Better than the Website 2: Photobucket

Lots of sites have poorly-designed apps that just aren't necessary or useful considering how well the iPad browses the non-mobile-optimized web. But a few have apps that I even prefer to the website on a desktop browser.

The latest is for photo sharing site Photobucket. Although it has long been my photo host of choice (or at least, since Yahoo! Photos shut down), the website is slow, clunky, and cumbersome to navigate. In fact, I think I share fewer photos because it's just a pain to use.

The app may completely change my photo sharing habits. The interface is simple and sleek, photos load quickly, everything works smoothly and like you expect it to.




Icons in the top right let you navigate subfolders, upload and download pics to/from your iPad, and share the photos. When you are viewing a single picture, you get the familiar list of copy-and-paste options for sharing it on different types of websites.




I have yet to run into a single glitch or bug, though I've only been using the app for a day.

This is an especially great find for me right now, because with a new baby I've been looking for ways to streamline my photo taking/sharing. I have a small camera with an Eye-Fi card in the diaper bag, and the card uploads all pics both to my computer and a private folder on Photobucket. This app now makes it ten times easier and more convenient for me to sort through those uploaded pics, move the good ones to public folders, and share them with friends and family.

The one thing I would love to see in an update is the ability to select multiple photos in an album to perform batch actions like deleting and moving to another album. Currently these actions are only available as you view each photo. But even so, I'll take this app over the website any day!

Two apps I like better than the websites

It seems like nearly every website has its own free app these days. Now, I'm sure many of these make sense on an iPhone, where regular web browsing isn't ideal. But I soon discovered that on the iPad, these are often extraneous at best and far inferior to just loading up the web page at worst. A couple of examples in this category are the Amazon shopping app and the iPad Forums app - in both cases, I'd much rather navigate the web page than bother with the app.

But there are definite exceptions. The Weather Channel Max app has me grabbing my iPad every time I want a weather update - even when I'm sitting at my computer where I have both the weather widget and weather.yahoo.com bookmarked to my city. The key is that it gives me super-easy access to two things that I always seem to have to poke around for on the web: hourly forecasts and animated maps. And maybe I'm imagining this, but it all seems to load faster and more seamlessly than on their website.

The other is the GasBuddy app (sorry, having trouble getting the direct link right now). Even though it's only an iPhone app, the loss in resolution at 2x doesn't detract from its usefulness. Like the weather channel, it loads more smoothly and quickly than the website, particularly in map mode, which is nearly the only way I use either the app or the site. Plus, it's easier to find map mode to begin with - sometimes the web page can be a bit much to navigate. Overall, it's simply a much more pleasant experience than on the web, yet every bit as useful. And, of course, this is one app that is truly useful to have around on the go!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad