Everpix — a brief review

October 14, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Software

Logo Orange

I honestly don’t remember where I first heard about Everpix — maybe someone mentioned it on Twitter or App.net or in a blog post. I took a mental note and said to myself I’d try it as soon as I had enough time to understand how it worked and whether it could be a suitable solution for my photo sync needs.

Last Friday I finally checked Everpix out. The short video explaining what the service does is very well made, informative and funny. That put me in a good mood already. I signed up for a free account instantly.

What does Everpix do?

What Everpix does is quite simple: it keeps your entire photo collection in the cloud, always aggregated, organised, in sync, without duplicates — and everything is private by default. And I really mean your entire photo collection: if you subscribe/upgrade to a paid account ($4.99 per month, or $49 per year), you can upload all your photos — from your computer and from all your devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Android devices…) — no matter how long ago they were taken. A free account lets you upload all your photos from the past 12 months. Even this basic offering is better than iCloud and photo streaming, especially if you take a lot of photos with your smartphone.

Three main reasons I love Everpix

  1. Design simplicity — Everpix is a classic example of good, streamlined design, where the user always knows what’s happening. There isn’t a single obscure element in its interface. The iOS universal app, the Mac app and the Web viewer are all well thought-out, responsive and snappy, easy to navigate, and offer a very pleasant experience on the whole (see below).
  2. Not just to store, but also to rediscover — Everpix is not just a safe place you use to store hundreds of photos as part of a backup/syncing strategy. The service is also designed to encourage you to go over your photos, to rediscover past shots, to put everything you’ve been photographing in context and in perspective. My favourite is the Flashback feature, that shows you photos you took one year ago today (or two, three years ago today, etc.). It’s an instant reminder of where you were, what were you doing, but it’s also another chance to find great photos you might have overlooked right after you took them. Further, the beauty of having a single photo repository is that whatever device you’re using, you can browse, view, and (if necessary) download photos uploaded from a different device.
  3. It ‘just works’ — You install the app on your iOS device, you sign in, and it starts uploading and syncing the contents of the Camera Roll. On the Mac, you can tell the Everpix app which photo folders you want to upload/sync. The process then happens in background and any error (such as Unsupported format or dimensions) is logged, so you always know what’s going on. The overall impression is to have a very robust and transparent tool at your disposal.

A quick look at the Web interface

I really love how clear, elegant and fast Everpix’s Web interface is:

(Click to enlarge)

(Click to enlarge)

This is the Home view: on the top, if available, you’ll see your photo ‘Flashbacks’; on the lower part of the screen you’ll see your photos neatly organised in reverse chronological order (from newest to oldest). I really love that sequences of photos taken on the same day are grouped in mini-albums. When you hover the mouse, all thumbnails are displayed:

Everpix moment detail

If you click on the (>) icon, you can see all the photos from that sequence, in detail.

This is the single-photo view:

(Click to enlarge)

(Click to enlarge)

The sidebar offers all kinds of useful information: where and when the photo was taken, with which device, other EXIF data (ISO, focal length, f/stop, etc.), a selection of ‘nearby’ photos, and the source device where it comes from (‘Quattro’ is the name of my iPhone). From the More menu in the bottom right corner, you can rotate the photo left/right, edit the date, delete or download it.

Conclusion

I’ve only been using Everpix with a free account and for three days now. Maybe it’s too early to draw conclusions, but for now I haven’t noticed any significant downsides in Everpix. The service is really well-designed, powerful, fast and easy to use. If you need to store your thousands of photos in the cloud to have a constantly-updated, always-available collection you can browse from anywhere, then I certainly recommend you try Everpix. It’s what iCloud Photo Stream should have been from day one.

If you’re a professional photographer, keep in mind that, as of this writing, Everpix only imports photos in JPEG format (no TIFFs or RAWs), using RGB colour model (not grayscale or CMYK) — read this Support article for more information. Also, Everpix currently does not import videos.

Finally, the Everpix Support site is very helpful and informative. Make sure you check it, maybe starting from the Frequently Asked Questions.

Type:Rider - A typographical odyssey

October 10, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

#alttext#

I’m not much of a gamer on iOS, and I tend to favour puzzle and adventure games more than fast-paced shooters. When I learnt about Type:Rider, a freshly-released platformer (for iOS and Android) focusing on typography, I purchased it straight away. If you love type, you’re going to love this. 

For a more detailed overview of Type:Rider, and more screenshots that give you a better idea of how the game looks and works, you should read this article by Fast Company: Type:Rider is the Ultimate Video Game About Typography.

Type:Rider is available now on the App Store and Google Play starting at $2.99 / €2.69.

One little thing I would add to iOS

October 9, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

Have you ever picked up your iPad, visited a website or followed a link to a video, played that video, and thought there was something wrong with the audio because you couldn’t hear anything? Or, instead, you were startled by the sudden, unexpectedly loud volume? Chances are that in both cases you simply forgot the volume level you previously set up — muted in the first case, left too high in the second. Or perhaps you were remembering the level you set it when you last used your iPad or iPhone with headphones, and now you’re using it without, or vice-versa. 

I know it’s easy to check the volume level by trying the Volume Up/Down buttons, or (with iOS 7) to just enter Control Centre and look at the volume slider. But wouldn’t it be nice and useful to simply have a volume icon in iOS’s status bar, just like in Mac OS X? You could learn at a glance if you left your device on mute, or whether the volume level is high or low. It could even be an optional setting, with a “Show volume icon in status bar” on/off switch in Settings > Sounds. Yes, it’s a tiny detail some will find superfluous. For me it would be a nice addition, since I frequently change the volume settings when I use my iOS devices at home and when I’m out.

iOS 7, battery life, and the iPhone 4

October 8, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Software

In the first days after installing iOS 7 on my iPhone 4, I was paying particular attention to the overall performance, trying to verify any iOS 7‑related issue other users and tech websites were reporting. Contrary to other iPhone 4 users’ impressions, with regard to speed, animation and navigation smoothness, so far I haven’t encountered any significant lag or sluggishness that makes me want to go back to iOS 6. 

Something that seems to affect the majority of iOS 7 users, regardless of device, is battery life. Practically everyone I’ve interacted with has complained about the noticeable battery drain under iOS 7. Initially I was puzzled, because on my iPhone 4 I was experiencing the opposite effect and enjoying an extended battery life since updating to iOS 7. I even ventured that iOS 7 may have a better battery management, because in my informal tests it was rather evident that the iPhone 4 was draining less battery power during standby than it did under iOS 6.

Then yesterday I stumbled on this article by the Huffington Post, 9 Ways To Improve iOS 7’s Battery Life, and I started to better understand why iOS 7 doesn’t seem so battery-hungry on the iPhone 4. Let’s review some of the tips, and you’ll notice a pattern emerge:

2. Turn Off AirDrop When Possible

This feature is not present on the iPhone 4.

4. Turn Off Parallax

[…] The aspect of iOS 7 that makes everything look a little bit 3D and makes your background move around behind your apps. It also drains your battery. To turn it off, go to Settings, General, then Accessibility, then Reduce Motion. Turn Reduce Motion on to stop the parallax effect. 

This feature is not present on the iPhone 4.

7. Turn Off Frequent Locations

Your iPhone wants to learn the places you often visit to give you “provide useful location-related information.” This is takes up a lot of battery life and may also make you feel uncomfortable privacy-wise. To disable it go to Settings, Privacy, then Location Services. There, scroll all the way to the bottom and hit System Services. There you can also turn off Location Based iAds (ads from Apple based on your frequent locations). Then go to Frequent Locations and turn that off, too.

This feature is not present on the iPhone 4.

8. Say Goodbye To Siri

Unless you’re using Siri regularly, you’re better off disabling her to save battery. […]

This feature is not present on the iPhone 4.

9. Don’t Use A Moving Background

The new moving backgrounds that iOS 7 offers are super cool, but they will totally kill your battery. To change your iPhone’s wallpaper, just go to Settings, then Wallpapers & Brightness. Try out one of the beautiful new static wallpapers or use a photo of your own.

This feature is not present on the iPhone 4. Only static wallpaper images are available.

As you can see, in this particular instance, having the operating system tailored for a less capable processor, and therefore stripped of certain features (some of them rather unnecessary in the first place) turns out to be a bit advantageous. At least for battery life.

This may explain in part the difference in battery performance between the iPhone 5 family of devices and the iPhone 4. Still, I’m not following other battery-saving tips like tweaking Spotlight settings, turning off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (most of the time I have Bluetooth off, but I leave Wi-Fi and 3G networking always on), turning down Brightness (it’s always at 65–70%, left unchanged since I bought the iPhone 4 in 2011) or disabling auto-downloads. Even without taking these precautions, since updating to iOS 7 my iPhone 4 on a single charge — and normal usage — lasts about two days, which is roughly 15–18 hours more than under iOS 6. My temporary conclusion is that, while some of the most battery-draining features of iOS 7 are not present by default on the iPhone 4, iOS 7 still displays an improved energy management over iOS 6 — on this device, at least[1].

 

 

  • 1. For comparison: on my iPad 3, after updating to iOS 7, battery consumption seems unchanged from before. ↩

 

Giving Blippex a try

October 4, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

The other day, during my morning Flipboard-skimming over coffee, I noticed an article from Quartz about Blippex, a search engine I had heard mentioned a while ago: This is the first interesting search engine since Google. What caught my eye was this paragraph: 

One of Blippex’s key selling points is that Kossatz and Baeck [its creators] are fanatical about privacy. Though Blippex constructs its search results on the basis of data gathered from its users, it does it in a way that’s anonymous and untraceable to any individual Blippex user. This obsession with privacy allows Blippex to rank pages—i.e., decide which pages to show people—with an algorithm that Google can’t match, because if Google gathered the data that Blippex does, users would find it unacceptably creepy. 

Another thing I found interesting is Blippex’s algorithm, DwellRank:

Google’s base algorithm is something called PageRank, named after Google founder Larry Page. PageRank evaluates the relevance of a site according to how many other pages on the web link to it. Blippex’s algorithm, called DwellRank, decides relevance based on how long users spend on a site and how many times Blippex users have visited it. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have, independently of the Blippex team, established that the amount of time someone spends on a web page or document is, not surprisingly, a pretty good measure of how important and relevant it is (pdf).

I suggest reading the whole article (and readers’ annotations) to get a better picture of this alternative search engine. I have decided to give it a try and install its extension in Safari. I must say that its results so far haven’t impressed me, but Blippex is, by design, something that’s destined to be increasingly useful and precise the more people are using it.