Beta testers needed

iotashan

Hey all,

I need a few beta testers for a SmugMug service I'm building. I've finished the proof of concept, but I'd like a small group to bounce ideas off of, and actually put the finished product through it's paces.

I can confidently say that many of you will be excited when this thing launches in the next week or so. If only my photography skills were anywhere near my application development talents.

Just respond to this thread, and give me a super-brief summary of how you primarily use SmugMug. Those I pick will be PM'ed more info.

:barb

Thanks,
Shan

wellman

I'll bite. I'm a hobbyist with a pro account, taking mostly family/travel shots. I occasionally do portraits for people for a small fee. My SmugMug street cred is that I've developed AlbumFetcher and two themes. Looking forward to seeing what you've got.

iotashan wrote:

Hey all,

I need a few beta testers for a SmugMug service I'm building. I've finished the proof of concept, but I'd like a small group to bounce ideas off of, and actually put the finished product through it's paces.

I can confidently say that many of you will be excited when this thing launches in the next week or so. If only my photography skills were anywhere near my application development talents.

Just respond to this thread, and give me a super-brief summary of how you primarily use SmugMug. Those I pick will be PM'ed more info.



Thanks,
Shan

Markjay

Sure, test away!
I'm a Smugmug pro user with two pro websites. I do stock photography / commercial work, pet photography and anything that my camera can help justify itself :-) I've been a Smugmug member for about 4 years now.

I've been a google beta tester, an MS beta tester, and a few others of note.

Markjay

iotashan wrote:

Hey all,

I need a few beta testers for a SmugMug service I'm building. I've finished the proof of concept, but I'd like a small group to bounce ideas off of, and actually put the finished product through it's paces.

I can confidently say that many of you will be excited when this thing launches in the next week or so. If only my photography skills were anywhere near my application development talents.

Just respond to this thread, and give me a super-brief summary of how you primarily use SmugMug. Those I pick will be PM'ed more info.



Thanks,
Shan

darryl

Hi Shan:

I'm a total amateur shooter, with two boys, 3 years and 3 weeks. So that means a ton of photos.

I've been a SmugMug Power user for over 3 years, but opened a Phanfare account a couple of years back. Because their workflow is so much better for lazy users, most of my recent photos are up there.

By lazy, I mean I don't shoot raw, I don't post-process. If I'm lucky, I have time to figure out an album title, upload everything, delete the bad shots, hide the redundant ones, and maybe throw a caption in here or there. Oh, and I upload videos too.

Phanfare makes this ridiculously easy and fast. SmugMug, not so much. I've got a whole rant about this here, and I'm very excited about the potential of this.

HOWEVER, since September I've spent a ton of time on SmugMug working on a Pro account for my 3-year-old's nursery school. Tons of CSS and JavaScript hacking to make it look and work "just right". Hacked a JavaScript so that I can have a "Recent Galleries" box on the home page, since SmugMug doesn't think that's important. Hacked some Perl scripts to convert specially formatted comments into keywords, so that guests can add keywords (there is a site-wide password, so no worries about random folks adding spurious keywords.)

For preschool photos, I mainly upload with Picasa, so I'm thrilled that a new SmugMug-backed version has been released.

aquaticvideographer

iotashan wrote:

Hey all,

I need a few beta testers for a SmugMug service I'm building. I've finished the proof of concept, but I'd like a small group to bounce ideas off of, and actually put the finished product through it's paces.

I can confidently say that many of you will be excited when this thing launches in the next week or so. If only my photography skills were anywhere near my application development talents.

Just respond to this thread, and give me a super-brief summary of how you primarily use SmugMug. Those I pick will be PM'ed more info.




Thanks,
Shan

I use SM to archive my photos, and also to show them to friends and family. I'm a not-super-serious hobbyist. I typically take some pictures, work on them in Aperture, and then upload the picks to SmugMug.

Let me know if you need my help. Sounds fun!

rkalla

I'm happy to offer up some time to help test if you still need it.

DJ-S1

Shan - I shoot family, air shows, and in the spring I shoot tons of Little League and run a site for the local league. I process in Lightroom and upload using Smugbrowser. I have a Pro account.

Would love to test your app if you need it -

darryl

So Shan -- have you already contacted the lucky beta testers? What's the app category, anyways?

Pittspilot

Me too?

iotashan wrote:

Hey all,

I need a few beta testers for a SmugMug service I'm building. I've finished the proof of concept, but I'd like a small group to bounce ideas off of, and actually put the finished product through it's paces.

I can confidently say that many of you will be excited when this thing launches in the next week or so. If only my photography skills were anywhere near my application development talents.

Just respond to this thread, and give me a super-brief summary of how you primarily use SmugMug. Those I pick will be PM'ed more info.



Thanks,
Shan

I'm a recent (one year) pro ex high tech marketing, user experience and brand software guy. You can see my resume at www.linkedin.con/in/grahambird and my smugmug site at photos.brearleyphoto.com

Cheers

iotashan

I haven't contacted any beta testers yet. I hit a little security snag that hopefully I'll be able to work out with SmugMug. They're waiting on me to finish a couple things, and we'll see what we can figure out from there.

The last thing I'd want to do is end up exposing SmugMug accounts to a security breach, so we're going to have to take our time to figure this one out.

I've got one workaround in mind, but it won't be fun for me to implement.

We'll get this sorted out, though.

Shan

Pittspilot

Pittspilot wrote:

I'm a recent (one year) pro ex high tech marketing, user experience and brand software guy. You can see my resume at www.linkedin.con/in/grahambird and my smugmug site at photos.brearleyphoto.com

Cheers

Be great if I could type :-)) My profile is, of course, at linkedin.com (not .con as above).

Thanks for the heads up on the bad finger work.

Cheers

Graham

iotashan

After talking with our friends at SmugMug, it looks like this project is going to be on hold until the next version of the API is released. And, by "next" version, I don't think that means 1.2.1

That's ok... It gives me time for my other idea

Shan

batts

iotashan wrote:

After talking with our friends at SmugMug, it looks like this project is going to be on hold until the next version of the API is released. And, by "next" version, I don't think that means 1.2.1

That's ok... It gives me time for my other idea

Shan

If your still looking for testers when that time comes. New to smugmug, used coppermine and gallery2 for quite some time, looking at smugmug now, they all have their strong points. Mostly shoot as a hobby, spend the other time in front of a computer, mainly run linux, so might be of no help if the app doesn't run on linux, or I can't get it to run in wine.

darryl

iotashan wrote:

After talking with our friends at SmugMug, it looks like this project is going to be on hold until the next version of the API is released. And, by "next" version, I don't think that means 1.2.1

That's ok... It gives me time for my other idea

Shan

Bummer -- would've worked out nicely for school events, etc.