MobileMe Gallery: Is that in focus?
>optical channelколи под наеммебелиally want to like MobileMe. The Apple revolution is supposed to be about slick, easy-to-use software that helps you spend less time troubleshooting and more time creating. MobileMe was to extend this concept to the not-so-new generation of web-based services. While it’s a nice facelift from their older .Mac service, it still has a long way to go.
Take their Gallery service. While it integrates easily with Apple’s iPhoto software, the web-based galleries are a mess. There’s too much interface and not enough… wait, what are we here for?
Pictures. Visitors to your gallery get fancy resize sliders, color pickers, and animated layouts to play with, which is great fun for the first few minutes. These fancy gadgets, however, soon get in the way of what we’re really trying to do - view pictures. When you click a thumbnail, it never just pops up. It always slides, zooms, or fades in. There’s no way to search within an album or sort pictures into a particular order.
But the most serious affront to my photographer sensibilities? The pictures don’t even display properly. Clicking a thumbnail should bring up a large version of the image. In MobileMe Gallery, it first brings up a fuzzy low-resolution version of the image at full size. A second or two later, the full-resolution version pops in. This is an odd behavior, and one I’ve never seen on any other website.
The net effect is that a visitor’s first impression of your pictures are that you’re a talentless hack that doesn’t know how to focus a camera. When you spend hours trying to get that perfect shot, you don’t want anyone’s first thought when viewing it to be, “Whoa, that’s blurry. Oh, there it goes. Yeah, that’s a pretty good shot.”
Next up to bat: Flickr.