Archive for the 'About snapACT' Category
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
August 2009 Site Visitor Stats for Snapact
Hungary knocks off the United States to take the #1 spot in our top ten list for August 2009!
The United States has been consistently the top country referring traffic to Snapact.com since Tecagora launched Snapact in September 2008. So how did they get knocked off the #1 spot? Well, it looks like the website techline.hu in Hungary recommended Snapact Photo Manager as one of their top 5 Windows software programs. I guess being recommended as one of the top 5 Windows software programs combined with a great review of Snapact Photo Manager sparked interest from readers to download our product and give it a try.
Thanks techline.hu for the recommendation, product review, and referral traffic!
Here is the list of the top 10 countries that visited Snapact in August 2009: 1) Hungary 2) United States 3) Canada 4) Italy 5) Brazil 6) United Kingdom 7) Germany 8) Romania 9) Japan 10) France.
Welcome Hungary and Romania to the Snapact Top 10 Countries list!
Thursday, August 6th, 2009
The Rise of Netbooks
According to an article in ComputerWorld, it looks like netbook shipments this year could surpass 32.7 million units nearly doubling the number of units shipped in 2008. So why is this figure important to Tecagora and Snapact? The Snapact Photo Manager is a small download (just over 2 MB) and the install size is currently just under 6 MB! Most of the current netbooks in the market have 160 GB hard drives. Some are even available with solid state hard drives (up to 64 GB). Because Snapact Photo Manager has such a small footprint, when compared to other digital photo managers and viewers in the market, that’s a significant difference! All netbooks include USB ports and media card slots to upload photos from digital cameras (or media cards) to the netbook.
Netbooks are great because of their small size and portability with most weighing less than 3 lbs. Many netbooks are available with different screen sizes (ranging from 8” to 12.1” displays), come with webcams to stay connected via web/video chat, and are reasonably priced (ranging from $
If you’re looking for a simple and fast way to view, organize, and share your digital photos without having to give up too much hard drive space on your netbook, download Snapact Photo Manager and give it a try. The Snapact Social Networking Community is a great way to share your photos and stay connected with friends and family. If you don’t have a Snapact account yet, CLICK HERE to sign up for a free account.
Thursday, August 6th, 2009
July 2009 Site Visitor Stats for Snapact
Here is the list of the top 10 countries that visited Snapact in July 2009: 1) USA 2) Canada 3) Italy 4) China 5) Greece 6) Germany 7) South Korea 8) Brazil 9) United Kingdom 10) France.
Welcome China, Greece, and South Korea to the Snapact Top 10 Countries list.
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
Snapact and Touch PCs
The emergence of “Touch PCs” will certainly impact the way personal computers are being used today for entertainment. Computer manufacturers like Dell, HP, Asus, and MSI have already launched their “All-in-One” Touch PCs into the marketplace and have already received favourable reviews due in part to the large, rich display screens (20” display screens and larger), and the ability for users to simply tap their display screen to launch applications, listen to music, watch videos, or view photos. I have had the opportunity to briefly test the various Touch PCs manufactured by Dell, HP, Asus, and MSI at retail stores such as Staples and Costco.
As of now, my preference is the HP TouchSmart All-in-One PC but that’s not to say that Dell, Asus, and MSI don’t have a comparable product offering, because they certainly do. The first time I saw the HP TouchSmart PC was in Costco and I was amazed with the vibrant colors and crisp display on the 25.5 inch screen. As I was playing around with the features of the HP TouchSmart, I started to think about how Snapact Photo Manager would work really well with the HP TouchSmart, or any Touch PC for that matter.
Snapact Photo Manager was designed to incorporate “drag and drop” features and functionality. The design of the Touch PCs allows users to essentially replace the mouse with the user’s finger. With Snapact Photo Manager, users can now create their Snapact Albums by placing their finger on a photo and “dragging” the photo to the Album. Likewise, double-tapping on a photo will take the user to Viewer Mode that will display the Edit tools and the Thumbnail Filmstrip view at the bottom of the screen. To view photos, users can simply place their finger on the Thumbnail Filmstrip and drag their finger to the left or right to scroll through the photos. To select and view a photo, simply tap on the thumbnail image of the photo.
If you have already purchased a Touch PC or you are thinking about purchasing one in the near future, make sure you install Snapact Photo Manager. You won’t find an easier software solution out there to view, manage, and share all your digital photos.
CLICK HERE to download your copy of Snapact Photo Manager (2.02 MB download).
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
June 2009 Site Visitor Stats for Snapact
Here is the list of the top 10 countries that visited Snapact in June 2009: 1) USA 2) Canada 3) Italy 4) Brazil 5) Germany 6) Denmark 7) France 8) Switzerland 9) United Kingdom 10) Spain
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
Photo Sites Not Removing Deleted Photos?
There has been a fair amount of hype and concern in the news lately about photo sharing websites not removing photos that users have deleted.
User photographs can still be found on many social networking sites even after people have deleted them, Cambridge University researchers have said.
That quote is from a BBC article on the topic. The story has been picked up in blogs everywhere in social media circles. I’m glad to report that Snapact doesn’t fall victim to this shortcoming on the Snapact Photo Sharing Community. We actually have a regularly running program that discovers photos that users have removed and run the appropriate deletion routines.
Your photos will be removed from our permanent storage within a couple of minutes of your request. Your security and privacy are important to us, so enjoy Snapact knowing this information!
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
New Snapact Website Progress Update
It’s been a while since I’ve given an update about our progress on the Snapact website overhaul, so… here we go:
- Basic layout changes are done. The view will be wider, focusing more on 1024-width displays compared to the current 800-width displays. This means more screen “real estate” to show off your photos.
- User feed notifications are reimplemented to be more flexible - you won’t notice a difference too much, in theory, but now…
- … Community feed notifications are done. This is new. You will now be able to see, on one page, what your friends/connections have been up to on Snapact.
- Increase in upload speeds from the Snapact Photo Manager to the Snapact Photo Sharing Community! This is a big one.
- A more visible use of photo tags (in a proper multi-sized ‘cloud’ format). Community pages will expose community-wide tags and profile pages will show user-specific photo tags (if any). This is a good way to get your photos noticed - if that’s your thing.
- Importing contacts. You will be able to add your contacts from popular online email services to Snapact. Once imported…
- … You can easily share your photos, albums and profile with your Snapact contacts (your friends and family) - even if they’re not Snapact users themselves. Of course, it might be nice if they started using Snapact too!
There are more details, but that should be enough to whet people’s appetites. We’re looking to start our formal (internal) testing by the end of February, so that means within a few weeks, it will be live for all to use!
Once released, you’ll be seeing many new additions over time that enable you to do what you want with your photos - most being suggested by users like you. Making it easy to add new functionality to the Snapact Photo Sharing Community is the biggest reason for the architecture switch.
Final note: you can follow Snapact on Twitter, don’t forget!
Monday, September 8th, 2008
Server Upgrade Progress
It’s been a while since anything has been posted - this is a big no-no in the world of blogging. I know this, but really when you’re hammering away at work during the day and then hacking PHP and SQL in the evenings, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for the all-important communication that users need. The Snapact team plans to improve our communication with you once we get the first public release out there - we promise. Now, some news:
I am happy to report that we have made some major strides in the couple of weeks. We’ve migrated our static content hosting to S3 to offset the bandwidth and server load from our main web server, which - in a somewhat humorous fashion - has been located in my closet at home up until yesterday. www.Snapact.com has been in testing, and I had a great system for it sitting at home… a piddly little 1.6ghz, 396mb RAM, 120gb hard drive machine. Perfect to see if all of the PHP and DB script would bog it down - and guess what? It proved to be an excellent choice!
That junky little machine was handy in identifying the need for caching DB results in memory; it also helped to identify the need to offload static content to an external server. All that having been said, it has reached the end of its public involvement with www.Snapact.com - but please, don’t worry about its future. It will continue on merrily as a development and staging system!
Some details of how we’re currently operating:
- The PHP website is hosted via www.Slicehost.com (referral link - feel free to sign up via the link; it helps us with our hosting costs!). These guys ROCK. A great virtualized setup, easily upgradable, affordable and very flexible. That, and their website is very pretty.
- The Upload from the Snapact browser is done via www.AmazonAWS.com’s EC2. This is a great way to get items into S3 with only a single hit of uploading bandwidth.
- www.AmazonAWS.com’s S3 is where Snapact stores your photos for the website to reference. Having the user photos as well as the Snapact CSS, Javascript and miscellaneous other static files for the website lets the PHP website hosted by Slicehost be fast and focused.
On the Snapact website server, we use a couple of caching mechanisms:
- MySQL has some built in caching that’s done - but I don’t count that…
- XCache is a PHP plugin that caches the compiled PHP script pages (preventing future interpretation)
- Memcached is a distributed, in-memory caching system cleverly devised to share any sort of cached information across multiple servers. This is where many of the database query results will get stored in order to prevent redundant database hits.
All in all, while there are further optimizations possible (and planned), this is the foundation from which we will launch into the public. Both Amazon EC2 and Slicehost offer multiple avenues for scalability, so we feel fairly well prepared for our growth.
We look forward to opening up Snapact for users to use; in the future, we really look forward to having developers build on our platform using a planned developer API. Exciting times call for … sharing. Photo sharing.
Saturday, September 15th, 2007
snapACT, Digital Photography Solutions Done Right: Part 3
In our first introductory blog posting, we shared some high-level information about snapACT and our goals. In the second snapACT posting, we gave an overview of our background and why we believe that we can address user frustrations with superior solutions in addition to specifying the key areas we will be targeting for improvement. We would like to complete this introductory series of postings with a few further details about us and how we are going to help you.
Who’s doing what?
Well, to let you know who’s handling certain features, you have to know who is involved, right? This is where things got a little more fun for us; you see, we aren’t quite ready to reveal our real identities until the time is right. So, to achieve this, we have each chosen a pseudonym from the character list of a very popular TV show. If you haven’t already noticed, I’m Kramer. We also have Jerry, George and of course… Newman. We may add an Elaine down the road, but for now, this is where we stand. We think we’re a pretty fun crew, and given that we all like Seinfeld, it seemed like the appropriate choice.
Jerry, George, Newman and I (Kramer) will be posting our updates, results, and thoughts in a regular fashion. We believe that keeping you informed will result in quality feedback, which, in turn, will result in better solutions! It’s sort of a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours type of deal.
Ok, enough with explaining our TV personas. George is leading the charge on the digital photo management software. Jerry is lending his trained hand to help George on key software features. In addition, he is working with Newman on the particular aspects of running snapACT that will make it a great success for you and other photo enthusiasts out there. I will be focusing largely on the photo sharing online community website. We regularly discuss the direction of the solutions we’re building to ensure we don’t stray from what is needed.
Read the rest of this entry »
Thursday, September 13th, 2007
snapACT, Digital Photography Solutions Done Right: Part 2
As a follow up to our first blog posting introducing snapAct, we’d like to delve into a bit more detail about what we believe are the common sources of frustration in the digital photography world.
Who are we?
Our experiences as digital photography solution architects and providers go back a few years, so we believe that we have some great insight to the optimal workflow for digital camera users. Not only have we created digital photography software solutions as well as photo sharing websites in the past, but we have also been heavily involved in the digital photography community. A part of that involvement includes hearing what bothers people; whether it is missing features, poorly implemented features or lack of an intuitive interface, we’ve heard what people have had to say. We wholeheartedly agree!
snapACT’s goal is to create what you, a member of the digital photography community, needs. We don’t want to create solutions that you need to spend hours to learn how to use - we want to create solutions that help you achieve your digital photography needs with ease. Minimal hassle, minimal effort.
To do this, snapACT is always actively seeking input from people like you - people who see a need for better solutions. We can’t build something better without hearing about or observing what problems need to be solved, so please do feel free to share your thoughts by adding a comment to this posting.
What have we done so far?
We have taken our combined past experiences, along with the community feedback that we have received so far, to begin design and implementation effort on better digital photography solutions. The following steps are primary targets for improvement:
- Adding photos from a camera to your computer
- Tagging and adding your photos into albums
- Sharing your photos
We are not about to lie and say that there aren’t any solutions out there that work for those 3 areas of functionality - but we do feel confident saying that there are no solutions currently on the market that cover of all of the above functional areas well. What’s more, few products provide elegant, intuitive and easy to use ways to accomplish steps 1, 2 and 3 in a seamless fashion.
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