Archive for the 'Photo Management Software' Category
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.
Saturday, October 11th, 2008
Upcoming Snapact Photo Manager Update
We’ve analyzed the workflow of the Snapact Photo Manager 1.0 based on user feedback (thank you, everyone!) and have decided to make some changes to make using the product easier in a general sense, but with a focus on introducing album/organizing features to you culminating with the photo sharing experience that we’ve delivered.
We intend to make album creation, populating albums with photos and the simple synchronization process the focal points of our changes, but you will see other minor improvements as well. When the update is actually released, you can do one of two things: open the Snapact Photo Manager on your computer - it will tell you that an update is available. The updating process is simple. Otherwise, you can dowload the Snapact Photo Manager again (or for the first time!) - our download location will never change and will always have the latest version.
We promised many blog postings ago that we’re always interested in your feedback. This hasn’t changed, and never will. Most of our feedback so far has been via email from the people that we’ve directly introduced to Snapact (friends/family, friends of friends/family), but we do get input from the Snapact Contact form (currently available for logged in users only; this will be changing) occasionally. We really hope to start getting GetSatisfaction.com related feedback - but then again,we understand that typical GetSatisfaction usage is based on complaints and issues that users have that aren’t being addressed by the company. We don’t want to be that company!
So, be suitably excited for the upcoming release of the Snapact Photo Manager - it should make a few things easier. We’re excited!
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008
Snapact Product and Photo Sharing Review
As indicated in a previous blog posting on world-wide demographic interest in Snapact, a part of the rush of interest in Snapact is (thankfully!) due to a couple of product/website reviews. One is Japanese, the other Brazilian; as the Japanese review of Snapact (although positive in nature) had a bit of explicit content in it, I won’t be speaking of it here - although we’re grateful for the feedback and exposure!
The Brazilian review is fairly domestic in content, yet revealing in the user viewpoint. It demonstrates that we have done a great job in putting out a first version of the Snapact Photo Manager and the Photo Sharing website - even as it (almost) silently says that there are still refinements to be made. We take this type of feedback well - it means that we’re on the right path; that we have done some really good things and also that we have a good chunk of work ahead of us to improve the service. We’re on it! Now… for the review.
Here’s a (translated) excerpt from the Brazilian review of the Snapact Photo Manager:
“Snapact is without any doubt, a complete solution for organizing and managing images. With powerful tools and easy use, this program has advanced features that make life easier for anyone who has many photos on their computer. Snapact is lightweight, stable, and visually pleasing. It is an excellent program that is really worth having installed on your computer”
“… [One of the objectives of] Snapact is the sharing online. Anyone can register on the site [and] then share your images with other users. The site acts as a sort of social network, where you can add friends, edit your profile, create albums and publish your photos [through] the program directly… To send pictures from Snapact, click the “Sync images with your online albums.” - Team Baixaki (URL: http://baixaki.ig.com.br/download/Snapact.htm)
This was translated via Google Translate. View the English translation by clicking here.
Thanks Baixaki, for the kind words! The review correctly asserts that the Snapact Photo Sharing website is intended to be a community - a social network. We know that there are many features missing from the website in order for it to function as a full-on social network, but believe us, it’s coming. We want to enable - and be a part of - further photography-related social interaction!
We would really like to encourage feedback from our current and future users. You can do so in a non-hostile, generic feedback environment at GetSatisfaction.com, where we have “claimed” ownership of the Snapact product and server and will be listening attentively for your feedback.
Sunday, September 14th, 2008
Snapact Website and Photo Manager are Live!
We are overjoyed to announce that www.Snapact.com are now available for general public use!
The Snapact Photo Manager can be downloaded for free by visiting www.Snapact.com now - or if you’re anxious and can’t for another webpage to load, just click here.
I encourage you to explore the Snapact Photo Manager thoroughly; we’ve put extra effort into keeping it simple and even though we’ve only just released it to the public as of 10 minutes ago, we already have plans to make it even easier to use. We even have some new features that we’d like to add in - but we believe that simplicity is important to users.
Most of all, we really want you to create your own photo albums within the Snapact Photo Manager so that you can easily share them online with the click of a button. We’re excited to see your mad photography skills.
Over time, we will be adding great new community features to the Snapact Photo Sharing website. We’re thinking of things such as contests and a rating system, but really, it’s all up in the air until we hear what you want. If you have something you’d like to share with us - a neat idea to make Snapact better, a problem you’ve noticed or perhaps you’d like to just as a question - you can do so by going to our Snapact partner page on GetSatisfaction.com.
GetSatisfaction.com is a great way for users to share their thoughts, ideas and frustrations regarding ANY business. I’d recommend them for companies and individuals alike.
Monday, July 28th, 2008
Beta Update: Infrastructure
It’s been a flurry of activity recently, based on great user feedback. A host of bugs have been addressed, along with some improvement of existing features in both the Snapact Photo Browser and the Snapact Community Website.
For the website, one of the more crucial changes has been to move to a small-business, entrepreneur-like infrastructure using services like Amazon’s S3 and EC2 - this has been proceeding well, and is forecasted to be complete within the next week or so. We plan to (re)launch the new-featured beta by mid-August.
Stay tuned for more updates over the coming weeks - we’re more excited than ever!
Friday, July 4th, 2008
Beta Update: Profile, Album and Photo Privacy
We’ve been hard at work not only fixing bugs, but also trying to add what people have been asking for.
We knew Privacy was important, but hearing your feedback helped us to prioritize - so now, we’ve got a great start for profile, album and photo privacy in place on the beta website. Numerous fixes and optimizations have been added in as well, including:
- Xcache: prevents unnecessary ‘compilation’ of PHP scripts
- Memcached: prevents redundant hits to our database
- mod_deflate: reduces page size by compressing web page content
Fun stuff!
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
Beta Progressing Well
I just wanted to share some simple news: our beta is alive and going well. It has been operational for a couple of weeks now and we are opening the beta program to more individuals as we address issues that float to the surface.
Feedback has been good so far; excellent new features (and defects!) have been brought to our attention. We appreciate all the efforts that the keen, bleeding edge folk are putting in!
In the coming weeks, we will be putting the website in the public eye, however we will still be restricting access to our growing closed beta group. We’ll be sure to put a “Request an invite” feature up for those of you interested-photo-sharing-people.
Thank you and take care, all Snapact followers!
Sunday, June 1st, 2008
Photo Sharing Progress; Beta time!
It’s been far too long since we’ve posted news in regards to our great new snapact product and service - for this, we do apologize. We’ve been enormously busy with putting some final touches on the initial feature set of the snapact photo browser and the snapact photo sharing community.
We are fast approaching our initial beta testing, which is slated to start in the next 2 weeks, pending the review of current features and functionality. So far, things are looking fantastic. We have decided to each select 5 participants for the first early, closed beta of the website - making a total of 20 new people we’ll be introducing our ideas to… and the culmination of months of effort.
We’ve gotten more excited with each passing day, as the product and service prove themselves. It’s a great feeling knowing that we are about to show what we’ve created to ‘outsiders’ - although we actually want them to become insiders. We want everyone who tries the product and service to want to stay; to be a part of our community and help build it up over time. We know there will improvement and feature requests - in fact, we’re hoping for them. We want people to share with us what they believe will make an excellent photo sharing solution.
If you’ve read previous postings on how busy we’ve been working full time as well as creating snapact, you’ll know that the simple fact that we’re still working on this adventure - our adventure, including you - means that we are dedicated to seeing what we can accomplish together.
First, there were 4 people. Soon, there will be 20 more. To infinity, and beyond!
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