Together with the new iMacs Apple presented yesterday iLife 2008, their ‘digital life-style’ software suite for managing photos and movies.
Integration with Apple’s own .mac online services has been enhanced and heavily publicized in Steve’s keynote; exporting pictures from iPhoto and sharing them with friends is a snap; album previews, slideshows and carousel viewing in full web2.0 ajaxified style, making you almost feel like dropping your flickr account and… wait a second: where are tags ?!?!
Even in previous versions of iPhoto a very efficient tagging workflow and flickr sincronization was possible, there seems to be no news on this front -surely the user interface tries to keep tags away from the casual user.
Looking a little under the hood of the web application (View Source…) the enthusiasm further slows down; the cool and functional animation effects are done in Scriptacolous (and Flash for the ‘carousel’ view), but layout <TABLES> are found in the HTML. These are usually thrown-in to support older browsers, but looking at the Javascript we find over a hundred lines of code dedicated to browser sniffing, based on ‘navigator.userAgent.indexOf‘ checks, finally redirecting everybody but Safari2.0 and Firefox 2.x users to an ‘incompatible.html’ document.
As any standards-aware Javascripter knows, browsers capabilities and DOM support can be checked much more efficiently by other methods, as (even) Apple clearly illustrates in its own Technical docs for web content delivery; hence it is clear how the intent here was that of not letting people in, and make them feel it is time for the Win-> Mac OS switch!
As o loyal Mac user since the late 80s… I’ll keep my pics on Flickr!
Thanks for this post, very useful to know that .Mac isn’t browser agnostic. Thanks also for mentioning my post on using keywords and tagging in iPhoto for Flickr (which I’ll be sticking with, too
Edit: SproutCore a new MVC application framework for JavaScript was used on top of scriptacolous t build the galleries.