iPhoto’s Mystery Meat Gestures
After downloading and playing around with Apple’s new iPhoto for iOS, I felt like I was teleported back to 1998. Touching and gesturing in different ways would make seemingly random things happen. I regularly unintentionally activated features, changed views, opened or closed pictures, and got iPhoto into states I wasn’t sure how to get out of again.
Great article. It’s impressive what can be done with iPhoto for iOS. But I tried it before watching Randy Ubillos’s demo and was confused, even though I was familiar with many of the features from Aperture. The buttons aren’t labeled, and I missed many of the hidden gestures. There’s very little help within the app, and of course there’s no written manual.
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2 things here about a user guide :
- Reading a user manual on the iPad or iPhone for an app running on the iPad or iPhone is not a nice user experience. Because you have to switch back and forth between the user guide and the app. A user guide requires another display. Of course, this could be solve if the iPad/iPhone was able to manage multiple displays which is not the case.
- I thought Apple was in the business of making products that do not require a user manual. If an Apple product requires a user manual for basic/common tasks, then it's a failure.
An issue with iPhoto for iOS is that:
- you can take photos with an iPhone but the screen is too small to edit them reliably.
- you can probably edit photos on an iPad with its not-too-small screen but you can't be serious about taking pictures with an iPad (unlike you're into self-inflicted pain).
@David Thanks. I didn’t realize this was available on the Web. It‘s actually way better than the Help Center app on the Mac because you can click the printer button and save the whole thing as a PDF. Then it’s easy to search or to read without having to click to show each individual section. Still, I wish Apple had written more of a “manual” (like for its Pro apps).
@bob The switching is really bad because (a) the help is not accessible from most of the app screens, and (b) it doesn’t remember which help section you were viewing. I guess it would be better to load the help in Safari and then switch back and forth from iPhoto via multitasking.
