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  • Darkroom Photo App Shows Why UX Details Are Everything

    Darkroom Photo App Shows Why UX Details Are Everything

    A new photo editor for iOS launched today, and it’s called Darkroom (free, with a $2.99 in-app purchase to unlock Curves).

    “Another photo editing app? What does this one bring to the table?” I’ve seen a few early reviews of Darkroom begin along those lines. It seems a sense of fatigue has set in amongst people watching this space, and it interests me to find that I don’t feel the same way. I’ve dived into every new release with optimism, because there are still so many ways to improve upon what we can currently do on our mobile devices.

    The Verge mentions Darkroom in the same breath as VSCO Cam, suggesting that the latter has a new challenger. That’s somewhat wrong-headed; they aren’t anymore alike than, say, how Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda are as ways of passing time. Both apps allow you to tune the look of a photo, and apply presets, but it’s how they’ve been engineered to do it that counts.

    Darkroom’s most exciting development, if you listen to what people are saying, is that it allows you to edit photos by adjusting RGB curves. Except that’s not especially new in the iPhone app space — Photoforge did it years ago, Filterstorm has that and much more in the way of professional tools, and there are others. The next feature to get attention is that you can save any of your adjustments as a custom preset, ready for future photos, and it’s like making your own filters. Again, this is territory that Mattebox, PicTapGo, Mextures, et al pioneered awhile ago.

    The reason Darkroom is exciting, is that it seems to have absolutely nailed the UX of these features, and made them feel manageable, comfortable, and pleasurable to use as a whole. I want to emphasize that this is hard, and that their solutions are so subtle and executional, they might not have convinced anyone of their worth if presented as bullet points on a slide at some early point in the process.

    Using other apps with curves and pro adjustments can feel claustrophobic and stressful on a small screen. I’ve hated almost every single one (Adobe’s own Photoshop Touch is so awful at it) and keep them on my phone as last resorts. If I’m on holiday and take a problematic photo with potential, I’m more likely to wait till I get home just so I can do it on a Mac than try to fiddle with it on the go. Snapseed is one powerful exception, but that uses its own control metaphors, not curves.

    Darkroom’s UI is blissfully open in design. It will likely get more complicated as they add more promised features, but I’m hopeful the team finds a way to keep this incredible simplicity. As you page through its 5 key sections (composition, filters, adjustments, curves, history), you never lose your place in the mental model. Nothing is buried in a submenu or out of sight.

    You don’t have to click a checkmark to save an adjustment before tapping another, because everything can be undone to an infinite degree, and one can undo hundreds of minute actions back to the beginning of an edit if necessary. Because that step (so annoying in apps like Afterlight, Faded, and VSCO Cam) has been eliminated, using Darkroom’s tools feels close to direct manipulation of the colors and pixels on your screen. One more nice touch: you can tap to the left or right of a slider knob to nudge it in that direction. Simple, but I can’t remember the last time a photo app let me do that.

    Loading up a photo is seamless. The app starts with a view of your entire photo library. Tapping a photo pulls it forward, straight into editing mode. At this point, you can swipe to either side to start editing adjacent photos in your library. Flicking a photo down tosses it back into the pile, and you’re looking at all your photos again. In use, it feels gloriously fast and uncomplicated. As that bullet point on a slide, “Seamless browsing and editing flow” wouldn’t have done it justice. This is the kind of feature that needs to be designed, prototyped, tweaked, and tuned over and over to create something subtle, but innovative. A team rushing their project out would have missed the opportunity.

    The difference between Darkroom and apps that require stepping in and out of different editing modes, especially when the placement of those modes is obscured, is like Apple’s own (now discontinued) iPhoto for iOS and the new built-in photo editing options in Photos.app. The former was a confusing mess with plenty of user-undiscoverable gestures and submenus, while the latter gives most users all the power they need in a more approachable UI.

    iPhoto Photos

    I’ve stopped using half of the other apps I’ve listed above as problematic, and forgotten the names of twice as many more. The ones I remember tend to be the ones I really wanted to succeed; I’ll unfairly single out Mattebox as an app with great technology and features, but suffered from confounding UX design. Countless times, I actually got lost inside the mess of buttons and menus that were hidden at the “back” of its camera mode. Thinking about the Darkroom icon sitting on my homescreen now doesn’t fill me with the same dread. I’m dreaming about using it later tonight, and tomorrow, and anticipating what will be new in the first update. Although its name is generic, I don’t think I’ll be forgetting it soon. I imagine it’s the beginning of a new phase of using my iPhone as a camera, one in which I can send better photos home while still on holiday.

  • The Druggists Craft Beer Bar

    The Druggists Craft Beer Bar

    The Lavender/Jalan Besar area has been a little too hip lately, and walking down the streets you’ll see several cafes with all too twee decor, or preserved signboards from the Chinese businesses that were previously there (the new stores incongruently named the same thing; the coffee place named Chye Seng Huat Hardware an obvious example), with many prices on the new menus a few zeroes removed from the hawker stalls they coexist with.Druggists is one such new factor in the gentrification of an area that houses the undertaking facilities of Singapore Casket, a small stadium, Hong Kong-like shophouses with murky windows through which racks of hanging clothes can be seen, and furniture shops where the products are still made on site and spill out onto the road. It is guilty of all the aforementioned crimes: it’s a craft beer joint with an interior made to look like a traditional Chinese diner, complete with marble tabletops and mosaic flooring; the sign above the front door reads “Chinese Druggists Association”, looking straight out of 60s Chinatown; and a pint will run you up to $21 while bottles of Tiger at the kopitiam across the street can’t be more than $5.But who cares, because you’re there for 23 taps of craft beers imported from across the globe, and they don’t take your VISA at the hawker centers anyway. There’s no way this stuff was going to come cheap, but I’ll tell you what, they make it easy to try a bunch of them. You can get any beer in a half-pint size that’s reasonably priced at about 53% of a full pint. I never understood those bars where the two sizes are something like $12 and $15, and happily, that’s not a problem at Druggists. (What a name! I can’t stand typing it.)If you go to the bathroom, you’ll find the tap over the sink is an actual beer tap, which is a clever touch. The airconditioned interior is enclosed and all hard surfaces, which makes it noisy and difficult to have a conversation, which isn’t so clever. The two tables outside fare much better, and you can enjoy your imported IPAs with the cultural dissonance of a nearby Chinese banner ad (yes, the offline kind) advertising a dodgy sounding sleep/health service for $10-40. It’s delicious.119 Tyrwhitt Road
    Singapore 207547

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  • Singaporean Telcos and Their Chinese Mobile Gambit

    One of the immutable truths of living in Singapore and reading our national broadsheet, The Straits Times, is that your Saturday morning news will be interrupted by three large and distinctly color-coded blocks of full-page advertising taken out by the major telcos: red for Singtel, green for StarHub, and orange for M1.

    In the late 90s, the brands advertised consisted mainly of Nokia, Motorola, Alcatel, Sony-Ericsson, with a few models from minor players like Sharp, HTC, and Panasonic. You’ve probably recognized the ones still around. Apart from a few new entrants like Apple, Samsung, and LG, the Saturday ad landscape was quite stable for over a decade.

    Something started happening this year, around the time Xiaomi launched local operations — their first market outside of the Chinese territories. New brands have started to share space alongside the established premium brands. Oppo/OnePlus. Huawei. Asus. ZTE. All very competitive spec for spec, dollar for dollar.

    It’s significant that these Chinese-designed products now share equal space with the Samsungs and LGs in expensive telco media buys, in one of the world’s most saturated and advanced smartphone markets.1 There are similar products coming out of other Asian countries2, but the Chinese brands have far more visibility here.

    I won’t go into how Xiaomi employs a differentiated, social media-driven sales model, but I will say that they got a lot of positive press at the start, driving home the idea that they offered comparable quality and reliability at a fraction of the cost. But they’ve been the only ones to get such an image in the mainstream mind, to my knowledge.

    The rest are coming into town aggressively — Oppo opened a flagship store at Suntec City, a central mall, and I swear I’ve seen a Huawei store along Orchard Road — but their cachet seems strongest amongst the small group of tech and Android enthusiasts attracted to low-cost, high-value devices, which are replaced frequently.3 These are not mass market items yet, and I wonder when their moment will come, if at all.

    What interests me is why the telcos are throwing their weight behind these entrants. Are they a bargaining chip to negotiate better hardware prices with the others, regardless of sales? Or do the postpaid 4 margins on selling already-cheap Chinese phones to consumers just look that much better? Or could it be driven by actual market demand?

    My leading theory is that it’s simply a reactionary move that doesn’t consider the longer-term effects of promoting these price-disruptive products. Why? Because telcos are instinctively programmed to serve products at every available price point.

    But the low price, contract-free nature of how consumers can otherwise obtain these devices is a threat to the lucrative business of locking people into contracts. Including such devices alongside premium devices in weekly advertising validates them. In the past, doing the same with a $50 Alcatel featurephone and a $500 Nokia “multimedia computer” was apples and oranges. Now, the products at both price points are much more similar, and one of them doesn’t need to be paid off in monthly installments. Legitimising cheaper smartphones inspires potential postpaid customers to simply buy a contract-free phone online (or pick one up in a store), and then save with a prepaid mobile line instead. At least that explains why Oppo is paying downtown rent on a flagship store. The telco strategy, though, that isn’t so clear.

    1. As of January 2014, Singapore had 87% smartphone penetration, with 29% of people owning more than one device. Anecdotally, the vast majority are on subsidized/contracted premium devices: iPhones, Galaxy S and Note models, etc. ↩
    2.  Joi Ito has a post about visiting Shenzhen that may be enlightening. ↩
    3. I think of this one friend as an edge case, but it’d be interesting if there were more like her: a former iPhone user, she found herself too clumsy to trust with expensive phones (they were smashed, stolen, or fell into toilets), and now uses Xiaomis because they are pretty much disposable at around USD$140 a pop. ↩
    4. Singapore has a bit in common with the U.S. phone market, in that only a minority pay full price or even know what the actual prices of their phones are. Everyone else pays a smaller sum upfront, with the rest of the device cost bundled into monthly fees. Some of the new Chinese phones are free/virtually free at their subsidized prices, but so are older iPhones and Samsungs, and it’s hard to see the price advantage lasting. For any brand that doesn’t enjoy the recognition of a Xiaomi, that window may close when current large-screened iPhones get priced down. ↩
  • Akihabara Park, Real vs. Virtual Photography

    Akihabara Park, Real vs. Virtual Photography

    There’s this spot in Akihabara Park beside the designated smoking area, across from Yodobashi Camera’s rear exit, where I’ve taken the same photo twice; on the second occasion purely because it was a beautiful evening and I suddenly remembered taking the first photo and wanted to replicate it from memory without referring to my Flickr account. They turned out pretty close.

    The other day while playing the game Akiba’s Trip on my PS Vita, I decided to visit the same spot to try and take it again with the in-game camera feature (the title is quite an accurate recreation of the gaming/anime/gadget town); again trying to find the same spot from memory.

    The level of detail is surprising, and this is just for one building out of many. I even got the same corner of the little rain shelter peeking in from the left. Makes me feel like I should visit again sometime soon.

  • New Power Generation

    New Power Generation

    The rumors about Apple switching from MagSafe to USB-C as a charging port standard are starting lots of conversations, and my own reaction to hearing that was “What? Why?”. But when I think about it, I really like that I can charge almost everything in my bag via microUSB these days, regardless of brand and manufacturer. My Sony camera and PS Vita, Beats noise-canceling headphones, Jawbone Bluetooth headset, Logitech UE portable speaker. Last I remember reading, the EU had mandated mobile phone makers use a common charging standard, and Apple got around it by supplying a microUSB-to-Lightning adapter for iPhones.

    And while Lightning is a great improvement upon microUSB that no one else would have made, the benefits of keeping just one cable in your bag for your power bank can’t be overstated. Less to lose, less to keep organized in a pouch or whatever, and less clutter on your desk when plugged into a charger. The main exceptions in my daily life apart from Apple devices are my wearables (UP24 and Pebble); for obvious waterproofing and form factor reasons they went with proprietary designs. The Apple Watch will probably replace both of them for me, but I’m not looking forward to buying and carrying a second conductive charging thing for it. They don’t look small, cheap, or durable.

    Disclaimer: This somehow became a gear post, so I’ve added Amazon affiliate links to see what happens. These are all great things to buy!

  • Thoughts on Apple Watch’s Pricing, Upgradability, and Luxury Positioning

    Thoughts on Apple Watch’s Pricing, Upgradability, and Luxury Positioning

    Neil Cybart, at Above Avalon on Apple Watch’s Secret Weapon:

    Several luxury watchmakers have given hints that they think a smartwatch’s lack of timelessness guarantees traditional luxury watches will not be threatened by this new crop of wrist gadgets. I’m not so sure that logic will stand the test of time.

    The discussions to come after the Apple Watch arrives and sells in numbers (and at prices) alarming to existing watch brands will be focused on luxury as a notion in flux, affected for the first time by technological utility in the form of personalization. Valuing features over the intangible lies in opposition to the definition of luxury, but the wrist may be where the two worlds come together. After all, you can only wear one watch at a time, and a smartwatch’s absence from one day to the next is glaring once its features have become habit. Apart from providing large margins for Apple, the Edition watch exists to allow luxury watch customers the  benefits of a smartwatch. It opens the door of their resistance a crack, but won’t debut in a position to steal meaningful profit share, which is the real danger to a complacent luxury watch industry — it’s a time bomb with years on the clock.

    The post concludes with the suggestion that a hypothetical $7,500 Apple Watch Edition will not be designed to last long; predicting that it will not be upgradable as some have suggested it needs to be. In other words, its class of buyers (inference: rich, Chinese, digitally savvy, all of the above) will get a new one every few years despite the price. Despite being made of solid gold, you will not buy one as an investment or potential heirloom.

    I don’t think Cybart backs up this assumption very well, leaning largely on the cottage industry that has sprung up around customized gold and wood iPhone 6es, but I am inclined to believe in the same outcome: success whether Apple Watches are upgradable or not, although my personal preference would be for upgradable, owing to the size of my wallet.1

    That they’ve announced the opening price of an Apple Watch Sport at $349 signals a belief that it will be a significant mass market seller, regardless of its sporty positioning. A large group of people will choose the Sport version because they want an Apple Watch/are curious, and it’s simply the one within their reach. If the price difference between the Sport and the standard model were relatively insignificant (say, $349 vs. $499), they would probably have announced the standard pricing too. That they didn’t, could suggest a belief that pricing is less relevant in the decision making of Apple Watch and Apple Watch Edition customers.

    My guess is that the standard model will be in the range of $800-1200, possibly upgradable for at least one future generation, and the Edition model will be easily upwards of $8000 and upgradable as well. As a point of differentiation, I expect the Sport models will not be upgradable.

    I’d like to believe that the straps and their locking mechanisms are also designed to be used for many generations of Apple Watch, which would mean dimensions such as the thickness of the case will be stable for years, but we’ve seen Apple revise accessories/standards without hesitation if it means allowing a better product to come to market. Hence, I wouldn’t be surprised if a third-generation Apple Watch mandated all new straps.

    In terms of mix, I’d wager an approximate 60% Sport, 30% Apple Watch, and a maximum of 10% Edition in the first year. At the prices above, the 10% sales of Edition watches will probably drive half the overall revenue.

    But I could be wrong about upgrades. In conversation about this a few months ago, as part of an office podcast we’re still trying to get off the ground, I recall speculating that the Chinese luxury factor could be bigger than anyone expects right now. It’s well known that tens of thousands of dollars are nonchalantly dropped on leather bags and other so-called Veblen goods on a regular basis by Chinese customers, and this no doubt includes timepieces costing 10x more than Apple would ever charge for an Edition watch. If the Edition series was expressly designed to take advantage of conspicuous consumption in China (in volume, followed by the rest of the world), then we’ll see it when they announce that the watch cannot be upgraded, and is inherently disposable. What’s flashier than wearing a gold watch that says you can afford to get a new one every year or two?

    1. As I understand it, the recent release of WatchKit details suggested that almost all processing in Watch apps will take place in the CPU of the companion iPhone, not the Watch’s S1 processor. But in a release of the software scheduled for late 2015, the Watch will gain the ability to run native apps. The delay may be down to the software not being ready now, although the shipping hardware may already be equipped to handle it. But it’s hard to believe this later update won’t lead to a degraded experience such as shorter battery life. Having the option of bringing a new and expensive Apple Watch in for a relatively low-cost hardware upgrade in early 2016 seems like a fair proposition. This could mean an annual tech refresh cycle, but a biennial hardware (body) cycle. ↩
  • Vintage Poster Exhibition at ION Orchard

    Vintage Poster Exhibition at ION Orchard

    Came across an exhibition of beautiful vintage posters at ION Orchard last night. It’s on till tomorrow (Level 4, ION Art), and presented by a gallery from HK. If you want to own any of them, they’re between $1500-3000 from what I saw.

    Picture This gallery

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  • Hipstamatic Vault Reopens — Old Friends for Sale

    Hipstamatic Vault Reopens — Old Friends for Sale

    The Hipstamatic iPhone camera app is in the habit of releasing new “HipstaPaks” of gear (each one typically has a new “lens” and “film”; occasionally a “flash”) every month. Some of these disappear awhile later, to keep the available collection manageable and, I suppose, to create some artificial scarcity around their releases.

    I discovered this a couple of weekends ago when I wanted the Swedish-themed Södermalm Pak and discovered it missing. I regularly buy everything they offer, not the idea of not having some drove me crazy. I promptly bought the remaining two or three I did not already have, proving their marketing technique works.

    So if you also have an obsessive nature and need to have a complete Hipstamatic pack collection, this weekend will feel like Christmas has come early because they’re opening their “HipstaVault”, with almost everything from the past available once more.

    As far as I can tell from Googling, the last time this happened was in 2012. I didn’t know it would actually happen again, so… predictably, I’ve now bought everything I missed.