Sharing Memories Online

I love taking photos and videos of family events for posterity, often to the annoyance of my family. Memories are very important to me, and the idea of digitally recording events has always appealed to me vs the old shoe box full of flammable and yellowing photos.  When it comes time to storing and share my digital memories, the options are varied. To whittle down the list of online offerings, I have a couple of basic needs that I look for. Everything I consider must be at least compatible with my iPhone and Mac, as well as some sort of web interface. When it comes to taking photos, I believe in “the best camera is the one you have with you” and that means my iPhone 6 Plus even over the beautiful Leica lens of my beloved Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS10 (even with Eye-it wasn’t able to mimic smartphone capability and smartphone cameras are only getting better). My iPhone is always in my pocket and the bulk of an additional camera is a deterrent from carrying anything but my iPhone. I’ve never been someone who takes photos of sunsets and flowers, but I respect some of the amazing photos that people take and share. To me, my moments are just as precious. Obviously I’m not interested in photos that disappear after 10 seconds like Snapchat – yawn.

First and foremost, I need my photos be presented on Facebook. Facebook is, for the most part, the social network where my friends and family live. Facebook is where real contextual conversation and friend interaction happens. They also provides fine grained control over who can see my media. Other networks are either subsets of my Facebook friends, or a public broadcast platform to strangers such as Twitter where I don’t want to present photos of my kids.

Second, I need my photos to be potentially removable from the site in their original form. I was bitten badly by Everpix when they went into non-free mode and were unwilling to get my uploaded pictures back to me in any form whatsoever. Google frequently cancels services. I am in a sense using an online service as a backup and want to make sure that backup is always there for me. I don’t want to upload my high quality pics to a service only to find that what I get back is lower quality. I don’t want my pictures silo’d into something that my Facebook friends have to go to another site to see or have to register for another account or have to make 10 clicks to get into. Any other form of sharing such as email is rudimentary and just gives the recipient no sense of presentation.

Flickr – All platforms. Tons of free space. The 1TB that Flickr gives us is immense. I have over 44,000 photos going back 20 years (some are scanned prints) and I am at 4.5% of usable space – the remaining space is more than I will be able to use in my lifetime.  I can see that people who are into serious photography who might be using RAW format would be the primary target for that amount of space.

Unfortunately, Yahoo still hangs on to the idea that it wants to sort of create its own social network so Flickr has no real idea of integration with social networks. Albums and photos need to be set to completely public in order to share into Facebook, so all my photos are set to private by default. Automatic photo sync. Photos kept in original format. I do like the new Uploadr app which lets me auto sync photos from certain folders on my Mac, which means I can auto upload any pics I get in iMessage, which means also capturing any media sent by my green-bubble non-iPhone friends: capturing almost all media that I’m in contact with. Photo sorting and organization on Flickr is greatly improved with the new Camera Roll feature. I hope this is a sign that the service will be getting more attention in the coming months instead of languishing unattended for yet another few years.

WordPress – Completely public presentation. Manual upload. 3GB space for the basic account, pay for up to 13GB on the Premium account and unlimited for the business account. I’m past the days where I once ran my own PHPGallery site so I don’t want to build web pages or manage a site when it breaks – I just want to upload phones and be sure that it works, not make me do more of what I already do at work. Not Facebook friendly. Photo organization is redimentary.

Dropbox – All platforms. Sharing is not linked to anything like Facebook. It’s just a filesystem so you do whatever you want with your files and folders. Booooooring. Beyond the initial free 1GB account (or is it 2GB these days?), you can sign up for their Carousel app which does automatic sync and gives you some bonus space. Otherwise you are invited to pay for all the storage you can use. No real presentation for recipients – just a disorganized online shoebox. Not Facebook friendly. No Uploadr equivalent to get photos from alternate sources. Sharing and collaboration are primitive.

Microsoft – All platforms. Same as Dropbox, except Microsoft provides OneDrive app to do the syncing. Also no Uploadr equivalent to get photos from alternate sources. Sharing and collaboration are primitive. You get 15GB of space these days for free. I feel like this is another company that could offer 1TB of space, but if you want more you can pay for it.

Facebook – All platforms. I’m not aware of any limits on the number of photos you can have. Photos and videos are separated into different albums, although Moments app tries to bridge this. No auto upload from mobile and no autocapture capability for photos on my Mac, although interestingly Benny Wong does just fine in this area with the Timehop Mac app. Collaboration on the platform with Shared Albums is really good in getting moments that you yourself weren’t able to capture. Photo sorting is a little frustrating – one large set of pictures was set to sort by time the photo was taken and it was a jumbled mess. The real drawback – video quality is surprisingly horrific for uploads.

Apple – Automatic photo sync. Photo and video quality is fantastic. The 5GB limit of the basic account is anemic, but Apple knows how to monetize so you always have the privilege of paying for more space. Only captures photos that I take – anything else relies on my saving the photo or on Uploadr via my Mac. Sharing via Photos relies on other members being iOS users. Apple could add more audience by providing some similar functionality to Windows and Android users, but that’s not the point of their halo effect. As much as I’d like it to be otherwise, however, not everyone I know is an Apple user. Photo organization here is what everyone would expect from every service. As such I can only capture and share photos with my Apple gear, but not have any meaningful backup.

Google – All platforms. Data export through Google Checkout is awesome. Sadly, image quality is altered for unlimited uploads – you can only store unlimited photos in lower than original quality (they call it High Quality). Uploading original photos in highest quality results in using up your allotted space (currently says 16GB for me) and having to pay for more space. Google was one of the big players in the space wars when 1GB online was a big deal, now they’re holding back just like the rest. Google Photos Assistant and Magic are genius level features – I share those back into other services. Automatic photo sync since they already had that capability in Google Plus, but this is a backup of last resort. No Uploadr equivalent to get photos from alternate sources unless you’re still counting Picasa.

Instagram – Many but not all platforms (ahem, iPad). Disorganized mess. Connected to Facebook. No auto upload.

Twitter – Please. No. Stop.

I cannot keep my photos in any one single place where I can trust that they will still be under my control in their original form. Being native to Apple, I have to use Photos in iOS and Mac to share, but I cannot keep them there since I am unwilling to pay for the extra storage and photos basically age out of the system for me. Automatic syncing to Flickr works as my backup for storing full sized photos. Facebook is my preferred sharing platform. I use a lot of connected automated means of capturing photos from everything else, including IFTTT to capture media that I’m tagged in like Instagram, but that tends to be such a very small amount.

If there were any areas of improvement in the above flow, I’d say:

• Facebook should auto capture my photos from mobile and desktop, making sure everything is private by default.
• Apple should provide a lot more space especially to those that have invested in multiple iCloud capable devices. The limits should be 5GB per device for the basic account.
• Yahoo should integrate Flickr sharing permissions with Facebook to get some granularity. All the above services should as Facebook is now the de facto backbone for all social networks – stop trying to reinvent the wheel. Sorry Twitter.
• Flickr or Apple or both should pay attention to the AI magic of Google Photos’ Assistant. This only improves presentation and it’s the future.
• Stop with the stupid stickers on photos. I don’t want to explain to kids 20 years from now why there is a thumbs up hand in the middle of one of their most cherished photos.
• Facebook needs to stop making my videos look like blurry photos of bigfoot escaping into the woods. This is a crime against humanity in 2015.

Blackberry makes another stab with Passportbob Squarephone

Earlier this year, I posted that Blackberry would die this year.

Blackberry has put out a product that can only be described as cartoonishly square, like something my kid watches on TV, in an attempt at being something different. Since their OS can no longer stand on its own, this last ditch attempt at clawing back some market share on its way over the cliff of no return comes across as something that should have been painted yellow.

This phone is only for those with the largest cargo pants pockets or those who can dedicate a whole side pocket of their suit jacket.

This also brings to mind the LG Intuition which had sharp corners and was really good a tearing holes in pants.

Looks like I’m right on the money about Blackberry feebly thrashing in the water as it circles the drain.

Social Center: The loss of Sharing in iOS

One of the most disappointing things in iOS 7 was the disappearance of the Facebook and Twitter fields in the Notification Center that graced the Notification Center since iOS5 and 6.

Oddly enough its removal was advertise as if it were a feature:
In iOS7 we don’t have the notification center sharing panes.

Mac OS X has had sharing in its Notification Center since Mountain Lion in 2012. It has been thought that iOS and Mac were becoming more alike in features, so the loss of this convenient interface was jarring to me . Many hoped that with iOS 8 this oversight would have been corrected, but not so.

A “Social Center ” could have been made as another pane in the notification center that only shows when the phone is unlocked. It could have taken the place of the redundantly awful Missed pane in Notification Center we had in iOS 7. There were lots of ways this could have been done securely and still left us with the ability to quickly post quickly to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Maybe those tweets and posts weren’t the best quality because they were too easy to post? Maybe the extra steps to get to the apps is a deterrent that prevents low quality posts? I’m not sure if any of this affects social networking quality, but it should still have been my choice.

IOS already has the capability to choose whether certain notifications and widgets will show on the lock screen. I would have loved to have seen anything with OAuth capability to display an input there, either a photo button for Instagram or a text field for LinkedIn, etc. A Social Center pane would also have been a very convenient way to advertise the Apple brand on social networks.

The one bright spot is that Apple introduced Notification Center widgets in iOS 8 and thus left the door open to developers to recreate this convenient sharing feature. An app called TapToShare seems to have brought this back! http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-add-facebook-twitter-share-widget-in-ios-8-notification-center/ Try it out and see if it brings back quick convenient social sharing to your iPhone or if Apple needs to put it back in.

Flickr and iOS 8

Right as Apple pushed out iOS 8.0, a large number of users jumped onto the upgrade. As always, overeager to get the new tech, I upgraded my phone too. I loved it. As with all upgrades, a couple of apps broke; much fewer than I expected actually. The most serious for me was when background photo upload stopped working to Dropbox, OneDrive and Flickr. Dropbox and OneDrive fixed this almost right away, within 24 hours. Flickr, however, was different.

Yahoo Abandons Flagship Flickr app
https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157647758799626/#reply72157648042400158

While this was eventually fixed by default by Apple when they brought back the Camera Roll in iOS 8.1, it leaves me puzzled that Yahoo was content to allow Flickr to languish unattended without support for a major feature of its Flagship app for so long. It brings to mind all the complaining people are doing about whether yahoo is being steered right by Marissa Mayer and whether or not it is time to bring in new leadership to Yahoo.

On the third anniversary of Steve Job’s passing…

 

 

I happened to be in the Silicon Valley area this week to work at a client site. Having the rest of the day free after my flight today, I decided to hit some curious spots: Facebook campus, Googleplex. With little time left before the sunset, I headed to Cupertino to check out the local Apple Store, which turned out to be the on the Apple campus, which was closed today. Being my birthday today, on the way there I sadly recalled that this was also the third anniversary of Steve Job’s death. A quick Google search for Steve’s childhood home, 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos, proved to be pretty close by. So in memory of Steve I drove by to give a nod to the house that Steve and crew built the Apple II in, where something different started…

 

Related:

Three years after his passing, memory of Steve Jobs is very much alive with Apple execs

http://www.imore.com/three-years-after-his-passing-memory-steve-jobs-very-much-alive-apples-execs

Coffitivity And The Sounds Of Silence

I’m not really the type of person that listens to music when I’m working, since my library of music is the kind of stimulating stuff that makes you want to suddenly parkour out of a skyscraper, run up and down the sides of the building, chase down some perps, and then parachute into a war zone, all in the same minute. I don’t like any kind of pop music or anything that comes out of the radio – it’s basically the equivalent of elevator music to me. I need something else to run in the background when I want to be productive.

My Thyroid is Very Very Broken

This is going to be a long post, so if you’re busy or in the middle of something or just skimming for something easy to read, you might want to scroll on.

Anyone who has been around me knows my hands shake, my legs shake. I have always been just a little more active than I should be. I dress very light, because a warm day will have me sweating like Niagara Falls. Everyone I took Tae Kwon Do with years ago knew I would sweat enough to make a puddle under my feet.

Over the past two years you might have noticed I was looking thinner and thinner as the days went by. I have posted no pictures of myself in that time, because of how thin I look. I first tried to attribute this to when I was smoking or how I walk to work every day. But the calories loss and gain did not add up. My walk to work is only worth about a can of Pepsi. At one point I tracked how many calories I are in a day. I actually ate two days worth of food in one sitting, and this was my normal daily meal. And this was all after my gall bladder was taken out. I don’t really feel the cold – even in this winter I stroll outside in a tank top and shorts to throw out the trash. I’m feeling overheated at 69F. I’m not able to exercise anymore, so I’ve lost so much muscle mass, losing close to 100 lbs of weight at one point. Once I hit my high school weight, I got really scared.

I went to the doctors. At one point 4 years ago I was misdiagnosed with Schoegren’s Syndrome. they really didn’t find anything. My imagination ran away with me: maybe it’s cancer, maybe I have something nobody has seen before, maybe I sat on the wrong toilet seat at Penn Station. But after a few scary Google searches, slowly all of this added up. I went to see a doctor who had basically diagnosed me when I walked in the door. I had not even noticed my thyroid was enlarged. They did the usual blood work. My thyroid hormone levels turned out to be so high that the lab they sent the blood work to cannot register how high: it’s above the highest point in their scale.

So now I’m off this morning to take a radioactive Iodine pill and will come back later to get scanned today and then scanned tomorrow. They’ll tell me how bad my thyroid is and what treatment I should have, and supposedly this can be turned around in months.

Why Your New iPhone Cable Is Broken

Since Apple release the iPhone 5 on September 21, 2012, the company has been bundling a Lightning cable with every new phone. The addition of this new cable format was applauded for its compact format, because it left more room for the speakers and the audio jack that was relocated to the bottom of the device. The cable brought new issues with it, so it is not something I am ready to applaud. Let’s see what’s wrong with Lightning…

Blackberry – A Eulogy

Starting with the new year, I’m making the prediction that RIM is in total collapse by the end of 2014. The only question – how many companies will be too paralytically entrenched to move their infrastructure away from this black hole in time? BYOD policies will move in as the quick path of and least effort and resistance.

RIM is starting to transfer staff away from the abysmal Z10/Q10 devices and towards free (zero income) services such as Blackberry Messenger for iOS and Android. The fact that RIM bragged about how many users it grabbed when its free BBM app was released, is insane. The pod people are in control of RIM, and they are either in denial or oblivious as they spiral the drain. See more at the link below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/technology/blackberry-posts-huge-loss.html?_r=1&

2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,700 times in 2013. If it were a cable car, it would take about 45 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.