Archive for the 'Business Talk' Category
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!
Saturday, January 24th, 2009
Update on Our Status and Twitter too!
Wow - it’s been a long time since there has been a new posting on the Snapact blog. With the holiday season and then jumping right back into website and application development, we’ve all been very busy. The new website implementation is coming along very well - it’s going to rock. It will make it far easier to implement new features and integrate with other websites.
The new website layout will feature a wider layout, with more intuitive navigation - it will be far more community oriented as well, meaning it will be easier to interact with other users, explore other photos, ask questions, get feedback and more. If you’re into digital photography, Snapact will help you learn how to shoot better. If you’re simply into sharing photos with family and friends, Snapact will give your photo sharing a shot of adrenaline. We can’t wait.
It’s a little earlier to start talking about timeframes, unfortunately. There are still a few unknowns - but it’s coming, and it will be big.
Oh, a couple of weeks ago, we started tweeting on Twitter here http://twitter.com/snapact. Follow us!
Saturday, November 8th, 2008
Top Ten Snapact Countries
- United States
- Japan
- Canada
- France
- China
- United Kingdom
- South Korea
- India
- Brazil
- Italy
Due to the recent French review of Snapact, France has shot up in the rolling 1 month Top Ten listings of countries that are interested in and using the Snapact Photo Sharing Community (and by association, the Snapact Photo Manager). Merci, la monde française!
Interest and use from users in China is also growing rapidly. This has all gotten us very excited for the potential of worldwide opportunities!
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
First Snapact 1.1 Review: in French This Time
A Swiss software website by the name libellules.ch has, in record time, posted a French review of the Snapact Photo Manager 1.1 - this new version of Snapact was released mere HOURS before this review was posted. Here is a quick quote from the review (translated to English):
“[The Snapact Photo Manager 1.1] proposes to create albums, with a system of tags, descriptions, keywords and ratings (5 stars). The interface is very worked and the creation or manipulation of albums is quick and simple. Similarly, viewing the images is fast and well, taking advantage of the mouse wheel. A search engine is integrated (top right) to quickly find your lost pictures.”
Later, the following is mentioned:
“The developers have set up a community to share photos online. The program can synchronize the contents of albums with an online service (free but not compulsory to use [Snapact]), which allows private use: the user chooses who can see or not see his photos.” - Falkra from libellules.ch, English translation
It is important to note that Snapact as a whole, as a system, is not just the Snapact Photo Manager, although we appreciate if people wish to use only that aspect of the system. We would love people to see the value in sharing their photos - their memories - online with family and friends. Privacy options let you do just that with comfort. Sign up for your own free Snapact online photo sharing account today!
Oh, there’s even a comment from a user of how they decided to uninstall ACDSee in favour of the Snapact Photo Manager 1.1 - high praise!
Thank you for the kind words, Falkra from libellules.ch!
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008
Snapact Photo Manager 1.1 Changes
As promised in my previous announcement on the Snapact Photo Manager 1.1, here is a list of changes and additions to our software product:
- In the Browser mode, press ‘F10‘ to display the Preview window. You can use this for multiple monitor viewing of your photos.
- In the Viewer mode, press ‘F‘ to see the current photo full screen. (To get into the viewer mode from the Browser mode, double click or press ‘Enter’ on a thumbnail.)
- In the Viewer mode, press ‘S‘ to start (and the same key to stop) a slideshow in full screen viewing. You can use the contents of the mini-basket, a folder or an album.
- Normalized and added many other shortcut keys (see the Interactive Help for more details)
- Initial support for RAW files.
- GUI redesign:
- improved visibility of panes
- icons for albums (indicating published state, etc.)
- simplified layout of Browser toolbar
- made the Snapact Sync button stand out more
- album and mini-basket pane have a new drop down menu for ease of use
- added toolbar buttons to switch from Browser to Viewer and Viewer to Browser more easily
- Improved Help functionality (click the arrow beside the Browser toolbar’s Help button):
- updated the Interactive Help with shortcut keys and new features
- added a Contact Us menu entry to easily get to our feedback webpage
- added an About Snapact menu entry to list the version number of the Snapact Photo Browser
- Small improvements in uploading speed.
There are a number of improvements that are desired for upcoming releases as well. Most notably among them is improving the product’s editing functionality.
Spread the word about Snapact - our objectives are to continue to improve the product and sharing community, while keeping them simple and easy to use, for everyone. In fact, we would love for parents and grandparents to discover Snapact and how it can help them share memories with others!
Saturday, November 1st, 2008
Snapact Photo Manager 1.1 is Released!
After a few weeks of gathering input and putting our noses to the grindstone, we are happy to announce the release of the Snapact Photo Manager 1.1. It includes a number of bug fixes, and a few select features as recommended by our feedback crew - you, the users!
Thank you so much for all of your input, positive and ‘constructive’. It has helped immensely. I will put together another posting in the morning with details of what’s new in this 1.1 release… for now, I must sleep.
Friday, October 31st, 2008
After a Busy Week, a New Top 10 List
- United States
- Japan
- Canada
- Brazil
- South Korea
- United Kingdom
- China
- India
- Germany
- Sweden
Some fairly big changes in the Top 10 Countries List this week, thanks to recent reviews of Snapact. The US is on top, with Japan following and Canada is now third! The Czech Republic, France and Italy have all move down below 10th spot and China, South Korea and India now have taken their current placements.
It’s incredible to see the demographics changing in such short periods of time. We’re more than happy to welcome worldwide users - sign in to Snapact and share Snapact with your friends! Don’t forget that you can search for users and add them to your friend list once you’re logged in too. We will be adding more community features to the website in the coming weeks and months.
Lately, we’ve been busy implementing Snapact Photo Manager feature requests that make sense and fixing defects/issues that both we as well as our users have found. A big thanks goes out to Samer from Freewaregenius.com for posting his review of Snapact; it has generated a lot of great feedback, which is mostly making its way into the super-fantastic next release of the Snapact Photo Manager.
We even managed to get a comment comparing the Snapact Photo Manager to ACDSee Pro! We’re a ways off from that level of functionality - and I don’t believe that we intend to “go there” at all. We will add what our users need, as long as it keeps the product simple and easy to use.
Be excited - we are! The next release of the Snapact Photo Manager is only a few short days away!
Sunday, October 26th, 2008
A Snapact Review - This Time in Korean
It’s a shame that Google’s translation tool isn’t perfect. I’m not an expert when it comes to languages, but really, automated language translation must be a hard task to perfect, if perfection is even possible.
With that being said, I’m happy to say that Snapact has received a favorable review from the Korean technology website ChoboWeb. Google’s translation from Korean to English is a bit sketchy, so I will refrain from putting any quotations here for now. If you happen to be a bilingual Korean/English speaker, feel free to add a comment with some of the key points translated for us. It would be greatly appreciated.
ChoboWeb’s review translated to English
Friday, October 24th, 2008
Another Snapact Review - This Time, in English!
We’ve had some growth in English-speaking countries the last couple of days - particularly the United States. A new review of Snapact has been posted over at Freewaregenius covering both the photo manager and photo sharing parts of the free offering.
The review is quite positive and yet still manages to give us some great feedback for improvement - thank you to Samer, the review’s author, for digging into the photo management and sharing aspects of Snapact so well.
I’d like quote a couple of sections of the review:
“What also needs to be said about Snapact is that it is very much a desktop front-end to the free Snapact image sharing service; which is to say that it is designed for seamless integration with your online Snapact account.”
Towards the end of the review, Samer mentions the following point - which subjectively tells me that Snapact provided a good impression overall:
“I will confess that at first I did not intend to review this software, but the main draw for me was the good user experience that it provides. If you are looking for a stylish image viewer with good features that does not hog your system you should check out Snapact…” - Freewaregenius.com
Thank you again, Samer and Freewaregenius.com.
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
This Week’s Snapact Top 10 Countries
After a bit of a busy time period, the Snapact Top 10 Countries list is back:
1. Canada
2. Japan
3. Brazil
4. United States
5. Sweden
6. United Kingdom
7. Germany
8. Czech Republic
9. France
10. Italy
The only changes are with the Czech Republic overtaking France and Italy unseating Spain for 10th position. With the soon-to-be-released update of the Snapact Photo Manager, I think we’ll see a shift in numbers - I expect a larger interest from the US to be prevalent in upcoming reports. We will be announcing Snapact on larger-scale product review websites shortly after the launch of the update.
A bit of feedback on how the above list is generated: straight from Google Analytics, where the default time period is one month, ending with more or less the current day. So, the list above is based on a 1-month, rolling report - a sliding window of time.
That’s all for now - stay tuned for the Snapact Photo Manager product update!
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