As I've mentioned before, I've gotten it so that my entire photo workflow is on my iPad... Until the very end. To order prints, I've got to use my desktop. And now that I want photo books for Christmas, same deal.
Now, there aren't zero options. Walgreens has basic print ordering on their app, and a (poorly-designed) app called LifePics allows print ordering to CVS, Ritz Camera, and a few other places. So if you want 4x6, 5x7, or 8x10 prints, and your pictures are already cropped to the right size (these apps won't help you there), there are a couple of options. But seriously, why don't companies like Photobucket and Shutterfly have this option in their apps? Are they allergic to money? As far as I know, Apple only takes a 30% cut on in-app downloads, not physical merchandise.
Same for photo books. They could easily turn the flash book-making services on their sites into apps. The apps would likely be smoother than the sites! But right now, I seem to have two options: use a scrapbooking app like ScrapPad or Album App to design the book, email it to myself, convert to PDF, then use the desktop just to upload the PDFs to a bookmaking site that will take them; OR use a flash browser like Puffin to navigate a slow, half-assed version of their bookmaking sites.
This is the kind of thing the iPad was born to do. Page layout via touch beats via mouse any day (and this is something I've done professionally via mouse and trackball). Whoever realizes this first has a pile of cash waiting for them.
Showing posts with label Wish List. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wish List. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Friday, November 4, 2011
Wish List: iCamera
Okay, I know this isn't strictly 100% iPad-related. But bear with me.
The iPad has revolutionized taking, sharing, and printing photos for me. I have an Eye-Fi card in my camera, so all photos are automatically uploaded to a private folder in Photobucket (and to my desktop, sorted neatly by date taken). Then I use the Photobucket app to look through them, move some to a public folder for sharing, order prints of some, and download some to the iPad.
Once on the iPad, I have the wide world of iOS photo apps at my fingertips to play with. Right now I am especially digging Pic Stitch and Instapic, both of which help you make simple photo collages (the two apps make very different styles of collage). Very useful for sharing several photos at once, with style! I can also upload to FaceBook albums thanks to the new FB app (finally!). And then I upload edited pics back to Photobucket for more sharing and printing. Everything is 100% iPad.
This is pretty awesome, and I am loving it. But this process could be even better. For one thing, this is a lot of tedious uploading and downloading, one pic at a time. Having Photobucket as the main storage space, rather than just where I put pics to share or print, is not ideal. Second, and related, I wish I had some of these filtering, etc apps on my camera! Downloading a pic just to see if an app would be a good fit is more tedium. Plus some will even preview the filter as you point the camera, but taking pics on the iPad, well, mostly sucks. So that functionality is lost to me.
What I really want is an iPod Touch with an iPhone camera. No expensive voice/data plan to buy (and keep buying). Just the functionality I really need - taking pics on a palm-sized camera, right within iOS, playing with the apps right away, then iClouding it all to the bigger screen for detail work, sorting, uploading to sites, etc.
Now, on the one hand, lately people have been tolling the iPod touch's deathknolll. Sales are down, it's hard to see how it fits between the iPad and iPhone, and the lack of an update this fall does look like the first coffin nail. This kind of thing could revive it - sure, no one with an iPhone would buy it, but they wouldn't buy it under any circumstances. But iPad owners without an iPhone would have a real use for it, since taking photos is one thing something that size is better suited for than the iPad.
On the other hand, if they want to let the touch die, give us an iCamera! Hobble it to only run photo apps, but turn it into a full-featured pocket megazoom. With better zoom lenses and control over things like exposure and f-stops, even iPhone owners might want one.
Either way, this product would be the perfect photo companion for the iPad, and a sure way for Apple to get a couple hundred more of my money.
The iPad has revolutionized taking, sharing, and printing photos for me. I have an Eye-Fi card in my camera, so all photos are automatically uploaded to a private folder in Photobucket (and to my desktop, sorted neatly by date taken). Then I use the Photobucket app to look through them, move some to a public folder for sharing, order prints of some, and download some to the iPad.
Once on the iPad, I have the wide world of iOS photo apps at my fingertips to play with. Right now I am especially digging Pic Stitch and Instapic, both of which help you make simple photo collages (the two apps make very different styles of collage). Very useful for sharing several photos at once, with style! I can also upload to FaceBook albums thanks to the new FB app (finally!). And then I upload edited pics back to Photobucket for more sharing and printing. Everything is 100% iPad.
This is pretty awesome, and I am loving it. But this process could be even better. For one thing, this is a lot of tedious uploading and downloading, one pic at a time. Having Photobucket as the main storage space, rather than just where I put pics to share or print, is not ideal. Second, and related, I wish I had some of these filtering, etc apps on my camera! Downloading a pic just to see if an app would be a good fit is more tedium. Plus some will even preview the filter as you point the camera, but taking pics on the iPad, well, mostly sucks. So that functionality is lost to me.
What I really want is an iPod Touch with an iPhone camera. No expensive voice/data plan to buy (and keep buying). Just the functionality I really need - taking pics on a palm-sized camera, right within iOS, playing with the apps right away, then iClouding it all to the bigger screen for detail work, sorting, uploading to sites, etc.
Now, on the one hand, lately people have been tolling the iPod touch's deathknolll. Sales are down, it's hard to see how it fits between the iPad and iPhone, and the lack of an update this fall does look like the first coffin nail. This kind of thing could revive it - sure, no one with an iPhone would buy it, but they wouldn't buy it under any circumstances. But iPad owners without an iPhone would have a real use for it, since taking photos is one thing something that size is better suited for than the iPad.
On the other hand, if they want to let the touch die, give us an iCamera! Hobble it to only run photo apps, but turn it into a full-featured pocket megazoom. With better zoom lenses and control over things like exposure and f-stops, even iPhone owners might want one.
Either way, this product would be the perfect photo companion for the iPad, and a sure way for Apple to get a couple hundred more of my money.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Wish List - A Better App Store
Why is the App Store the most poorly-designed app on my iPad?
Among the problems:
No back button - I follow a link to an app from a web page. While in the store, I notice that I have updates, so without thinking I switch to the update screen. Crap! Now I have to go back to the web browser and click the link again to get back to the app I was checking out. This and a dozen other common scenarios would be far less annoying with a simple back button.
100,000 apps, 20 categories - Browsing by category is useless when there are tens of thousands of apps in each category, and no subcategories to divide them! I understand that when the app store launched on the iPhone, they had no idea what a runaway success it would be and these categories were probably sufficient for a while. But by the time the iPad launched, and certainly by a year later, they should have figured this out. I go into Education and the college economics study guides are right next to the ABCs apps! No subcategories for age/grade level or subject. What's even stranger is that games do have subcategories listed once you're on the game's page.... But this information is not used at all in the app store itself.
Limited and inconsistent sorting and filtering - Once you're in one of those categories with tens of thousands of apps, you get three options: sort by release date, name, or popularity. (Unless you're in the Games category; then your choices are only Featured or Release Date.) So if a really great app whose name starts with W was released several months ago and never caught on, it probably ever will because no one will ever see it. If you search, you can't sort but you can filter by paid/free, customer rating, and more. Why can't you sort within those filtered results? Why can't you filter within a category browse? Who knows! I guess that would just make it too easy to find what you want.
Leaving the app to download - This is just nonsensical. Every time you download an app - or even an update to an existing app - you're pushed out of the store. Because it is simply VITAL that you view the little "waiting" icon, amirite? And nobody wants to buy more than one app at a time!
Stupid Genius - I have yet to see the Genius recommend an app I actually want. Some of the recommendations seem totally random, unrelated to the app they're based on.
No zooming - As with their calendar app, Apple somehow completely forgot about those great multitouch gestures that they pioneered when designing the app store. No swiping between apps isn't such a problem, but no zoom? When the text is fairly tiny and the screenshots are miniscule?
The app store is both a major revenue stream in itself an a main driver of the popularity of iOS devices - you would think that Apple would want to make it as easy as possible to find and buy the apps you want. And yet it suffers from such basic usability problems that it seems to have been designed by a summer intern rather than Apple's famous software design team.
Did I miss your biggest app store pet peeve?
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Among the problems:
No back button - I follow a link to an app from a web page. While in the store, I notice that I have updates, so without thinking I switch to the update screen. Crap! Now I have to go back to the web browser and click the link again to get back to the app I was checking out. This and a dozen other common scenarios would be far less annoying with a simple back button.
100,000 apps, 20 categories - Browsing by category is useless when there are tens of thousands of apps in each category, and no subcategories to divide them! I understand that when the app store launched on the iPhone, they had no idea what a runaway success it would be and these categories were probably sufficient for a while. But by the time the iPad launched, and certainly by a year later, they should have figured this out. I go into Education and the college economics study guides are right next to the ABCs apps! No subcategories for age/grade level or subject. What's even stranger is that games do have subcategories listed once you're on the game's page.... But this information is not used at all in the app store itself.
Limited and inconsistent sorting and filtering - Once you're in one of those categories with tens of thousands of apps, you get three options: sort by release date, name, or popularity. (Unless you're in the Games category; then your choices are only Featured or Release Date.) So if a really great app whose name starts with W was released several months ago and never caught on, it probably ever will because no one will ever see it. If you search, you can't sort but you can filter by paid/free, customer rating, and more. Why can't you sort within those filtered results? Why can't you filter within a category browse? Who knows! I guess that would just make it too easy to find what you want.
Leaving the app to download - This is just nonsensical. Every time you download an app - or even an update to an existing app - you're pushed out of the store. Because it is simply VITAL that you view the little "waiting" icon, amirite? And nobody wants to buy more than one app at a time!
Stupid Genius - I have yet to see the Genius recommend an app I actually want. Some of the recommendations seem totally random, unrelated to the app they're based on.
No zooming - As with their calendar app, Apple somehow completely forgot about those great multitouch gestures that they pioneered when designing the app store. No swiping between apps isn't such a problem, but no zoom? When the text is fairly tiny and the screenshots are miniscule?
The app store is both a major revenue stream in itself an a main driver of the popularity of iOS devices - you would think that Apple would want to make it as easy as possible to find and buy the apps you want. And yet it suffers from such basic usability problems that it seems to have been designed by a summer intern rather than Apple's famous software design team.
Did I miss your biggest app store pet peeve?
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
The iPad as a research tool
I'm a grad student collecting my dissertation data. My research is on science education - I give middle school students written tests, interview them, and videotape their science classes.
One reason I wanted an iPad was for reading scientific papers on - I'm tired of lugging around a two inch stack of reading material, and wasting a tree or two on printouts every semester. But I hadn't really given any thought to how it could fit into my research workflow in other ways. There are plenty of things I simply can't do on it, or that are still easier on the laptop - things like transcribing videos, coding data, and statistical analysis (unless anyone knows a good stats app that can compete with R or SPSS...). That pretty much leaves data collection as the one part of my work that it might actually fit into.
So today I took it with me as I taped some eighth grade classes. There we some definite advantages:
- I take limited notes during the taping. Nothing extensive, since I do have the tape, but bits to remind myself of interesting things to look back at later, things that might have affected class, etc. Notetaking apps are perfectly adequate for this, although I'm not sure yet I could use them for more extensive purposes. Right now I'm switching between Notes Plus and UPad, seeing which i like better. I took notes in NP today, and it worked quite well. Plus, I have a tendency to spread my notes across whatever notepad I grab each day, leading to lost notes (I'm a bad scientist, no dedicated lab notebook). Consolidating them all on the iPad would be helpful.
- The iPad is far less intrusive than a laptop. I had it open alongside my notebook in the back of the room all through the classes, and I don't think a single student (or even teacher) noticed. Lugging my 15" laptop out, opening it, etc is a lot more likely to grab attention when my main goal is for the students to forget I'm there. And my laptop has crappy battery life, so I'd have to find a place to plug it in, etc.
- On the other hand, I don't think I'll be using it during interviews. I use my laptop to show the kids videos and paper to hold my questions and take notes on their thoughts about the science topics in the videos. I could use the iPad in place of either of these, but in this case, when it would be right there in front of them, I think it would be a distraction. Tablets are still too new and cool - the kids think nothing of being shown a YouTube video on a laptop, but waving an iPad in their face would be a bad idea. Maybe in a couple more years.
- It made multitasking easier. In any classroom, there are going to be periods where the teacher is taking care of business that I don't particularly care about. With the iPad, I was able to use this time to take care of some scheduling issues (trying to videotape in multiple schools/classrooms at once is always complicated) instead of just standing there watching the teacher collect homework. Again, my qualm about viewing multiple things at once came into play. I wound up using both the iPad and my paper side-by-side to facilitate writing down schedule issues from emails and comparing them to figure out the best combination of dates. I know nothing about the iOS API; I assume that if app devs could allow me to view multiple notepads/pages at once, they would? So I'm left hoping that Apple realizes how useful this would be soon.
- On the other hand, of course, I had to resist the temptation to goof off. :) I did a fairly good job - the only thing I really did that wasn't work-related was using the Gas Buddy app to figure out where to get gas on the way home.
Overall, I'm definitely interested in exploring the iPad's potential as a research tool further. I'm going to keep using it to take notes during data collection and see how that goes.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
One reason I wanted an iPad was for reading scientific papers on - I'm tired of lugging around a two inch stack of reading material, and wasting a tree or two on printouts every semester. But I hadn't really given any thought to how it could fit into my research workflow in other ways. There are plenty of things I simply can't do on it, or that are still easier on the laptop - things like transcribing videos, coding data, and statistical analysis (unless anyone knows a good stats app that can compete with R or SPSS...). That pretty much leaves data collection as the one part of my work that it might actually fit into.
So today I took it with me as I taped some eighth grade classes. There we some definite advantages:
- I take limited notes during the taping. Nothing extensive, since I do have the tape, but bits to remind myself of interesting things to look back at later, things that might have affected class, etc. Notetaking apps are perfectly adequate for this, although I'm not sure yet I could use them for more extensive purposes. Right now I'm switching between Notes Plus and UPad, seeing which i like better. I took notes in NP today, and it worked quite well. Plus, I have a tendency to spread my notes across whatever notepad I grab each day, leading to lost notes (I'm a bad scientist, no dedicated lab notebook). Consolidating them all on the iPad would be helpful.
- The iPad is far less intrusive than a laptop. I had it open alongside my notebook in the back of the room all through the classes, and I don't think a single student (or even teacher) noticed. Lugging my 15" laptop out, opening it, etc is a lot more likely to grab attention when my main goal is for the students to forget I'm there. And my laptop has crappy battery life, so I'd have to find a place to plug it in, etc.
- On the other hand, I don't think I'll be using it during interviews. I use my laptop to show the kids videos and paper to hold my questions and take notes on their thoughts about the science topics in the videos. I could use the iPad in place of either of these, but in this case, when it would be right there in front of them, I think it would be a distraction. Tablets are still too new and cool - the kids think nothing of being shown a YouTube video on a laptop, but waving an iPad in their face would be a bad idea. Maybe in a couple more years.
- It made multitasking easier. In any classroom, there are going to be periods where the teacher is taking care of business that I don't particularly care about. With the iPad, I was able to use this time to take care of some scheduling issues (trying to videotape in multiple schools/classrooms at once is always complicated) instead of just standing there watching the teacher collect homework. Again, my qualm about viewing multiple things at once came into play. I wound up using both the iPad and my paper side-by-side to facilitate writing down schedule issues from emails and comparing them to figure out the best combination of dates. I know nothing about the iOS API; I assume that if app devs could allow me to view multiple notepads/pages at once, they would? So I'm left hoping that Apple realizes how useful this would be soon.
- On the other hand, of course, I had to resist the temptation to goof off. :) I did a fairly good job - the only thing I really did that wasn't work-related was using the Gas Buddy app to figure out where to get gas on the way home.
Overall, I'm definitely interested in exploring the iPad's potential as a research tool further. I'm going to keep using it to take notes during data collection and see how that goes.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Friday, April 15, 2011
On my wish list
I am sure that as I use my iPad more, for a wider variety of tasks, I'll come up with quite a few features that I wish Apple would add.
Today's wish list item: Viewing more than one app at a time.
Now, I'm not holding my breath for this, really. After all, it took them years just to put true multitasking into iOS. They are clearly trying to create a new interface experience, getting away from the old desktop, window, and file system metaphors entirely. But y'know, sometimes it's really, really useful to see two things at once.
Last night, I was up late writing out some data collection plans on UPad. This morning, I wanted to email another grad student about them - it was really annoying to have to switch back and forth constantly just to get a list of dates from the (handwritten) notes typed into my email. It made me wish I'd just done my work on a plain paper notepad so that I could have it sitting next to my iPad to look at while I wrote the email.
Apple certainly wouldn't have to go back to old style windows entirely to make this happen. It seems that now that there's multitasking, it wouldn't be too hard to have an option to view two (or four) apps onscreen at once. No desktop or home screen behind them, just a simple split screen.
Interestingly, Apple has gotten a patent for what is basically a version of Spaces for a touch screen. While I really really do not see them taking the iPad back to the OS X desktop metaphor as shown in the patent drawings, it makes me hopeful that they are considering some way of viewing more than one app at once. It may not have made any sense for the iPhone or iPod Touch, but the iPad has enough screen real estate to at least offer the option.
Today's wish list item: Viewing more than one app at a time.
Now, I'm not holding my breath for this, really. After all, it took them years just to put true multitasking into iOS. They are clearly trying to create a new interface experience, getting away from the old desktop, window, and file system metaphors entirely. But y'know, sometimes it's really, really useful to see two things at once.
Last night, I was up late writing out some data collection plans on UPad. This morning, I wanted to email another grad student about them - it was really annoying to have to switch back and forth constantly just to get a list of dates from the (handwritten) notes typed into my email. It made me wish I'd just done my work on a plain paper notepad so that I could have it sitting next to my iPad to look at while I wrote the email.
Apple certainly wouldn't have to go back to old style windows entirely to make this happen. It seems that now that there's multitasking, it wouldn't be too hard to have an option to view two (or four) apps onscreen at once. No desktop or home screen behind them, just a simple split screen.
Interestingly, Apple has gotten a patent for what is basically a version of Spaces for a touch screen. While I really really do not see them taking the iPad back to the OS X desktop metaphor as shown in the patent drawings, it makes me hopeful that they are considering some way of viewing more than one app at once. It may not have made any sense for the iPhone or iPod Touch, but the iPad has enough screen real estate to at least offer the option.
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