-PL5. Whereas up until now, most of the photos I’ve been putting in Day One have been iPhone shots.
Day One is $10 on the Mac App Store. And on iOS it’s free this week to celebrate the App Store’s 5th anniversary.
“That’s a loaded question.”
What happens when our vision and desire to create amazing work reaches further than our ability to actually create that work? How do we handle it when we know we can be better, and we want to do better work, and we know how it should look in the end, but we don’t yet have the skills to meet our goals?
I think most artists and makers live in this state perpetually.
And if we’re fortunate, we’ll stay there. Ideally our talent will never surpass our drive to make things, because if we wake up one day with more skill than drive, we’re probably burnt out.
Though the feeling of lack sucks, it’s also proof that we’re hungry to do better and go farther in our work.
And I think the pain and frustration we feel when we’re confronted with our lack of talent and skill is also the path to overcoming our talent ceiling. The pain an athlete feels when exercising is the proof that they are getting stronger.
Which is why I think the most important character trait of a successful maker is perseverance.
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Last week I asked if anyone wanted to share their story of how they’ve overcome their own talent ceilings. The emails I’ve received so far have been much more encouraging and personal than I could have imagined. I’m still trying to read through them all and I’m realizing this is such an important and personal topic.
Here are a few excerpts from some of the emails I’ve read so far:
Michael Schechter: I’m banging my head against that ceiling daily. Seems to be the only way I’ve found to raise it.
Guido O.: I guess that overcoming your own talent ceiling just requires you to trust yourself, to give yourself space and time to grow. Talent may grow indefinitely, but it is not an immediate process.
Larry D.: I got around my talent glass ceiling by enlisting the help of others who do have the talent and exciting others in the company about the benefits. What I’ve learned professionally is that we need to dream big, dream beyond our own capabilities. We can enlist others to help us on our journey because we can’t all be good at everything. The talent ceiling may exist for an individual, but not for a team of the right people. I’ve found people want to help if you have a big, great idea.
As Larry mentions just above, I think the second most important character trait of a successful maker is relationship and community. In fact, community and perseverance go hand in hand, like two sides of the same coin. Have a community to go to and work with and get feedback from gives us continued energy to persevere.
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Right now I am working on a project for people who make things. And in it, I go into more detail about this topic as well as many others related to the making of things. If you want to get an email when it’s ready, I’ve made a little signup form.
Michael Mace:
The most beautiful app is not the one that looks most striking; it’s the one people can actually use. You should design your app to be usable first, and then make it as pretty as you can. The highest form of beauty is functionality.
This pretty much goes for all design, but it’s especially true of mobile design where (a) the usage contexts are so extremely varied, (b) the devices are relatively small, and (c) standard UI and UX practices are still being learned and developed, and perhaps just now are maturing out of their infancy.
Bradley Chambers writes up how he uses Plex as the brains for his home media server and as a “home grown iTunes Match for video” solution. When I wrote up about how I’d converted my old PowerBook into a home Mac media server, a lot of readers wrote in to say they were using Plex and loved it (one very cool feature, as Bradly points out, is that you can stream your movies from your Mac to your iPhone/iPad even if you’re on the other side of the planet.)
Nice profile of Ryan Sims, the head of design for Rdio:
Music is magical. Discovering and consuming it should be a joy. One thing we’ve tried to do with Rdio is bring the music to the foreground by pushing everything else to the back. If Rdio is the canvas, the music is the paint. And we are trying to compose spectacular landscapes. Being a company that values design at every level and having such a design-driven product, we can take some pretty big design risks where others might be more cautious and conservative. This is one hell of an opportunity and it’s something every one of our designers has a good grasp of and takes very seriously.
This week will be the 5th anniversary of the iOS App Store. Though Apple hasn’t yet announced anything officially, several popular developers are offering their apps and games for free this week presumably as part of a special 5th-anniversary promotion that Apple will do. These are some great apps and, man, you can’t beat free.
Update: The 5-year celebratory page for the App Store is now on iTunes.
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My thanks to Backblaze for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. I have been using Backblaze as my offsite backup solution for years now and am very happy with their service and price. Definitely worth checking out.
Simon Christen spent two years filming this beautiful video that he calls a love letter to the fog of the San Francisco Bay Area:
I spent many mornings hiking in the dark to only find that the fog was too high, too low, or already gone by the time I got there. Luckily, once in a while the conditions would be perfect and I was able to capture something really special. Adrift is a collection of my favorite shots from these excursions into the ridges of the Marin Headlands.