Nice to see this timeline. After a failed photo startup, we launched Credit Card Terminal for iPhone in October 2008. It took Apple around two months to approve it, during which we received one of the famous "requiring unexpected additional time for review" emails. I'm pretty sure they didn't quite know what to make of it back then. April 2009 really kicked things off though when Apple put our app, along with Print n Share and FedEx, in a "There's an app for that" tv ad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZxpljDz4Wc
Thanks for the feedback. This is exactly the kind of detailed feedback we were hoping for.
A revised landing page is in the works. You gave us a ton more to think about :)
RE: squares. We do create square thumbnails (it lets us fit a lot more on a page, especially at 1024x768). Clicking the thumbnails goes to a larger, correctly aspected version, and of course there's the original photo data as well.
yeah, I thought the repeated photographs were weird too, made me think I wasn't getting the idea or something. I would replace them with a set of photographs that are obviously related. Tell a small story. A lot of work, sure, but its your home page, make them good, even if they are a tiny part of a screen shot. This is where you get people's attention. You have the Eiffel Tower, what about other scenes from Paris or Europe as if the person was traveling? After all, people will identify with travel photographs, and hence identify with you (its one of the psychological points of selling, make yourself seem similar to the customer).
At Photosleeve we're trying to eliminate the photo workflow. We've made it so that you can plug in your camera, and a few minutes later have an email full of your photos that you can share. No more manual copying, resizing, rotating, uploading, backing-up, etc. Just one step.
We recently enabled signups and are looking for feedback. Here are some specifics:
* We use a two-stage upload process so we can satisfy instant gratification and give lasting peace of mind. First, smaller versions of your photos are uploaded so that you can share quickly. Once that's done we back up your original photo data to S3. You can use the originals for printing, or just so you can stop worrying about your hard drive crashing and taking your photos with it.
* You can upload photos from your camera to email/web in a single step (copies, rotates, resizes, uploads, sends email) using the Windows desktop app
* Alternatively, you can upload using the web-uploader, which also resizes photos before uploading them, and does it all right within your browser (uses Silverlight + Flash)
* We'll send you an email with thumbnails of your photos right in it (HTML mail) that you can forward to people without clogging their inboxes
* You can use drag-and-drop within your browser to create albums, export to Facebook, order prints, create another email, etc. You can try some actions on our demo site, http://www.photosleeve.com/user/demo/album/eiffel-tower
One thing Derek failed to mention that might be interesting to the HN set: we're using Catalyst, which is a Perl-based MVC framework. It's a little unorthodox, as the popular choices these days seem to be RoR and django.
We've been really happy with Catalyst, especially its Chained dispatch type. And CPAN has been really helpful since there's just the two of us working on this right now. :-)
Catalyst has an active mailing list and IRC channel full of helpful people. For more information, check out http://www.catalystframework.org/.
As the author of Catalyst::DispatchType::Chained, thanks!
I think most of us in the Cat community consider it a secret weapon - it's not optimised for simple, fast stuff like rails is and it's not optimised for content sites like Django is but it scales really nicely to large projects and CPAN helps keep them from getting too large in the first place.
Perl and python are very different languages. They're both good. You might find you're vastly more productive in python. I'm vastly more productive in Perl.
(declaration of bias: I'm a Catalyst core team member and would be delighted to see you on #catalyst on irc.perl.org :)
If you already know perl, then there's no reason not to use Catalyst. While it's lacking in the shiny marketing (build a blog in 5 minutes) that other frameworks seem to like, it's a good bit more flexible in terms of your choices of Models and Views, and in the way that you can present dispatch logic than other frameworks.
