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Introducing Facebook Camera

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Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#101

Post by ZeroGravitas »

clarky07 wrote: post #100
scotu wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now. With android intents (ok, not cool as pipes, but the idea is there)

You can do it on iOS as well. You can go from the facebook camera app to the main fb app. (Any app can do this, but the point of the article is fb so i used them as the example)

Is the link between the two apps hardcoded on iOS?

On Android you can have any camera app | any photo editing/filters app | any social network upload where each app is chosen by the user which seems closer to the idea of pipes to me.

Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#102

Post by timjahn »

smackfu wrote: post #89
niketdesai wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Two things people do that FB wants channeled through their systems: Photos & Chat. Replacing your camera app with FBs means that all photos go to Facebook, which also represents the most important content on Facebook. If your photos and your friends photos are all on FB then they go to FB. If everyone you know is on FB then you'll probably use FB to talk to them. Thus, the chat ecosystem. Because FB is device a…

Plus it's pretty seamless replacement. Same label "Camera". Same icon, just with a blue background instead of grey.

I noticed that when changing the location settings in "Settings". The default Camera app was listed immediately next to Facebook Camera, confused me for a moment.

I wonder if Apple will make them add "Facebook" to the app name to avoid confusion, since it's the exact same name currently.

Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#103

Post by nicholassmith »

I must admit, this looks great. There seems to be a couple of design choices that are a bit weird that have been mentioned below, but it's a solid bit of work.

But Facebook, why are you still cursing the world with your terrible main applications and spending precious development hours making additional apps? If you ever want to monetize mobile you need to make the mobile experience not terrible.

Take the team working on this, give them the main app, give them 3 months and let them go nuts. It'll work. It'll be great. Your users will want to engage more.

Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#104

Post by EricDeb »

How does this compare with instagram? (I have yet to upgrade to a smart phone)

I wonder if FB could have simply released this as a direct competitor to instagram and crowded them out versus shelling out $1B.

Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#105

Post by clarky07 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #101
clarky07 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do it on iOS as well. You can go from the facebook camera app to the main fb app. (Any app can do this, but the point of the article is fb so i used them as the example)

Is the link between the two apps hardcoded on iOS? On Android you can have any camera app | any photo editing/filters app | any social network upload where each app is chosen by the user which seems closer to the idea of pipes to me.

Yeah it's something that Facebook would hardcode. Click on this person and instead of doing something here it sends you to that person's profile on their other app.

It isn't like intents on Android, but from the perspective of Facebook it is probably preferable. They don't want you to go to your choice of photo or social network or chat app, they want you to go to their app.

Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#107

Post by Timothee »

dominostars wrote: post #34
JCB_K wrote: post #8

I really don't see the point of separate apps. The main Facebook app, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Photos...what's next? Anyone who can enlighten me why this would be a good strategy? Seems like unnecessary fragmentation to me.

It's the iOS paradigm to make feature simple standalone apps. Why do you think Apple has both a "Photo Album" and "Camera" app? And both a "Phone" and "Contacts" app? Many users upload photos to Facebook, so there's a huge incentive to make an app that makes it simple to do this. Even if the main Facebook app has feature parity with FBPhotos, it's still going to come with all of the cruft.

"Why do you think Apple has both a "Photo Album" and "Camera" app? And both a "Phone" and "Contacts" app?"

I'd say that in any case, they had to have Contacts and Photo Album apps for the iPod Touch and iPad.

Why also include them on the iPhone? Well, Photo Album has more features than the Camera app (access to Events, Faces…) so it might be simpler to have one codebase for a Photo Album app shared with iPod Touch and iPad, rather than trying to put all the features of Photo Album in the Camera app. For me, it's better too because it makes the Camera app more easily replaceable. (as seen with the OP)

For the Contacts app, I'm not entirely sure since it seems to be a clear subset of the Phone app.

Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#108

Post by joedev »

JCB_K wrote: post #8

I really don't see the point of separate apps. The main Facebook app, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Photos...what's next? Anyone who can enlighten me why this would be a good strategy? Seems like unnecessary fragmentation to me.

The same reason that one goes to "Camera" on an iPhone to take photos and goes to "Messages" on an iPhone to send messages. They do different things and it's clear when you open the app what you want to do. And though you can take photos from within Messages and can SMS photos from within Camera, it keeps things simple to have a clear intention for each app.

Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#109

Post by eric-hu »

JCB_K wrote: post #8

I really don't see the point of separate apps. The main Facebook app, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Photos...what's next? Anyone who can enlighten me why this would be a good strategy? Seems like unnecessary fragmentation to me.

I had the Facebook app for Android before they split it into 3. The version just before the split was unstable for uploading photos. It was consistently crashing whenever I tried to upload a photo.

I'm not sure what was the source of the crash, but I can see how breaking up the Facebook application into smaller pieces would make it easier for devs to maintain well.

Re: Introducing Facebook Camera

#110

Post by Timothee »

cooldeal wrote: post #79
freehunter wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's somewhat in following with the Unix paradigm; do one thing, do it well.

So when can we do $ camera | fb-photo | facebook | sed 4 | awk ? Chaining the utilities is the crux of the Unix paradigm, remove that and you're left with individual utilities that are far less powerful than when chained together.

It's somewhat possible though not very widely used.

Basically, any iOS app can register a URL scheme and be opened with that scheme and anything after that by another app. This is used for example by Camera+: http://api.camerapl.us/app-api

With their API, another app can launch Camera+ to edit a photo and Camera+ sends the user back to the original app with the data of the edited photo.

Facebook uses it for single-sign-on of third-party app. (i.e. user taps "sign in with Facebook", the Facebook app is launched, the user taps "Accepts" and is redirected towards the original app)

One big limitation of this mechanism is that it's very much ad-hoc.

Another existing mechanism is the one where apps can register themselves as being able to handle a certain type of documents. You can then open a document from another app.

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