Tag: Apps

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.

Fans of @hipstamatic: if you missed buying any Paks and found them unavailable later, they're all back this weekend. Once every 2 years!

— Brandon Lee (@sangsara) November 29, 2014

November 29, 2014

Apps, Camera Apps, hipstamatic, iPhone, Photography
An Old Man Tries Snapchat
If you have even a passing interest in social media and haven’t seen Casey Neistat’s video on how “Snapchat Murders Facebook”, you should.

Like my friend Vicki notes in this post, Snapchat wasn’t something that I immediately saw any value in. I installed it once ages ago, didn’t have any friends on it (a combination of age and geography), and promptly left. Then Instagram’s Bolt soft-launched in Singapore and got some interest going around ephemeral photo messaging, but it still isn’t something that friends in their 30s seem to want.

We’re a generation of digital hoarders; the people who abandoned other providers for Gmail en masse because it promised never having to delete an email again. Cleaning out my harddrive the other day, I found a folder of interesting photos I’d saved off the net in the early 2000s: movie posters, album cover art, photos of global landmarks, and the like, simply because the sight of them were scarce and valuable pre-internet! You have to imagine what it was like to live in that time. I ended up deleting almost all of them because these days, if you can put a name to it, you can find it online.

So behavior is changing slowly amongst older people, and much faster amongst those in their teens, but photo messaging still wasn’t something I needed Snapchat for. Every messaging app offers it now. The ephemeral twist is a footnote.

Snapchat’s Stories feature changed the way I look at the product. It turns it into something of a lifelogging and broadcast platform. I can’t name another app (still) on the market that lets you grab video snippets of your life, and share them in a stream that your friends can tune in to. The fact that clips disappear after 24 hours is actually the part I like LEAST. It seems Vicki’s with me on this, as she’s set up a YouTube channel to archive these Stories to after they’ve been erased. I may soon do the same¹.

There are some other nascent thoughts I have on Snapchat’s bizarre UX; the more I think about it, the more brilliant it is — breaking many of the rules we use to design interfaces for users of all ages, in order to create an exclusive, obtuse, game-like experience (inviting the spreading of knowledge by word of mouth) that seems intended to make it a success with a younger crowd. I may be wrong, and it may simply be like this as a result of being designed by a younger team. Additionally, its overall visual clumsiness (check out that ghost icon) encourages you NOT to take it seriously, which makes it totally okay to fire off imperfect, portrait-oriented, poorly-shot, but authentic moments without too much thought.

If you’d like to follow me, I’m on there as “sangsara”.
1. Sharing these vertical videos on another platform poses a slight challenge. I tried every video editing app on my iPhone, and just about all of them failed to stitch the short clips together without cropping, unexpectedly rotating, or distorting the videos. Even Apple’s own iMovie produced only a black screen with audio playing, probably because Snapchat’s video encoding/metadata in non-standard in some way. Amusingly, the app that finally managed to do the job perfectly was YouTube’s own Capture app. ↩
October 29, 2014

Apps, iPhone, Messaging, Snapchat, Social, Technology, UX, Video
➟ The Beats Question

Apple’s Pursuit of Beats May Foretell a Shift
By BEN SISARIO, nytimes.com

If Apple makes a major marketing push for Beats’s subscription model — or, even better, if Apple integrates Beats into its ecosystem of online services and physical products — it could mean a big lift for streaming.

Apple entering the streaming music market (virtually overnight) with the clout and installed user base of iTunes would be massive, and it’s probably not an exaggeration to say Spotify’s days as currently structured would be numbered. Looks like we’re in for the next phase of music industry economics.

Since the rumor surfaced a couple of days ago, people have tried to rationalize why Apple would buy the headphone and services company. Some good theories and analyses of both brands have resulted; I think it’s fantastic to have lots of smart people simultaneously indulge in a thought exercise, the answers to which we will probably have in the near future.

My resistance to the idea has largely been because I’ve heard several pairs of Beats headphones myself, and haven’t been impressed. It’s not about being overpriced, but being bad experiences, functionally. A pair of BeoPlay H6 headphones at S$700 is subject to many of the same criticisms one might use against Beats: they’re too expensive, they’re made in China, the margins are criminally high, you’re paying for the brand, and so on — except the H6s really do deliver on the music experience. I suppose many Beats owners will say the same, but there are an awful lot of people with taste who disagree. Apple’s brand, to me, has always been on the opposite end of that spectrum. Perhaps this is an effort to change who we currently think of as their customers.

The Beats Music service, on the other hand, has been really impressive in my short time testing it out. There’s a feature called “The Sentence”, where you fill in a statement that defines the mood and situation you’re in, and Beats Music provides the appropriate soundtrack. I wish Spotify had something like it. I said in a tweet the other day that $3.2bn was the complacency tax of being asleep at the wheel of the world’s largest digital music store, and @craigmod noted that it was a rather low price to pay, in that case. Quite true.

The iTunes reluctance to play the streaming library game appears to be a legacy of Steve Jobs’s (and the senior executive team’s) approach to music as a tangible possession. He used to rationalize the download model by explaining how people prefer to own their music, and have collections, possibly informed by his own experiences with vinyls and CDs and so on. While it may have been true in the early days of the iTunes Store, I’ve observed even in my own listening habits as an older person that it’s no longer true. Collections matter, but song access is becoming ubiquitous and hence irrelevant. In a world where everyone pays $10/mo for music, we can build all the collections we want, without having to think about first buying a digital copy or worry about losing access. Why should you? It’s $10/mo for the rest of your life and everybody stays afloat and happy. Sold.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Beats Music became the backbone of a new iTunes Unlimited offering, and the headphones remained a standalone brand, sold prominently (as ever) in Apple retail locations.

[I first wrote this entry on my experimental blog about technological change, entitled T-Axis. I’ll be cross-posting stuff here for awhile.]

May 11, 2014

Apple, Apps, Beats, Gadgets, Headphones, iTunes, Music, Streaming, T-Axis, Technology
➟ Turning Paper to Pixels with a New Game Design Tool

From Paper to iPad, Pixel Press Turns Drawings Into Videogames
Bonnie Cha, recode.net

I loved playing videogames as a kid, but I can’t say that I ever spent any time sketching out ideas for my own games like my brother and his friends did. (My doodles usually involved cute animals or spelling out my crush’s name in bubble…

The core concept is every kid’s dream: designing their own games for friends to play through, or just for the heck of it. But without some serious inspiration, what you can do in a short platformer level is very limited. I remember a D&D game maker tool for PCs in the 90s; that was infinitely better because you could create a STORY, and set up narrative funnels for your players. 20 years later, our idea of imaginative play can’t be restricted to letting kids carve out crude worlds in 3D chunks and 2D lines.

May 9, 2014

Apps, Design, Games, Gaming, iPad, Kids, T-Axis
LINE Pop-Up Store Singapore, May 2014
Japanese-Korean messaging app LINE has opened their first pop-up store in Singapore, on a prominent stretch of the core shopping boulevard of Orchard Road. It will run for a month and reap immeasurable marketing value from the high visibility and sure-to-grow lines of fans eager to buy their cleverly designed character merchandise.¹

I dropped by on its first evening tonight with some colleagues, and we spent between $20–60 each. I would have spent $100, but put down a pack of 100 art postcards ($55) at the last minute. This is on top of the $40 I’ve spent on in-app purchase stickers over the last year or two of being on the platform. I don’t think any other messenger currently comes close in terms of having built brand loyalty or monetization potential that doesn’t involve serving ads or selling personal data.

Standing outside and watching the crowd, I remarked to a UX designer colleague that no other messaging app could pull off something like this in the middle of town, not WhatsApp, not WeChat. He correctly observed that none of the others have strong IP from which to make their own merchandise to even sell in a store.

“And it’s all this bloody kiddy stuff!”, I said, clutching a plastic bag filled with stickers and a pair of mugs that look like the faces of a bear and a bird. “It’s not kiddy,” he started to protest before going, “Oh alright, I guess it is.” Takeaway: “Kiddy” is largely irrelevant in Asia.

18-to-29-year-old females are its “core target,” says (U.S. CEO Jeanie) Han, explaining that in Asia, once girls were using Line, boys followed – and then this young “hip” user base helped bring in older users “like a domino effect.”

“People, especially young folks, are really adopting our stickers,” she says. “The ratio of people who are buying things online like our stickers is actually quite high in the U.S., as well as the people who are using our games inside our platform relative to the total number of users, so we’re quite optimistic in terms of our market in the U.S.” — Techcrunch, March 2013

The crowd lining up tonight was about 2:1 female to male, which seems in line with LINE’s targeting strategy. There were a few people who definitely looked over 40, and everyone present was walking out with stuffed toys, diaries, notebooks, plastic folders, tote bags, mugs, badges and the like, all emblazoned with Brown, Cony, Moon, Leonard, Sally, James, and other characters I can name because I see and employ their images in chat conversations on a daily basis. LINE is lovable, obsessionable. Few others are by design.

Against Facebook Messenger’s 200M monthly active users, LINE is said to have virtually the same MAU (out of 400M registered accounts). In comparison, WeChat (dominant in China) has 355M MAU, and WhatsApp has over 500M. I don’t consider WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger users to be the same thing², and LINE has the greatest growth potential outside of its home country, especially in Asian countries with an affinity for Japanese culture, whereas the Chinese WeChat is likely to have a harder time. I’m pretty bullish about LINE’s success, even if their apps have a lot to improve on. For the record, LINE also reports significant revenues — $338M in 2013 — versus about $200M for KakaoTalk and $20M for WhatsApp.
1. Within minutes of our arrival, I overheard a mom asking her two teenaged daughters, “What’s this about?”, to which they replied, “it’s kind of like WhatsApp.” ↩
2. For one thing, WhatsApp is not functionally part of a platform, and probably won’t be merging with Facebook’s in the near future for various reasons. All the other messaging networks are at some stage of offering content, ecommerce, games, and enhanced communication services such as video-calling. ↩
April 30, 2014

Apps, iPhone, LINE, Marketing, Messaging, Mobile, Photos, Shopping, Singapore, Social, Social Web, Technology
Shuttered Out

At a recent office balcony party, I spoke to a colleague who’s also into photography (by which I mean he’s also afflicted by the coin-draining hobby of buying cameras), and realized that maybe I’ve made some progress. My last purchase was the Sony RX-100, which he also bought, and then sold, and then bought a Fuji X20, and then sold, and then bought a used Fuji X100S (pictured). The urge has not visited me lately, unless you count the $200 Q Camera which no amount of money on Earth can buy at the moment because they’ve only made one sold-out and poorly handled batch.

I’m doing really well on just my iPhone 5S and excellent apps like the new Mattebox (do try my Velvius filter), and Cortex Camera. You can also explore all my posts tagged ‘Photography‘.

December 14, 2013

Apps, Camera Apps, Cameras, iPhone, Photography, Photos