August 3, 2013
This summer has been really exciting for us! With the release of Photosmith 3 for iPad and our free Lightroom plugin, we have received an overwhelming amount of praise in Apple’s App Store and in the tech media for our improved stability and streamlined workflow.
Photosmith remains the ONLY iPad solution for syncing photos and metadata with Adobe Lightroom, and we’re extremely thankful for all the kind words and encouragement.
In fact, we’re so thrilled with the feedback, we’re taking the show on the road to Photoshop World in Las Vegas September 4-6, 2013. Please drop us a note in our user forums if you’ll be there and would like to meet up.
Woah, what did you say? Forums?
Yes, we are very happy to take the wraps off the Photosmith Forums at forums.photosmithapp.com – a place where the community of Photosmith users can interact with each other, and with us. By expanding our policy of transparency to include user support and feedback, we think everyone will benefit. So please, stop by the new forums, register for a free account and help us take the bubblewrap off, say hello, and help each other out.
The future is bright for Photosmith, due in no small part to the support of our wonderful user community. Thank you!
Posted in: Current Progress, Marketing, Musings | Comments Off
May 4, 2012
Most people look at Photosmith and think it’s a simple app. That’s by design, and believe me, nailing that is very hard work. But once you get into the guts of it you realize that Photosmith 2 is quite complex. Everyone on our internal team (and especially the poor guy who has to document it) wasI quite surprised!
With all that complexity comes a lot of testing. I haven’t totaled it up yet, but I’m pretty sure we’ve collectively spent more hours just testing Photosmith 2 than I spent on the entire development of my last app… by a factor of two or three.
The great news is that things are going very well, we’ve sent out the build to the widest audience we can (within Apple’s rules) and we’ve already fixed everything that has been reported. We expect to issue a second and final release candidate to the pool within the next few days and then it will be off to Apple for the golden seal of approval (hopefully!) and into your hot little hands.
The less great news is that we’ve been lobbying for a fix from Eye-Fi to make card setup much easier but it looks like that’s not going to be possible. In it’s place we have a very workable solution but it’s one you definitely have to follow the instructions carefully. We’re documenting it very well and hope to have a walk-through video ready by launch.
The bad news is that we’ve had to temporarily pull GoFlex support from this release. Our stuff is ready to go (and we believe 100% solid) but we discovered a critical data consistency bug within the drive. When we brought it to Seagate’s attention they confirmed they are aware of it and are working on a fix. We don’t have any information of the timing of that fix yet. Since we’re positioning the GoFlex as a mobile backup solution and this bug has the potential to cause dataloss in certain scenarios we feel it’s better to protect users from unsuspected problems. We hope this is something we can reenable very very soon.
In other news launch activities are now in full swing. Nico is polishing the final version of the press kit and has done such an amazing job on the launch video that chills ran down our spines. Chills! Chills I tell you! Horne is keeping the bug queue as close to zero as possible and Morse is bothering every press, blogger, and photographer personality he can reach. Additionally, we are preparing a series of short “walk-through” videos so that you can see the various features of app in action.
If you have a regular blog or podcast and you’d like to feature Photosmith please contact us at [email protected]. We will be offering pre-release access for review purposes and free app give-aways at launch.
Posted in: Current Progress, Marketing | 24 Comments
March 19, 2012
We’re updating our icon starting with v2. We were never really thrilled with the original icon, but were under self-induced pressure to deliver, and then just never updated it since.
We wanted the new icon to be… oh hell- here it is:
A lot (most?) of the photo apps out there use a camera or a Poloriod-type image for their icon. We wanted to be different. And since “Photosmith” is a play on the goldsmith / blacksmith concept, we chose something that was representative of that. And after dozens of iterations on the concept itself, we liked the pure and simple anvil in the end – both for it’s simplicity and what it represents.
A big big thanks goes out to our designer, Nico Janssen, for taking the lead on this and driving it through multiple different artists and vendors to completion. It was no small task!
Posted in: Current Progress, Design, Marketing | 9 Comments
October 25, 2011
America is the land of the up-sell. Who would we be if we didn’t try to do the same thing? Dirty rotten scoundrels, probably… Actually, we’re asking this question for another reason: To make life better for you, our customers.
Some of our most frequently asked questions are:
- I don’t have Lightroom. Do you have a version without sync?
- Can you add support for app Y?
- Is there a trial version?
In our current pricing model there’s nothing we can do to help folks in the first 2 categories and the App Store doesn’t trial/rental program available.
In order to try and address these issues we’re considering a different pricing approach for the app*. A very low price for the base app with importing, sorting, rating, tagging, etc., and export/sharing and then an In-App Purchase (IAP) for some larger price to enable sync. The plugin would remain free.
The biggest concerns for us are: 1) does this feel like nickel & dimming you? 2) how do we do this in the most transparent and obvious way possible? Discovering an unknown IAP for a free app is of no big consequence to the user except disappointment. For an app they already had to pay some amount for, even if it’s a little bit, it is rightly grounds for some anger. We’ve already learned that putting it in the App Description isn’t enough. I can’t tell you how many irate support tickets we’ve gotten about something that was clearly listed. Even at $18 most customers don’t read past the first 2 lines.
So here’s my question to you fine folks. Would you prefer a single big price tag for everything or a lower price and then IAP for the major options?
[poll id="5"]
The poll is great and all, but we’d love it even more if you’d leave comments. We turned off moderation so they’ll appear immediately. (but spammers, we ARE watching & reading, don’t bother…)
*In all scenarios, existing customers would be grandfathered.
Posted in: Marketing | 40 Comments
September 6, 2011
We’ll be making some changes to the website over the next day or two. If you notice some weird things going on when you load the page, rest assured they’re being worked on and should be fixed in a couple hours.
We’re consolidating our different sites (www, which is pretty much useless right now, the blog, twitter, and the support site), to make it easier to find your way around. Stay tuned…
Posted in: Current Progress, Marketing | Comments Off