If you can explain a process in three steps, do it. And if not, then try harder, because it’s like a mind hack sales pitch and user manual. Picturelife (which Jamie shared in the studio) do a nice modal pop-up 1. 2. 3. on download click of their desktop app:
The old spinning disc hard drive icon is the only possible fault in this, but even that is smart in a way as it’s what people know (a 1. 2. 3. isn’t the place to reinvent the wheel, or even an icon of it).
Nicest of all they tackle the Finder based part in OS X in a really pretty way and leap the hurdle of opening a .dmg in a messy Downloads folder and having to drag the app to (after finding) your a Applications folder. Their .dmg opens automatically with instruction that just opening the .app file will move the app for you.
One last Apple security barrier:
And you’re into the Applications folder:
And their equally friendly install process:
Impressed so far. Here’s hoping my Everpix Spidey Sense is wrong for tingling…
The rest of the sign up goes is nice as well. Polish is high and feelings are actually quite good for Picturelife so far. All in all 9/10. Hoping it continues.
Update one: 10 minutes later, after playing around a bit. Very impressed. Wishing so much that this was a Dropbox product though.
Update two: (This post was written throughout the day in little 10-15 minute intervals) Plugged iPhone in to change and another nice UI dialogue box popped up:
Update three: WOAH! Spent a panicked few moments after clicking the above Backup button trying to figure out why my machine was bleeding disk space. I watched 6GB trickle away as Scratch Disk Almost Full message popped up all over the place before a friend (Ta Tim) at 54B helped discover that Picturelife creates a full image cache of your iPhone image library in User/Library/Picturelife/Storage/Images.
For me, in need of a data clear out and running on a meagre 8GB available, this nearly killed my machine and means I have to hold off playing with Picturelife for now.
What I saw was nice though, and if I was running with more free space, I might not have even noticed.
Main conclusion again though is that I wish this was a Dropbox product (case in point above when these iPhone photos here already on my HD) and also, I wish they had a native desktop app. Patients.
Documenteering 