Bill Atkinson’s PhotoCard
Sunday, December 6th, 2009
Bill Atkinson’s PhotoCard at the iTunes store.
PhotoCard is an iPhone application that allows you to send stock or your own images to friends as email postcards. Looks quite good and Atkinson is an excellent designer and developer (having been one of the original developers of the Macintosh). You can also use it to send physical postcards to street addresses. Very cool.
PhotoCard at Bill Atkinson Photography
PhotoCard User Guide
Review of PhotoCard at Luminous Landscape
My initial review is in the comments below: My First impressions of Bill Atkinson’s PhotoCard
Here’s Bill doing a nice demo:
[via Dale Allyn]
pretty interesting for sure and he has some realy nice images.
Edward: I sent some cards out last night. I’m not super impressed so far but maybe in V2 things will improve.
Oh could you send me one? I think the email one are free right? if they are not don’t bother.
Hi, thanks for linking to us, and for the feedback. We’d be curious to hear what you’d like to see in V2. We also have a new YouTube video if you’d like to update your link. It’s at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMyg3ZXmsrk
Thanks Bill and Soux. I’ve changed the embedded video, thanks for the heads up.
First, let me say that using this app is fun and that’s what I’d expect from something you two made. I’m not sorry I bought it and look forward to using it a lot. I have yet to receive the printed card I made and sent to myself but my guess is it will look great. We’ll see…
1. While I find buttons easier than a scrolling list, the recipients list needs to be the same type of list as the phone favorites list. Or, at least, users need to be able to choose how names get kicked off the list.
2. I’d like to be able to make stamps out of my own images, not just yours.
3. Consider the step of showing email before it goes out optional (a preference). Once I know how the email will look, I don’t really need to keep seeing all future emails. If turned off (email preview) we’d just see the dialog that the email is in our outbox at the end.
4. Could I send a single card to more than one person at a time? Is the only way to do this in the email step (above)?
5. Would it be possible to save frequently sent cards?
6. Maybe consider a better way of “chunk editing” pieces of the card to reuse: Salutation, first name, body, signoff, signature.
Each of those might be clicked on to bring up a popup list to make editing and reusing cards easier. And, maybe this could be combined with sending a single card to a group as in a mail merge like function.
7. Would it be possible to integrate sending a card with the calendar so a birthday card might be sent on a specific date? This would require saving cards (#5).
8. The typeface on the name of the app on the opening screen looks odd to me. That entire opening screen needs a redesign I think.
9. Maybe separate the guide from the preferences, I wasn’t sure where the preferences were until I clicked on the guide which I wasn’t really looking for except to find the preferences.
10. Is PhotoCard a tool for sending photo cards or is PhotoCard a tool for promoting Bill Atkinson’s photography? This is the crux of what feels uncomfortable to me about the app, it feels like it’s not quite sure what it is.
In my mind, your images are there to use if I don’t have images of my own that I’d like to use. It’s not a matter of who has the best images, it’s a matter of which images are most appropriate to use on a card and that’s entirely personal.
Because the app is designed in such a way that user images are secondary to yours (image info, stamps, gallery design) it feels like I’m being hit over the head with your images.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of your photography but I didn’t buy this app to send your photography around, I bought it to send photocards around with a variety of images on them.
If it were a free app I’d take the self-promotion without complaint but given that we’ve paid for it it seems like you’re hitting us with a bit too much of it on top of the already paid price. This is true both in the presentation of the images and in the link in the email. Nothing wrong with a promotional link in email, just tone it down a bit.
Current link:
“To learn more about PhotoCard or view Bill’s nature photographs, please visit http://www.billatkinson.com”
Who is “Bill?” I’d make it read like this:
“This card was made with PhotoCard on an iPhone”
Make “photocard” a link.
Many people won’t notice the things I’ve observed about self-promotion, or they simply won’t care. In fact, many people will be delighted to have a stock of great images to choose from for their photo cards.
I think you can make both types of people happy: people with no images and people with their own images. It’s just a matter of subtle design changes that position all images on equal footing so that it doesn’t feel like you’re pushing your own images on users.
All of that said, I love the app and I’ve been sending cards like mad this morning. It’s fun and I know I’ll be using it a lot.
Hi Richard,
Thanks so much for all of your thoughtful feedback. Hearing people’s input really helps us design the best product we can, and well-articulated comments like this list are so valuable. Some of these changes are definitely on our list, too. We are glad you were able to enjoy it overall, though!
We have one more YouTube update to mention, too. (The final one, we promise.) URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSvDbdWFBSM
Thanks again for the discussion.
Thanks Bill, updated the youTube. Keep up the great work.