Linked List: February 22, 2013

Friday, 22 February 2013

My thanks to Everpix for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Everpix is a smart photo platform that helps you make sense of your growing photo collection. It’s an ambitious endeavor: think of it as a cloud-based alternative to iPhoto for organizing and storing your entire photo library. It’s designed with modern photography in mind: the assumption is that we all have thousands of photos (the average Everpix user has more than 10,000), are adding hundreds more each month, and that few of us ever take time to organize our new photos.

Everpix does the organizing for you, based on dates and on very clever semantic analysis of the content of your photos. It’s impressive technology. They have terrific iPad and iPhone apps for viewing and browsing your library, and Mac and and Windows apps for syncing your photos from your computer to their cloud. You can keep using apps like iPhoto, Lightroom, or Aperture for importing from your camera and making editing adjustments.

Everpix is not a social network like Flickr or Instagram, it’s your personal photo library, stored in the cloud, accessible via really well-designed native client apps for iOS. The apps are free, as is the 30-day free trial to start. After that, subscriptions are easy: $5/month, or $40/year. (What a novel business model: charging money.) I’m loving it, and very impressed. I highly encourage everyone to give the free trial a go. Bottom line: Everpix is what iPhoto/iCloud photo syncing should be.

(Sidenote: Among their investors: Bertrand Serlet and Picasa co-founder Michael Herf.)

Zendesk Security Breach Affects Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest ★

Credit to Zendesk for the plainspoken headline on their announcement: “We’ve Been Hacked”.

The Rise and Fall of A-Rod ★

Great piece by Joe Posnanski for NBC Sports:

Everyone talked about his joy for the game, his deference to teammates, his innocence. “On July 27,” Gerry Callahan wrote that year in a Sports Illustrated story called “The Fairest of Them All,” “Alex Rodriguez will turn 21, making him old enough to have a beer with his Seattle Mariners teammates. He says he’s not interested. ‘Can’t stand the taste,’ he says. Rodriguez has always felt more at home among milk drinkers.”

Update: Fixed link to non-mobile URL.

Conditions ★

Attractive ultra-simple new weather app for the iPhone, by Jake Marsh.

Those Rumored Google Stores ★

MG Siegler:

With the news today about the Chromebook Pixel, the pieces are all starting to come together. Google says it’s selling that product through the Google Play online store and through Best Buy’s and Currys PC World’s websites. (And they’ll be available to use, but not buy, inside some Best Buys and Currys.) That won’t be good enough.

Google has been attempting to sell various Nexus products through their online stores for years now. The results have ranged from some success (Nexus 4) to fail (Nexus One) to major fail (Nexus Q). The Best Buy results seem mixed as well. While Chromebooks are finally seeing some traction, it’s still minimal despite the reach of Best Buy.

What Google needs for these products is what Apple needed a decade ago: their own stores that they’re in complete control of to showcase their products.

The one that most demands a retail presence is Google Glass. The bottom line: a physical presence makes a lot of sense when you’re trying to sell physical products.

Palm OS as a Precursor to iOS ★

I was a big a fan of Palm OS back in the day (I carried a Handspring Visor for a year or two), so I certainly didn’t mean to imply here that the iPhone was the first device to use a home screen that was just a grid of app icons. (Palm wasn’t first, either.) I’d still argue that the iOS “system” interface is simpler — fewer hardware buttons, for example — but the fact that Palm had something so brilliantly simple so long ago shows just how badly they bungled their evolution.