Category — Impressions

Photobucket has introduced Photobucket Stories as a brand-new Photobucket feature; in fact, it looks like Stories are still in Beta, and part of a general overhaul of Photobucket.

The basic idea behind Stories is that you upload pictures, you select a background, you arrange them and title them, you select their size (small, medium, large), and you add text annotations in the form of small text fields with a choice of color and font (limited in both cases, but quite reasonable options).

You can drag and drop to rearrange; you can change photo size, text placement, etc. And it’s dead easy to Share your saved/published story, or invite collaborators.

Photobucket Stories are strikingly similar to iPhoto for iOS Journals. You can see what I thought about Journals for iPhoto for iOS.

You can’t add weather and calendar widgets, and stories are a bit more limited in terms of options for layouts, but the concept is the same, and frankly, it’s a bit easier to us (at least on the Web; thus far it doesn’t seem to be actively supported by the PhotoBucket iOS app). Like Journals, Stories have built in facilities for sharing a link to a Story, but at least at present there’s no way to download all the content and make a stand-alone static Web site, the way you can with iPhoto for iOS Journals.

What’s interesting in particular about Stories is that you can collaborate with others on a Story. That’s a neat way to create a record of a family or group event, or to share data.

I made, roughly, the same kind of a Story as one of the previous Journals I made with iPhoto for iOS.

Here’s the Photobucket Story about Life in Washington.

Here’s the iPhoto for iOS Journal about A Year in Washington.  

I’m curious to see which of the new features are implements and supported in iOS apps.

Share/Bookmark

Dennis on iPad, Mostly Love, and Some Annoyances Abated:

I love my iPad and (most of) the apps on it. I qualify the app assertion because there’s one from Apple for which I have zero love (GameCenter), but can’t get rid of it and there are a couple I have because I need to refer to them when editing books about the iPad (FaceBook and Flickr).

You can read more at the link.

Share/Bookmark

My co-writer, Dennis Cohen, has an interesting post on his own blog about the state of the iPad world. Dennis makes intelligent, thoughtful remarks on the iPad 2, the iPad 2 release and iOS 4.

Share/Bookmark

Chris Foresman of Ars Technica writes about how the Star Trek PADD (Personal Access Display Device) prefigured the iPad of today. In the process, he interviews a number of people who worked on the various Star Trek series and movies.

For example, here’s scenic art supervisor, Michael Okuda, who worked on almost every Trek series: “There are a lot of things that are very easy to do in a prop, but actually very difficult to do in reality. For example, pinch to zoom—that was relatively difficult to do even as a visual effect. It’s implemented brilliantly on the iPad and the iPhone.”

It’s worth a read if you like Star Trek and iPads. (And we do.)

Share/Bookmark

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has posted some initial findings about the current state of UI design on the iPad. His summary:

iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems.

Share/Bookmark

My iPad is a 64GB WiFi-only first generation iPad. And being so young, it has its teething pains.

For example:

• The iPad claims that it doesn’t charge when connected to my iMac. That is, in fact, both true and a lie. When connected to “older Mac computers” the iPad does charge when it is in sleep mode, albeit slowly. But you can’t detect that it is charging, because you can’t see the battery indicator when the iPad is asleep. On the other hand, when the iPad connected to an older Mac (or PC) and awake, it isn’t charging, so the “Not charging” message I see beside the battery indicator is true.
• The iBook application is attractive, responsive—and flakey. When I set the body font for the page, the change doesn’t always stick: the text-setting heads-up display may show, for example, that Cochin is selected, but the page actually appears rendered in Times.
• Sometimes when the text setting/displaying mismatch happens in iBooks, a line of text can vanish between one page and the next.
• The file-sharing between apps like Pages and my iMac via iTunes is not a wonderful user experience. To get a Pages file from my iMac to the iPad, here’s what I do:
  1. I first connect the iPad to the iMac via the docking cable, thus automagically launching iTunes and starting a sync.
  2. I then select the iPad in the iTunes sidebar, and, in the content pane to the right, I click the Apps tab.
  3. I scroll to the bottom of the Apps tab to the File Sharing section. I click Pages in the Apps list in the File Sharing section.
  4. Under the Pages Documents list in the File Sharing section, I click the Add… button, and then, using a standard Choose a File dialog, I navigate to the file on my iMac, select it, and click Choose.
  5. I open Pages on the iPad and, in the My Documents display, I tap a little folder icon at the top right of the screen.
  6. In the Import Documents dialog that appears, I tap the document that I want to use. The dialog closes, and the iPad imports the document and adds it to the collection in the My Documents display, sometimes displaying a warning dialog explaining formatting changes that it made during the import.

  (The process of getting Pages documents from your iPad to your Mac is just as recondite.)

There are other, comparable problems in other apps and interfaces.

Nonetheless, I absolutely love this device. It reminds me of the crude wonder that was the first iPod: a bit rough around the edges, and yet a palpable piece of the future in the palm of my hand.

Share/Bookmark

As I sit here thoroughly enjoying my version 1.0 iPad, running what is essentially version 1.0 of the iPad OS, I realize that this is as limited and as frustrating as the iPad experience is ever going to get.

Share/Bookmark