FraserSpeirs
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Viewfinder for iPad review and interview with Fraser Speirs
Most Mac users know Fraser Speirs as the developer of FlickrExport which allows you to easily export pictures from iPhoto or Aperture to Flickr. Most iPhone users probably know him from Darkslide (formerly "Exposure"), a Flickr client that he developed for the iPhone. Back in September of 2008, he posted that he would not develop additional applications for the App Store because of the way that apps had been both rejected without explanation or (even worse) accepted and then removed without warning. That changed in May of 2010 when he announced that he was "Back in" to iOS development, due to the iPad. The end result of that decision is Viewfinder for iPad, a "photo search and download" app for iPad. Fraser's story has interested me from the beginning because (at least in my experience) it's fairly rare in life that someone makes such a public, definitive statement and then later reverses it. While I suspect the "knee jerk" reaction to hearing his story is negative, I find it compelling because of his honesty. Adults can (and do) change their minds. Some might see it as a weakness (anyone remember the 2004 US presidential election and the term "waffle"?) but I see it as a sign of maturity. I've been using Viewfinder for a few weeks (Fraser, like many developers, provided a review code for that purpose), but wanted to do more than just a review of the app itself, but also talk to him about this story. He agreed to an email interview, which was the most practical way of doing it since he is in Scotland and I'm in the USA. Read on for more...
Viewfinder for iPad now available
Viewfinder for iPad is now available on the App Store. I plan to offer a fuller review and an interview with its developer, Fraser Speirs sometime in the next few weeks. For those who aren't familiar with Viewfinder, it is a search front-end for Flickr. Viewfinder will let you filter for certain licenses (such as Creative Commons), and gives you easy access to the proper links to use for attribution. Viewfinder does not connect to your Flickr account. It doesn't upload pictures, and it won't let you view your friends' timelines. It's meant to help you find pictures on Flickr. We've mentioned Viewfinder for iPhone before, but this is an app which definitely benefits from iPad's larger screen. You could just use Flickr.com on the iPad for this, but Viewfinder makes it faster, better looking, and easier. If you spend a lot of time on Flickr, it's definitely worth the $9.99 asking price. Viewfinder will save a history of your downloads, making it easier to go back and find or verify license types and links to the images.
iPad pulls Fraser Speirs back in to iPhone OS development
When I saw Mac developer Fraser Speirs' Twitter post linking to a blog entry titled "Back In" I knew what it was about: the App Store. Back in September 2008, Fraser announced he was ceasing new iPhone OS development in a widely-linked post titled "App Store: I'm out". Fraser wasn't the first or last to announce that he was giving up on the App Store, but he is the first that I'm aware of who has come back. Why? Because to ignore the iPhone OS is to risk missing too many potential new customers. He says that he hasn't seen any comparable alternatives to the iPhone platform, and with the arrival of the iPad, Apple's mobile device platform is the place to be. "I have to ask myself if there's a train that I would rather be on," says Speirs. "I don't see one right now, and I don't see one coming down the track."
Two views on iPhone OS and the App Store
Most of you will have heard of Fraser Speirs. He's the developer behind FlickrExport and now Exposure for iPhone.This week he's made two consecutive and interesting posts that show what it's been like to be a software developer during the first few days of the Store's operation.In one post, he complains about the review process imposed on not just every app, but every update to every app that gets submitted to the Store. Things are not being reviewed fast enough, he says: "If Apple can't guarantee a maximum 24 hour review process, they should drop it."In the second, Fraser reveals that Exposure has been downloaded an average of 3,200 times per day since the Store opened. It already has more users than FlickrExport for Aperture, a much older and better-established product."These are crazy numbers," he says. His point is simple: the iPhone as a platform is going to be huge. In fact, it's going to be "Apple's mainstream platform for 2012 and beyond." Now there's a prediction.
FlickrExport 3 teaser screencast
Fraser Speirs' FlickrExport plug-ins for iPhoto and Aperture are the undisputed kings of bridging the gap between Flickr and your Mac-managed photos. The plug-ins are pretty powerful, offering a lot of strong integration with Flickr by adding photos to sets or creating new sets on the fly, as well as keeping in step with the tags you use in your account. The Aperture plug-in can even keep track of the photos you upload to Flickr and replace them with updated versions - instead of creating a duplicate. Apparently not one to sit in one place for too long, however, Speirs is already hard at work on a new version, FlickrExport 3.Not many details are known just yet, but Speirs has been tweeting some teasers about the new version, and just this morning published a screencast (.MOV link) demoing some of the impressive new Groups features in FlickrExport 3 for Aperture. Most notably, users will no longer be limited with adding a picture to one group at a time - the new version features a table of all the groups to which you belong, allowing you to check more than one group for adding the images to. FlickrExport 3 will even check with Flickr to make sure you haven't overstepped the upload quota for each group.[Update: Mr. Speirs stopped by to comment that the new features in this particular demo will also be present in FlickrExport 3 for iPhoto as well; he just happened to be demoing them in Aperture for this screencast.]No release date has been set for FlickrExport 3 just yet, and I assume the prices will remain the same for the iPhoto plug-in (~ $23 USD) and Aperture plug-in (~ $27 USD).
FlickrExport 2.0.1 released with bug fixes, API update
Fraser Speirs has updated his fantastic FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto to 2.0.1, ushering in a few key bug fixes an an API compatibility update. The specific bugs that Mr. Speirs squashed (murderer!) are the 'Waiting for Flickr' hangup the plugin could sometimes experience upon finishing an upload (I've been personally bitten by this one on occasion), as well as a nasty iPhoto crash upon upload.You can grab the update from Fraser's update post on his Connected Flow blog, or from the main Connected Flow product page.Thanks Nik Fletcher!
