Ken Segall, author of Insanely Simple, comments on Apple’s new “Photos Every Day” ad:
What this commercial does so well is capture the human side of technology. It’s a reflection of daily life, and it’s easy to see ourselves in it. The ad shows us how essential our phones have become, enabling us to capture the people, places and images we don’t want to forget.
Apple commercials aren’t new to this kind of theme. But I agree – Photos Every Day is one of the best ever made.
Alongside an Android update that brings it up to par with the iOS version, Flipboard has made available a web editor for managing your collection of curated magazines in Flipboard. The new site, launched at editor.flipboard.com, lets you change your profile information (such as your bio and name), create magazines, edit details of existing magazines, and delete them. You can also change the cover photo for your magazines if you like and open articles for saved content, but it’s not really designed as an online web browser as much as it’s designed to quickly rearrange articles or delete ones you’re simply no longer interested in. Providing just the basics, Flipboard also reminds you to download their mobile app if you try to browse someone else’s magazine — the editor is just a convenient interface for seeing what you have in your collection and nothing more. With the addition of the editor, what I’d like to see next is an extension for web browsers, letting me save links to my magazine of choice as I’m surfing the web so I can share content with friends and family from anywhere.
I imagine this has to be one of the coolest jobs in the world. Apple’s product photos are both legendary and seen by millions of people world wide, either in advertisements in magazines, on Apple’s website, or sometimes even on sites like ours. Peter Belanger, a photographer whose clients include Apple, Nike, and Square, was interviewed by The Verge and asked how he recreates the kind of simplicity that Apple portrays in its marketing.
I need to have control over each and every surface so when the client asks for a highlight to be elongated, I can do that. It’s similar to working on a file in Photoshop: you don’t do all your work on one layer. I think of my lights as layers that I can adjust individually to get the desired results.
While Peter shoots with a Canon 5D Mark III, he’s also the same individual who shot the Macworld iPhone 4 cover with an iPhone 4 itself. His process and attention to detail are absolutely amazing.
Apple’s Photos app is the default location for saving and sharing photos with friends on iOS. It’s a place where I spend a lot of time either deleting old screenshots (unique to us bloggers) or sorting images into albums as best I can before syncing them with iPhoto. The app has never made much sense to me, between how it simply handles moving images into albums from the Camera Roll or into Photo Stream, and I don’t particularly care for how it whisks away old photos after a period of time on a per device basis in Photo Stream. Peter Nixey was featured on Hacker News earlier today for his thoughts on how managing photos could be better on iOS, and I agree with the general idea:
I want the canonical copy of my iPhoto library in the cloud. One iPhoto library in the cloud, many devices with access to it. I want to edit, organise and delete photos on any device and see the same changes on all other devices. No master/slave setup - just straight cloud access.
I get that there are limitations and lots of things happening in the background, but a lot of that makes itself evident in Photos if you look closely enough. I don’t necessarily agree with Peter’s pricing ideas or that Dropbox and the like are even a threat. But what I do agree with is that the dumb syncing silo that is Photo Stream has to go. Camera Roll can stay as it is — I don’t necessarily need the two merged. When I move photos from the camera roll into a new album, that photo should be gone — moved from my Camera Roll. And those albums should simply show up everywhere from my iPhone to my iPad and on my Mac or Windows box. The “duplication” that happens everywhere with photos right now on iOS is absolutely crazy. And if I want to use the iPhoto app on iOS instead… can’t I just make that the default?
I love taking pictures on my iPhone. But the syncing, the managing, the sorting… it’s not great.
Genius idea, great promo video:
Pizza Compass is a $0.99 app that lets you find pizza joints nearby. Unlike other discovery apps for local businesses, Pizza Compass uses a slice of pizza…as a compass to show the distance from a pizza joint. You can turn the slice of pizza around, and tap on a pizza joint’s name to open an embedded Foursquare page.
I have downloaded the app, and it’s surprisingly full of accurate results for Viterbo; however, local results don’t seem to feature opening and closing times here, so the bottom bar that’s supposed to be color-coded is grayed out for me.
Get Pizza Compass here.
Some solid thoughts by Dave Addey. I disagree with the conclusion, though: if users could try apps for free and if a $9.99 app turned out to be exactly what they needed, I think many would (more comfortably) pay for it.
Greg Pierce:
Tally 1.1 adds x-callback-url support to our quick-counting app for iPhone. Tally supports two actions, “increment” and “decrement” – with full support of callbacks. This allows Tally to be included in automation workflows with Drafts and other apps – should you feel like you need to keep track of how many times you executed a workflow or similar.
I’ve never had a use for Tally, but this update looks interesting. If, for instance, you were to use a Draft 3.0 action to append text to an Evernote journal, you could integrate Tally to count the times the action is fired every day – perhaps by triggering everything from a Launch Center Pro timed notification.
If you’re looking for more examples, Eric Pramono has some good ones.
An interesting workflow by Jeff Hunsberger:
What Mailbox pointed out to me is that I need is a Later box. A place to stick emails that I don’t want jamming up my Inbox but I really do need to act on “later”. Ideally, the number of emails flagged in this way should be relatively few. If it is more than a handful, it is probably pointing to a different kind of problem – the last thing I need is an interim archive. I need two things – a place to hold emails until I return to my Mac and the discipline and discernment to act on them when I get there.
I like the idea of using Keyboard Maestro to automatically put emails back in the Inbox every day. I use Triage on a daily basis now, but I’m curious to see how Mailbox will change under Dropbox.
A good take by Harry Marks on the differences between Apple and Samsung ads. You know where I stand.
Towards the end, I especially liked this bit:
It’s been rumored that iOS 7 is going to bring a drastic overhaul to the UX, including a new home screen and enhanced features. This will inevitably bring a level of complication users haven’t had to deal with yet. Seeing as how this is Apple we’re talking about, I doubt these updated bells and whistles will be difficult to trigger, but there will most likely be a bit of a learning curve in the beginning. Every familiar paradigm starts out as something new and unknown.
I don’t know how much ads can be an effective teaching tool for users, but I agree: there will be a new learning curve, but some changes are necessary.
