Microsoft and Checklists

From Gruber at Daring Fireball:

Has any company in history had more of a love affair with feature checklists than Microsoft? These must appeal to some people, but the appeal of post-PC computing is ease-of-use and obviousness — a feature checklist can’t convey any sense of these things.

Microsoft tends to market to consumers just like they would their Enterprise customers. Most consumers won’t walk through a benefits checklist, but Microsoft still continues to do them for everything.

The worst part about this one is that I have no idea who the clear “winner” really is: it’s just confusing.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/04/24/microsoft-checklist

Wrong focus on the Lytro camera?

I’m not skeptical about the value of being able to set focus after the fact, I’m only skeptical about the value of letting the viewer set focus after the fact.  Letting the photographer set focus after the fact is fantastic.”

Agreed. Photographs, in general, tell a story. The idea of bring able to refocus a photo after the fact is wonderful for me the photographer. It seems lazy on my part to subject viewers to endless clicking around photographs to try and see the narrative I intended.

http://www.cameracuriosities.com/2012/04/lytro-its-aliiiiiive.html

Requiem for my Flickr Pro account

Flickr has always been a special place for me. A home to show off my photography and how I view the world. Some of my photos are bad, some of them are good, and a few of them I think are great. I’ve been a Flickr Pro user for years, gladly paying $25 year after year.

But this year I’ve become distant from Flickr, and noticed how sites like Facebook and Instagram have slowly eroded the benefits that Flickr provided. Well, I’m finally voting with my wallet, and I have let my Flickr Pro account expire. Part of me is sad, but I think it’s always sad to move on from your home of many years, no matter if the place you’re moving seems better.

So I’ve made the jump to 500px for my portfolio and will be uploading my “personal” shots to Facebook or Instagram exclusively. It just seems more fitting with my digital lifestyle.

500px targets “photographers” more than the snapshot crew. It prefers high quality shots instead of trying to be a place to simply share your shots. They seem to be at peace with the idea that the social media sites have won that war, and instead they’re focused on bubbling up great photos.

It’s more expensive than a Flickr Pro account, coming in at $50 a year, but I had a half off discount code. Here’s a quick rundown.

What I like:

  • Clean, fresh design.
  • You get a blog and portfolio site that can be themed as you like. Here’s mine.
  • You can customize your portfolio site URL to be your own.
  • You can integrate with a 3rd party service to sell your photos.
  • You are in a community of very gifted amazing photographers.
  • Clean rating system for photos.
  • Easy to discover great photos and other great photographers.
  • Beautiful iPad application to show off your work.

What I don’t like:

  • It’s still very young and feature sparse: uploading is tedious, for example. While there is a Lightroom uploader, it drops all of your tags (at the time of this post).
  • Batch/bulk editing is lacking to the point of almost being useless.
  • Usability is lacking or inconsistent: for example, the grid view may list your photos in one particular search order, but when you drill down on a photo it sorts the photos differently so you “lose your place”. No next and previous while viewing an individual photo on the site is also a glaring omission.
  • The community features are not as vibrant as Flickr, which has great group features for people with common interests. 500px is clearly not there yet.

In other words it’s a tradeoff, but I feel something new is what is needed. Yahoo seems to have let Flickr stagnate, and I’m confident that 500px will work quickly through those outstanding issues. As of now they have my attention.

Goodbye dear Flickr. You will be missed, but I’m ready for a new home.

Thank you.

Thank you.