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

by Mike Wren

Shhh… don’t tell anyone, but while the Chris’ and Nico are busy working on the forthcoming Photosmith app update, v2.3, I thought I’d give everyone a quick update – a peek behind the curtain – as to what we’ve been up to.  I’m too excited to keep this under wraps.

As we’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, the focus of the forthcoming v2.3 app update is, in a word: STABILITY.  While the v2-series of Photosmith works as expected for most users, there are certain workflow scenarios where the experience of using the app and sync with Lightroom has been… shall we say… less than desirable.  This is not acceptable to us, and we’ve taken the extraordinary step of reevaluating our entire methodology.

I’m very happy to report that after 12 weeks of coding, recoding, and a little bit of internal testing – the new version of Photosmith is already more stable than the current public version.  The Chris’ have warned me about managing expectations, but they seriously knocked it out of the park with this update.  It’s all because we’ve completely moved away from using the Camera Roll for photo storage.

We learned an important lesson in 2012 – The architecture behind Photos.app and Camera Roll simply wasn’t engineered for the kind of use (and abuse) we threw at it.  However, it was the Apple-recommended way to do things, and we complied.  We were never thrilled with the compromises necessary.  Inability to modify or delete photos in Camera Roll via our app, the muddying up of Photo Stream, and eventually the inability to mitigate and handle the quirks/instability of Camera Roll made it obvious that we needed to find a better way to store photos.  This would require a Herculean effort to update our code – an effort measured in months, not days or weeks.

Speaking on behalf of the team, I’m comfortable saying that our new no-compromises approach will mean Photosmith v2.3 will be the app we all want… and expect.

Let’s get down to the “when” and the “what.”

When?

I’ll be completely candid – we don’t have a specific target date.  The Photosmith v2.3 update will be ready when it’s done.  We’re not taking it out of the oven until it’s ready.  We’ve been burned in the past by discussing ballpark best-guess estimates; it’s not something we’d like to repeat.  I’ll only say this: Our timeline is no longer measured in months.

What?

Beyond app and Lightroom sync stability, we’ve taken the opportunity to add in a few new often requested features while making the move from Camera Roll.  These are features aimed at making Photosmith more useful for the mobile photographer.  There is some *really* exciting hardware interoperability we’re still working on, the details of which will be announced in the coming weeks.

There’s a new import photos dialog within Photosmith, used when ingesting/importing photos from Camera Roll.  This is necessary for everyone using a Camera Connection Kit (CCK) to get photos onto their iPad.  Apple locks all third-party developers from accessing the dock connector – you must import into Photos.app.  From there, we will either import the full camera raw or JPG file, or link a small reference version of the photo into Photosmith.  The specifics of all this will be covered in detail in our online documentation and Knowledge Base prior to release of v2.3.

For users with Eye-Fi cards, you will continue to be able to import from Eye-Fi directly into Photosmith, completely bypassing the Camera Roll.

But… I’ve saved the best for last: We’re working on background syncing with Lightroom – Continuing to work in Photosmith while syncing with your Lightroom catalog is a real game-changer.  Wireless import of photos will occur in the background, as well.  This is a big deal, and makes working in Photosmith that much more quick and efficient.

There’s more, which we’ll announce in the coming weeks, here on our blog, our Facebook page at facebook.com/photosmith (you *have* liked us there, right?) and over on the Twitters @photosmithapp .

If you have any questions, issues or ideas, please check out our support area over at http://support.photosmithapp.com – we’ve tried to compile as much information there as possible, and more Knowledge Base articles and FAQ’s are being added daily.  Yes, an all-encompassing user manual is still forthcoming – no, seriously.  Stop laughing, it on my to-do list!

Mike Wren joined Team Photosmith ten months ago as an enthusiastic beta tester prior to the v2.0 release.  He now advises the Chris’ and Nico on usability, workflow and general photographic geekery, while writing Knowledge Base articles and avoiding writing a full-fledged user manual.  He’s also been known to also help out with the user support queue.

An event and lifestyle photographer by day, Mike lives in Albany, NY with his wife, two kids, and collection of unframed Phish posters.  This is his first post to the Photosmith Blog.

Posted in: Current Progress, Development, Musings | 7 Comments

[Nico Janssen is our "new" designer (he's actually been onboard since July 2011) and is responsible for all of the incredible beauty that is Photosmith 2. He also produced the video on our homepage and has been an all-around incredible asset to the project, we are very fortunate to have him.]

January 2012.

It’s nine o’clock in the evening, and I’m chasing the sunset westward across the Atlantic. My plane is losing the battle, so I leave my window seat and wander the low-ceilinged aisles to prevent statistically improbable embolisms, and also to sneakily scope out some empty seats I might prefer.

“What are you doing this weekend?” they asked innocently, two days ago. We Skyped over breakfast — well, my breakfast, their dinner — and now I’m on my way to the United States for the third time in my life. I feel like such a jet-setter! I feel lik Andy Warhol, when Napoleon shuttled him to Atlantis to celebrate his marriage to Boudica. I don’t know what to expect.

‘They,’ by the way, are Chris Horne and Chris Morse, the developers of Photosmith, and I am Nico Janssen.

Born in Amsterdam to a feisty lass from Belfast and an educated rocker from Jakarta, I now live on the world’s largest man-made island, three meters below sea-level. Last time I was in the States, a girl asked whether we all scuba-dive to work. This time, I’m flying out to Atlanta in my capacity as the designer of Photosmith 2.

It took a bit of work to land the job — trawling the Photosmith support forums, shooting a spec promo video, and dropping hints with all the subtlety of Thor’s hammer — and I like it a lot. I like how it fills out that weird gap in my calendar between my dull day job and sleep. I like the team, too. The Three Musketeers we are, with myself as a cunning Aramis to two d’Artagnans both called Chris.

Photosmith has been a fascinating challenge. To bring full-fledged photo management to the iPad, a companion to Adobe Lightroom, is no mean feat. So much control needs to be placed at your fingertips on a sub-megapixel screen. “It should be effortless and delightful,” they briefed me, “and incredibly powerful. Here are three billion user scenarios that need to be supported. Go forth.”

That was months ago, and the work since then has been staggering. I designed transforming buttons, virtual drawers, intelligent sliders, swipe-enabled carousels of controls… Complex custom interfaces designed, coded and discarded in favor of something better. We plotted out a wish-list roadmap to ensure the interface could support future functionality.

Hundreds of radical iterations of mockups, all built pixel-perfect in Adobe Fireworks at my own masochistic insistence. Wireframes and sketches can convey an idea, but they can’t tell you how a screen will feel. On a touch device, feeling is everything.

Just last month they approved the new Polaroid-style thumbnail grid I proposed. We’re close, very close.

When I disembark the Chrises will shuttle me to a hotel, where I’ll be chained to a laptop for the weekend under armed guard. I’m excited to meet them, and even more excited at the prospect of finalizing the last outstanding screens. Well, I say “finalize”… Experience has taught us that Interface and Structure interact at every level. No concept, no matter how logical and obvious, is guaranteed to stand up to the rigors of pixel-perfect simulation. I’ll no doubt head home with more tasks on my punch list than we’ve scheduled for this weekend, but that’s fine with me.

I find a new seat where I can stretch my legs a bit, and settle down.

I blink, and the weekend’s over.

It’s three fitful days later and I’m on a (full) plane heading home, passing through the Atlantic time-vortex in reverse. In the overhead locker, my MacBook is quietly cooling down from its exertions. Shell-shocked and shivering, poor little thing. A talkative boy on the seat beside me informs me I resemble Doctor Tommy Oliver, the Black Dino Ranger.

By the time I land, a new build of Photosmith 2.0 will be ready to install on my iPad.

Bring it on, I say.

Here’s the thing, you see: every hour we spend on Photosmith 2, into the wee small hours of the week-night, is going to save our users a few seconds of time, a few calories of effort, and bring them closer to smiling — just a bit. It’s worth it.

It’s not just altruism, either: my camera hasn’t been sitting idle during the months I’ve been on the Photosmith team, and like so many among our target audience I have a substantial passel of photos sitting unsorted in my Lightroom catalog.

When we’re done, I can brew a pot of tea and sync all of them to my iPad with the awesome tech the Chrises have developed, then rate and sort them from the comfort of my sofa with the simple, elegant UI we’ve worked on all these months. That’ll be a nice way to relax after that hard work.

And then, in all likelihood, I’ll find some obscure little thing I never before thought about doing, which requires four frustrating taps to do. My photos will linger in half-sorted limbo, while I check if Morse and Horne are online so we can brainstorm about improvements.

Bring it on.

Posted in: Design, Musings | 1 Comment

[If you noticed the site was down for a bit this morning, here's why...]

It’s true, you really can have too much of a good thing sometimes…. about 7am this morning the alarms went off on our web server. CPU load was at 100% and there was zero network traffic.  In other words, the server soiled itself and ran away to sulk.  Looking at our log, it’s clear that the high strain of traffic just beforehand had done the deed.  (Mind you, most of that traffic was search engines which tend to be the worst kind, hitting every page on your entire site all at once.)

So, I did what any good programmer still bleary-eyed from being up most of the night would do… restarted the server. When the server comes back up you then you check the logs to see what caused the problem and fix it.  ONLY…. the server didn’t come back up!  Worse, the start command was grayed out. (Our hosting provider gives us a clever little web UI).  What’s going on? A few quick google searches revealed the problem…

You can never have too much User Experience (UX) design

You see, in my foggy morning brain I didn’t notice the difference between “Terminate” and “Reboot” right next to each other on the same menu.  One of those commands is ordinary business running a server.  The other annihilates it with extreme prejudice and no chance of any recovery. It’s kind of like the difference between starting your car or turning the key and activating a car bomb! In 1 single click, with no confirmation of any kind, our entire webserver with months of work, and 2 weeks worth of upcoming blog posts was gone*. POOF!

[* Of course we have good backups. That we were back up in about 2 hours is not the point.]

Our provider has apparently been made aware of this problem and added protection measures.  There’s now a “Terminate Protection” setting you can turn on somewhere else in the system (It didn’t exist when we created our server) that prevents you from terminating a server. Now, instead of burdening users with extra steps to gain protection wouldn’t it have been simpler to just move the “Terminate” to another place and perhaps rename it?  Like…. I dunno… say maybe, “Delete?” “Destroy?” “Detonate?”

So the lessons here are:

1. Don’t let programmers near the server racks before lunch.   ;-)
2. Make sure your backups are current, you never know when you’re going to need them…
3. Good UX is always important, even in “geek” systems.
4. You can never spend enough time thinking about what the user needs or what the problems really are.  I’m sure it took our provider many hours to create that whole “protection” system.  It would have taken far less to rename it or even better, move it to another place and add a explanatory confirmation dialog.

Putting our money where my mouth is: We’re actually flying our designer into Atlanta from the Netherlands this weekend and locking ourselves away in a suite to pound through every last little detail of Photosmith’s UI, interactions, how it gets used, and every possible detail we can think of to make sure we get it right.  It was missing a little “detail” like what’s mentioned above that caused us to drop batch-tagging from v1.0.

…we now return you to your regularly scheduled “Meet 2.0″ program…

Posted in: Musings | 4 Comments

“Endurance is patience concentrated” -Thomas Carlyle

We’ve received another glowing 1-star review today on the App Store. While we typically don’t comment either way on reviews, press, or the like, I wanted to share some of the insights and perspective from the developers. We don’t do this to complain, but rather to continue to be open with our process. (But there’s probably still some ranting within, so fair warning…)

We’ve stated a couple times in various places that this is not our full time jobs. We have been working on Photosmith because we feel that the iPad community needs a great photo management app. While we’re amateur photographers ourselves, we feel that we can best contribute to the photography world by using our programming experience. And so we’ve given up a year of nights and weekends to try to make that happen. We both have families with two kids under 5, and any extra time we have outside of work is that much more valuable to us both.

We’ve gotten several 1-star reviews and poor comments in the press world about how the app doesn’t sync both ways or doesn’t allow multi-image tagging, and how months have passed without those being added. Yes, we’re painfully aware of this. We’ve been working non-stop on redesigning the app and re-writing the sync protocols to accommodate this. Unfortunately, we also are juggling other things, such as support emails, iOS changes, bugs, and so forth. In addition to the typical 9-5 grid, we both also typically work 8pm-2am every night and a full day on the weekends on Photosmith. There’s only so much time for everything. Again, I don’t say this for any other reason other than to let our readers know where we are and “what’s taking so long!”

Heck, if Apple would stop breaking things with their iOS changes, (fun fact: SIX of the SEVEN iOS 5 beta releases broke the photo import process again requiring yet another rewrite on our part) we would have been miles ahead by now. We’ve calculated that almost a third of the entire app’s development has been spent dealing with inconsistencies, bugs, changes, and downright poor design in the iOS photo libraries. One third. That’s four months of development time – just to read out the photos quickly and efficiently. Photos are obviously not a primary focus of Apple, and yet, if we want to deliver the best product we can, then we’re forced to work within their walls.

We’ve gotten several nasty-grams from people saying “I don’t understand what’s so hard about multi-image tagging.” Sure- logically, it’s pretty straightforward. However, I challenge anyone reading this to sit down and really think through how you’d go about designing the interface. It’s not trivial, and we went through many, many iterations before finally nailing things down. We could have quickly delivered something that sorta works, or we could take our time and deliver something that really works well and is intuitive. Our goal is the latter, and if it takes an extra month for that, then we’re willing to put that time in – we want to see the product succeed.

As for the two-way sync: The Sync process been taken completely apart and re-written so that it’s much more robust (ie- syncing 15,000+ keywords or 5000+ image collections) and many more options (metadata presets, develop presets, etc), plus the new functionality for two-way sync and initiating sync from the iPad. In fact, here’s a teaser screenshot from my own development Lightroom – you can see that we’ve moved to a Publish Service platform, so that we’re better integrated into Lightroom:

   

Alternatively, for those who don’t want to use Publish Services, there will be a standard Export option, for blindly sending directly to Photosmith:

And all this works. Mostly. There are about 35 options, about 300 different combinations of options, about 15,000 lines of plugin code, and one sync developer. Sync is a notoriously difficult problem (with any product); it simply takes time to get right.

 

We’d love for this app to become successful enough to do this full time. However, we’re in no danger of that right now – the product needs to mature some more. The more time we can put into it, the better product that we can turn out; it’s a simple equation. The 1-star ratings are unfortunate- we understand user’s frustrations (despite the list of limitations in the app store description), but they only serve to slow current sales, which lowers the resources that we have to hire graphics designer, tech support, and so forth.  I’m not sure what the best answer is, and to date, we’ve just been “staying the course”, and working on version 2.0 as fast as possible; I’m not sure what else we can do.

I’d be interested to hear any comments from our readers, and if there are better avenues for us to communicate the process.

 

Posted in: Musings | 19 Comments

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