SnapPages: Flash-Based Photos, Calendar, and Friend Manger

By admin July 17th, 2007

Editor’s Note: For a more in-depth review of SnagPages, see the comment by livatlantis in the comments section.

SnapPages is a new Flash-based site which offers a set of interactive applications to organize your social and personal life. From their current selection, they’re offering a Photo Manager, Calendar Manager and Friend Manager.

Photo Manager
Like most photo managing software on the desktop, Photo Manager provides a slick interface to managing your photos. Importing your photos is a 3 step-process, which involves creating an album, tagging the set of photos, and finally, uploading them. Users can manage their library with a number of sorting and viewing options, and even add photo effects, quick fixes, and crop, rotate, and adjust the brightness of their photos. For those looking for an exact replacement for their desktop choice (Picasa and otherwise), Photo Manager holds up well.

Calendar Manager
With the level of advancement things like Google Calendar and all have been showing, there’s no need to wish for a desktop kind of a solution, but for those who do, Calendar Manager may be a good option. There are several advantages like a better user interface (i.e. transition, blur effects) and several things that aren’t possible with simple AJAX. Feature-wise, Calendar Manager holds up really well as well: I didn’t find anything missing that gave, for example, Microsoft Outlook an advantage over it.

Friend Manager
In a sense, Friend Manager is a social network in itself. Across elements laid out on the screen, there’s a friends list, updates, requests, and ‘the exchange.’ The interface lightly reminds me of Microsoft’s spinoff Wallop, which is another of the few Flash-based social networks I’ve seen. Unfortunately I couldn’t get anyone else to join in time to really test the feature, but if it does what it looks to do, then all you need to do is imagine Facebook meeting a super-slick drag-and-drop one-page interface.

Overall, I love the tools SnagPages has to offer. Unlike it may seem, they’re definitely anot a “yet another.” Infact, some of them are indeed the first of a kind (i.e. I’ve never seen a Flash-based calendar app), and the tools do their job incredibly well. We’d recommend SnapPages to anyone who’s new to doing stuff on the web (photos, calendars, etc.) — give it a go before you point your browser to, say, Google’s suite of products. SolutionWatch also has an in-depth review of SnagPages.

Josh Miller

Wow, the interface is amazing.

[IMG]http://i19.tinypic.com/4lo0ty1.png[/IMG]

If the image doesn’t work, that’s supposed to be a screen shot of how it BLURS the rest of the ONLINE application while you fill in the upper most dialog box.

Cool stuff.
http://rev2.org Brandon

wow, that blur effect is really cool. Trying it now..
http://www.rev2.org/ Sid Yadav

I saw that, does the fact that that’s all done in Flash totally annihliate Windows Vista’s Aero or what?!?!
http://www.realityequation.net/ livatlantis

SnapPages: a review for Rev2.org
-livatlantis

Forethought

The first question on my mind after seeing this post was, “Why do I need this?”

Why would I want yet another place to put my events, photos and friends in? Google takes care of the first (very well), Flickr (with its awesome developer community-created derivate apps) more than manages the second and since none of my friends are in one single network, email and forums and blogs work excellently for me. But PIM and “information managing” apps excite me, and by the looks of it, SnapPages would be a rather fun test drive. And I could learn a thing or two about deploying Web 2.0 apps. And so I took a quick tour, was thoroughly impressed (by the interface and visual effects mostly), and signed up.

I can tell you now, in review, that SnapPages can, in fact, be useful. And really, that’s saying a lot.

First Look
The sleek, minimalist presentation of the first page (pre-signup) gives you an idea of the approach SnapPages has chosen to take: make it simple. And, with all the green-on-black, futuristic, apparently. There’s a distinctly Web 2.0 feel to it, although minus the bright colours we’re used to. SnapPages doesn’t confuse about what it offers to do; three friendly icons tell you exactly what it can help you with: Photos, Friends, Events. Where the “ohh… impressive” really starts is when you hover your mouse over those three greyscale icons and they fade into colour. That should be your first hint of things to come.

Proceed to the simple, straightforward sign-up page and the smoothness continues. The verification code — which normally appears in websites in garbled forms that even human eyes don’t like reading — appears in a nice, glossy box. With bouncing numbers and letters. Oh, and reflections. Reason can go take a hike; you’ll sign up for the visual coolness.

Verifiy your registration (click a link in an automated email) and you’re good to go.

I’ll be reviewing the Photo Manger in detail (since that’s the app I’m most familiar with in this suite), and giving quick overviews of the other two sections.

Photo Manager

The first app lets you manage your photos. Obviously, comparisons to Flickr will be drawn. But what’s more, you want to even compare with basic desktop photo apps, because what you immediately notice is that this website works more like an app installed on your system than something running on the web. You either create an album or use an existing one, create tags to associate with your photoset (you can also pick from nicely rendered predefined set), select photos to upload and watch as nice green progress bars (liberally inspired by those in Mac OS X) tell you how far into the process you are. It’s seamless; no waiting for the next section to load. For a Flash application — and I haven’t forgotten the platform’s notoriety for insanely slow, bloated apps, although that could’ve been my old 56k; you know, the sort that delivered download speeds of around 2.3Kbps? — it’s very responsive.

Whatever the case, it’s insanely easy. And it feels nice. (Even the uniformity of icons — the flower icon remains the same even with other supporting symbols in parts of the same section of the app — contributes to that “feel good”-ness).

Soon after your photos upload, you make a revelation. This app’s not trying to overthrow Flickr at all; it’s targeting iPhoto or Picasa! Even the “My Library” view is eerily similar to Apple’s iLife photo app. Thumbnails can be resized (in that familiar way, complete with smooth animations) and you have three views — tiles, detail and and preview — to enjoy your photos in. The third, preview, shares an uncanny resemblance to iTunes‘ (and soon to be in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard) CoverFlow, and the shadows and smooth animations really makes you want to believe that the developers of SnapPages have somehow got their hands on a web-version of Core Animation. It’s beautiful!

In another Mac OS inspired feature, you can do Spotlight-like live searches for your photos. And there’s even a trash (icon in bottom left) you can throw (and temporarily hold) your not-so-best shots in (although I didn’t find a way out). To give your photos personality (and a better name than “P7120110.JPG”), you can click on the “Properties” button in the toolbar to edit the name, caption and tags. And that’s a bit of an annoyance. For every photo you select, a bar on the left hand side gives you these very information, so why can’t I just edit in the stuff there? That would save me from having to visit another page. Heck, wouldn’t it have been even nicer if we could select (you can round-up icons like you do in desktop, or Finder, or Windows Explorer, or Nautilus) a bunch of photos and enter common details right there. Then we could add the specifics individually.

Besides altering your view, any other change has to be made through other little dialog boxes and screens accessed through the icons. And these are your options: Import (to get more photos in your library), Download (if you’re in some other computer and want to access your photos locally), Adjust (where you can do all sorts of basic editing like Rotate, Crop, Quick Fix, Brightness and Effects — although limited to Greyscale and Sepia at the moment), Properties (to change any information, as I previously described), Tag (for batch tagging), Share (to email your photos), My Gallery (access to a public web gallery of your photos), Embed (to create and embeddable slideshow you can post to your website). Aside from minor annoyances (and, because it so resembles a desktop app, the perceived lag), it’s all really simple and well-finished (except for a spelling error: “Choose and album to embed”, although that’s being really picky). The blur effect that puts a specific window/dialog in focus by blurring out (in a sort of fade) the rest of the app at the back, is very impressive!

So basically, this is a really deep, amazingly impressive, online version of iPhoto. Minus having to worry about the drive space (although I’m not sure how long that will last). If I find an easy way to upload to SnapPages — I really wish this excellent service had a better name — directly from my camera through a small local OS X app, I’d definitely consider using it to iPhoto. Of course, volume will be a problem, especially with my camera’s 7.1MP photos, so perhaps that local app will need to have the ability to rescale photos (in addition to tagging them). So do some basic management there, and upload it in idle time. That would rule. But for now, you upload through the online interface.

One major, MAJOR shortcoming is that EXIF data is discarded (or, at least, not displayed). I’d hate to find a great photo while browsing through my library months later and have no way of finding the shutter duration or aperture size. Heck, or even when the photo was taken; I don’t see any time/date-based organization available. The left panel simply lists albums and the number of photos in them.

Definitely somethings to improve on should a version 2 ever see the light of day (which also goes to show how high it sets its own standards), but definitely an awesome piece of software design for anyone to use.

Calendar Manager
Google has spoiled us, and I’m immediately asking, “Why can’t I just type in things for my virtual secretary to make sense of?” But this calendar app does require input of dates and event information the conventional way. The ability to subscribe to others’ calendars definitely adds to that “social networking” bit of SnapPages, and I suppose that because Google trumps of this in terms of sheer functionality, it’s appealing to that part of the internet population who like to keep in close contact with friends and family. Again, the interface is — excuse the pun — snappy.

I’ll admit, I’m not huge calendar user: my Google Calendar hasn’t been updated for ages; I have an old Casio PocketViewer too that I rarely use these days; iCal isn’t even in my dock. Perhaps all this relates to my not being able to carefully organize my days. But with the spectacular visual presentation we’ve seen in and come to expect of SnapPages, I’m thinking I should give this calendaring thing yet another shot.

So what’s the most spectacular thing in the Calendar Manager? The time input button. To enter a time, you click on a small clock-icon to call a small dialog with a slider, a time reading and – get this – visual representation of the time of the day. So 12:00 pm will show a bright sunny day (and a bright sun too, for that matter); 5:00 pm is a light grey with the sun almost down; 9:30pm with the moon up at the 10 o’clock position; 7:00 am with the break of dawn. Move the slider control for animation. Developers two give so much thought to time input must be interesting folks to lunch with.

You can add standard event reminders (with repeats and reminders, although I don’t see email/SMS reminders), tasks in the To-do list and create several calendars. A standard feature set, finished with a smooth UI with excellent visuals.

A drawback for me was that in week or month views, you can’t click on an event to get more details. All the additional information you get is through a small tooltip; you’ll have to go into Day view to get the details (in all its text-smoothing, crisp rendering glory, might I add). Another annoyance was how, when I enter details of a task after clicking on Add Task in Day View, pressing Enter clears the text input (I have to press the OK button instead).

So although nicely presented, I don’t see this as useful as the Photo Manager. Google Calendar, for me, still rules this turf.

Friend Manager

I don’t use Twitter, Facebook, or any other social networking site (save for Flickr, if it fits the description), so I really have no idea how these things work. I have indeed read about other friend-sites (with updates on what’s going on in the lives of your acquaintances) here in Rev2.org, but having never actually used any of them — perhaps because I can’t find myself into socializing through means created for that purpose exactly — I can only comment on their delivery of an app that looks beautiful. And it does. It has a simulation-game feel to it (the Friend Updates sections has a nice little “news” icon) and, from what I can make from the visual tour they offer, it even works like that if you have friends in the network. The green and black (plus more of the friendly buttons and icons) gives it that surreal, even hyper-real atmosphere, like something you’d find in a sci-fi flick.

So although I can’t comment on the functionality, the presentation is definitely impresses. Again, for a flash app deployed online. And like Sid said in the post above, “the fact that thatâ€™s all done in Flash totally annihliate(s) Windows Vistaâ€™s Aero”. Oh yeah!

In Closing
What’s significant of SnapPages, beyond the tools it offers, is the way in which it manages to run like a desktop app and signals the tremendous rise of the next great software (and everything else) platform. It’s all pointing one way: Web 2.0 is all about social networks, the iPhone introduces a new paradigm and tells the world that there need not be “local” apps at all, and startups like SnapPages show the tremendous power of online software and the great talent and drive among web developers. This is yet another step — a huge, spectacular, beautiful step — to the great migration. To the world of “everything connected”.
Josh Miller

except maybe the fact that the iphone doesn’t support flash…
http://www.snappages.com Steve Testone

Thanks guys for the two great reviews! There is some really great feedback and suggestions here that I can use going forward and I really appreciate it.

Also thanks for catching the spelling mistake. The embed was a new feature I just added about a week ago so I guess I missed that one.
http://www.realityequation.net livatlantis

Hey Steve,

You’re certainly welcome. SnapPages is a beautiful app and reviewing it was lots of fun.

There’s a lot I could learn about designing functional web apps (and making it insanely beautiful). I’ll keep my eyes on SnapPages’ development.
http://blog.snappages.com/?p=18 What others are saying | SnapPages Blog

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