I’ve done my best to conduct a quite extensive (and, indeed, intensive) test of the BubbleShare (Beta) service and have a number of points to make, both positive and negative.

Firstly the basic idea of the service that sets it apart from competing products is that it will allow users to tell a “story� by means of their uploaded images. This is much enhanced by the service not only allowing but actively encouraging the use of audio clips to accompany each image…this is an excellent idea and is vastly superior to the more commonly found text caption(s). The implementation of this part of the service is beyond reproach.

The speed of BubbleShare’s servers is, currently, impressive though this may or may not be maintained as the service grows.

The site is flash heavy including both the standard and enhanced image uploaders…these being web based rather than downloadable products. In use the enhanced uploader has frequently baulked at some of my images when then have been offered as part of a larger upload but accepted these same images when they are added individually. Unfortunately this has revealed other problems:

When a single image that is part of a mass upload of images fails to upload properly, for whatever reason, user input by way of clicking a confirmation box is required before the upload can commence…thus making unattended uploading of large(ish) collections of images problematic at best. The error messages give no indication as to why an image may have failed to upload properly and given that said images often upload properly when tried again there’s no way to tell if the problem was with the image, the service or any other part of the process.

The service sends two e-mails following the addition of a new album, one being for a link to an administration page and the other being for a link to share with others. Unfortunately this means that each album has to be treated as a separate entity to any other albums added to the service by the same user. This adds some limitations to what the user can do, in particular an inability to move images from one of ones albums to another. I’d prefer to have a per user login and password system that would allow access to a unified admin page allowing control of all of ones albums from a single web page and the ability to move images between albums.

The site itself is presented in a clean, clear and simple manner that makes the images the focal point of the user experience rather than having the site overwhelm them, the systems for slideshow, captioning and commenting work well and the slideshow editor is very easy to use allowing one to quickly re-order ones images…again this fits nicely with the site’s aim to “tell a story� with the images.

Feedback I’ve had from friends to whom I’ve recommended this service suggests that it could do with a system that gives advice on its indended use and its systems…a small presentation offering static images of each part of the process a typical user might address would be ideal…I would suspect that this is already in the pipeline for when the service comes out of its beta phase. Internet savvy users will soon work it all out for themselves anyhow.

The service is in beta form so such minor glitches as I’ve noted above are to be expected; I hope that this user feedback may be of use to the site and help them to move their site foreward.

BubbleShare

Technorati Tags: Images, Sharing , Photographs

 Few people ever seem to realise that the generic, unmodified,
settings provided by their Operating System are, probably, not ideal
for the Internet connection they are using and that they are thus not
getting all the speed and reliability they have paid to get. Tuning
connections isn’t difficult and though it may sound like an arcane
black art it can be done in a way that hides most, though not all, of
the underlying complexities.

 A word of warning backup is
essential if you are to make changes to your system. This is best
achieved via a system image…a type of backup that copies your entire
system onto another drive or discs, the software will, likely, offer to
compress what it copies and will be able to restore from this backup.
Imaging software is an essential purchase IMHO…I take an image of a
newly setup system with all tweaks and updates in place so as to be
able to restore to that at any time…far easier than starting
completely afresh with a new installation in the event of an
unrecoverable crash. Other images are taken on a weekly basis (or more
often) so as to safeguard all my settings and data. Unfortunately
imaging software isn’t available F.O.C. but it is so necessary that
it’s money well spent…I would advise against Norton Ghost (or any
Norton/Symantec software for that matter!) and in favour of Acronis
True Image.

 Now your system is properly safeguarded by an Image backup use the
following software to easily and simply tune your Internet connection
to best advantage.

TCP Optimiser 2.0.2

An interesting new service has opened offering a free system whereby one can send voice mails using any standard e-mail client…it’s an alpha at the moment (very alpha even according to the developers but as it’s web based rather than a programme you run on your own machine that isn’t of great concern)…give it a try…Slawesome

Key Features:

1. It works with every email client.

2. It runs entirely in the browser.

3. You don’t need to deal with attachments.

4. It is free.

5. You can make messages public and syndicate them out with an RSS feed (though they don’t have podcasting built in yet).

M$ have a nice little con in place on this link. They claim that to be a list of 1,500+ free e-books but if you trawl through the list you will find a considerable number of links to Amazon where you will be offered the books only in pay to use form…and in the M$ .lit format thus providing royalties to M$.

Nice isn’t it…it gets even better if you happen to know where these books came from.

The University Of Virginia has a generous offering of 2,000+ truly free e-books and it is from there that M$ complied their offering…here’s the link to the real free resource link.

Oh…and note they aren’t in the proprietary M$ .lit format!

It’s been around for a few years now but maybe you haven’t yet found the M.C. Escher gallery here . Of all the fairly recent artists he is likely to be high on almost anyone’s list.

 Take Google as a basis then add a bit of trickery so that the words you input become images and you have Woogle

 I tend towards fairly fancy animated avatars when forum posting but this one is a bit extreme even for me.

Picaboo is pretty darn good however it won’t be much use to non Windows users as the software they offer is OS specific

Flickr is OK but limited…who wants to pay for a premium account anyway? I mentioned one alternative earlier and have now found another.

 BubbleShare is easy to use and has an uploader available (unfortunately it’s only for I.E. so for those of use who are sensible enough to avoid that piece of junk it’s not a lot of use)…still uploading via the Internet isn’t difficult.

 I’ll suggest that both BubbleShare and ShutterBook be supported by Flock.

 It’s not often that you’ll find me moaning about bugs in Mozilla based browsers but this post is an exception.

 There are two bugs that are not going to be fixed in the next version of Firefox and will thus be in Flock as well…firstly Firefox has a memory leak problem…the longer you leave it open the more memory it will consume (it seems to stabilise at some point so it’s not a deal breaker that would force you to dump the products). Mozilla have accepted that the bug exists yet they have also decided that it won’t be fixed until v2.0 at the earliest…a bad decision IMHO.

 Second bug…some sites don’t render as they ought so to do…scroll down and everything is fine and dandy but if you scroll up you get a series of annoying lines across the pages…this too appears likely to be present in the Firefox v1.5 release and will thus also be in Flock.

 To my mind both these bugs ought to be considered sufficient to delay the release of Firefox v1.5 until they are fixed but Mozilla appear to be willing to ship product with them in place. Neither bug makes the browsers bad products of unusable yet they do annoy users and, surely, Mozilla based browsers should consider the “user experience” with their products to be a high priority rather than adding to the feature count while bugs remain in the core code.