Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

Darkslide 1.5 Post-Mortem

I always think it’s weird to call these posts post-mortems, since things which receive such treatments are dead. Darkslide certainly isn’t dead.

Firstly, let me address the name change: another company with a product called “Exposure” was upset that Connected Flow had a product called “Exposure”, even if it was on a different platform. With the way the App Store is, anyone with a beef has a cheap and easy way of making life difficult for you: make a trademark complaint to Apple. If Apple then pulled Exposure, it’s a trial to get it all set up again. Easier to run than fight sometimes, and said Other Company was gracious enough to let me change the name on my own schedule, concomitant with the 1.5 release.

So, what’s in Darkslide 1.5?

Upload, upload, upload.

There are some features whose omission the market simply will not overlook. Uploading to Flickr is one of these features. I was very surprised at the reaction when Darkslide launched without uploading - words like “useless”, and “pointless” were bandied around - but I take the market’s feedback for what it is.

My original vision was for two Flickr iPhone applications: one ‘viewer’ app and a super-simple “FlickrExport Touch”. My motivation was primarily to keep it really easy and fast to get to the point where you could take a photo and upload it. Darkslide was already a fairly complex app and I felt that putting upload into that app would lead to a lot of fumbling around with the UI to get to the camera.

Users almost unanimously disagreed with that view, though, and who am I to argue?

Another reason I didn’t ship either Darkslide-with-uploading or FlickrExport Touch back in July was that picture taking in iPhone OS 2.0 was just a bit buggy. The main problem was that using the picture taker caused a gigantic memory spike in your application. The spike was on the order of 15MB and, when you think that the OS will kill your app at around 22MB of memory use, using the picture taker in OS 2.0 was a bit of a limbo dance. That particular problem was fixed in iPhone OS 2.1.

So Darkslide 1.5 has an Upload tab. What’s behind that tab, though, is really a whole other application.

PS: I know that EXIF isn’t being uploaded yet. Didn’t quite make the cut. Look for 1.5.1 soon.

There’s No Place Like Home

I’ve written before about my interest in what I’ve called “type 3″ iPhone applications: “lots of sitting down time, maybe some opportunities to get something meaningfully complex done”. Darkslide contains a lot of Type 3 features and carries a new one that I particularly like: Places.

Flickr knows about places. Flickr Places and Google Maps are my two go-to sites for planning trips. Flickr knows way more about places than just the fact that you tagged a pictures there. Flickr knows about the names of places and their hierarchical structure and relationships.

In Darkslide 1.5, you can search Flickr’s places database and see the most interesting photos from specific places. This is a great mobile research tool and, honestly, just outright fascinating and so much fun to play around with that I couldn’t leave it out. I hope you enjoy it too. Did you know there was a Moscow in Scotland?

I hope you like Darkslide 1.5, and I look forward to feedback.

Great upgrade to the app, I’m especially liking the ability to look at group pools.

On the subject of EXIF upload, it would be super great if sending the location information (geotags, is that what they’re called?) optional. I do like having this information available for me, but there’s nothing worse that uploading a photo (of say, my house) to flickr, and finding that everyone can now see where that is.

@Douglas: In 1.5.0, you can tap on the Location row and choose “Remove Location” from a photo you are about to upload. I appreciate that you may want to have a default option to not capture this information automatically, and I have noted that.

You can also simply deny Darkslide access to your location when the privacy popup appears, but that will also prevent Near Me from working.

We’ve called them post-partums sometimes. Still a little odd, but closer, I think.

Really nice update Fraser, congrats. I’ve watched the process from afar a bit via your blog here, etc. and now that I have the update in hand, I love the feel of having the upload built into the Darkslide app. One of my favorite parts is how after you upload, you are prompted to either go to Flickr, or post to Twitter. It’s really a good fit for the type of situations in which I’d be uploading from the phone itself. Just one of those small details that I appreciate in a well-designed app. Also glad to hear about the Exif/1.5.1.

One question, I see that if you use an existing image from the camera roll the size is restricted. It seems like when doing so it also doesn’t send the Geotag info, is that correct?

@Beau: There’s an API limitation that means you can’t get any EXIF from an image in the camera roll. Thus, the only location I know about is the location at the time of upload, which one cannot assume is the right location for an image retrieved from the camera roll. You can add a Flickr geotag to a camera roll image by going into the Location item and choosing “Set to Current Location”.

Excellent update. The upload tool is like you said, a whole new application. I thought it would be a straight up upload tool, but the extra tagging and location features make it really slick. Thanks for the update, and great job. Wrote about it on SA.

Darkslide? Hmmmm not sure about the name - always a difficult issue though. But Skateboarding? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_slide

@Caledonia I didn’t know about the skateboarding angle at first. A darkslide is also something you use to cover the film aperture on a medium format film back when changing magazines.

I was trying to find a photography term that wasn’t already used

Unfortunately Darkslide is crashing during launching after updating from Exposure on my iPod touch (rev1, 2.2). Sending crash logs to Fraser …

Great App Fraser, I bought it up last night. One question though, uploads are capped at 640 x 480. The SmugMug App uploads the full 1600 x 1200 resolution. Is it a restriction on the Flickr end?

I am having the exact same issue crashing on 2.2 3G.

If you’re seeing a problem with crashing on startup, delete the app from the device and reinstall it via iTunes. 1.5.1 is in review right now.

Aww. I am sad that slide-to-navigate-pictures didn’t make it into this release.

Still, uploading ability was enough to make me stop being a cheapskate and pay for the full version. Well, uploading ability and the $4 pricetag.