thoughtstart

Two similar questions posed today on O’Reilly Mac DevCenter and Lifehacker got me thinking. Is there really a competition between .Mac Web Gallery and Flickr? Or, are they instead complementary?I gave the new .Mac Web Gallery a spin last night. It’s fast and very easy to use. Literally within minutes, I created a new event in iPhoto ‘08, published it to .Mac and sent out a polished invitation. Setting access restrictions is painless should you decide not to go public with an album. Capabilities to upload via email and from the iPhone are great to have. One neat feature that may be easily overlooked is that, once an album is published, it is in effect a subscription. Any future additions, either from other people such as event participants or from yourself via the iPhone will automatically sync back to iPhoto. Performance was decent; browsing through an album or playing a slideshow were fast, responsive and smooth even on the iPhone over EDGE. As for looks, I found the rather subdued interface with a selected few large icons to be just about right for its intended purpose and audience.Surely, it holds no comparison to Flickr and its many features. But I don’t think it was ever intended that way. Instead, I think its purpose, from the start, was to simply enable you to quickly and easily get your pictures out there, and do it in style. In this case, I think it fits the bill very well and it will be a hit. And for me, it will be complementing Flickr just nicely.

I am not sure when or how this happened, but it appears that Google Reader has recently been updated to detect the iPhone. Where before visiting http://reader.google.com/ on the iPhone would simply bring up the desktop reader, now it automatically redirects to Google Reader Mobile at http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/.In addition, Google Reader Mobile has now gained the sharing capability previously present only in the desktop version. This is something I have long wished for and it is great to finally have it available at all times.I don’t have a camera (or a second iPhone!) with me to take and post a screenshot, but it does look great. News items fill the screen with no horizontal scrolling. Almost all the features from the desktop version are present, including “See original”, “Add/Remove star”, “Share” and “Keep unread”. At the top of a news item, a header has status icons for both Starred and Shared; and it does fit well within the Safari look and feel. The subscription list has live icons to the right indicating the number of unread items for that particular feed. Finally, the Tags link brings up a similar list of unread items per tag and links to both Starred and Shared items.