So here’s my quick review of slide, after using it for 15-30 minutes:
- I’d love to have the sidebar thingy as a feature of flickr or have it as a plugin to the Google sidebar (feeding off of my flickr photostream).
- I’d also be interested in the ability for the software to scan my local hard disk and just automatically find them and then, with the click of one button, upload them to a central site (I’d prefer flickr) for sharing or subscription by my friends (imagine this as a feature to picasa — it does most of this, it’s just the “upload to flickr” part that I’d want it to do).
All of my photo management stuff revolves around one software package: picasa. I’m starting to introduce a second service into the mix: flickr. I’m just not sure where slide fits into this.
One thing that Slide hasn’t done, in my 30 minutes of installation and expirmentation: it hasn’t found most of the photographs on my hard drive, which is weird. They are all in a pretty standard place (the My Pictures folder) yet it’s only found other, more obscure photos.
One thing that I find to be a bit annoying is how when I mouseover a photo in the stream at the left, it automatically enlarges the image that I’ve hovered over and then it takes a moment for that image to go away. The enlarge thing happens too easily — it’s almost like I have to avoid that section of my screen now because if my mouse rolls over there, I suddenly have this big pop-up taking up my screen (and covering up the slider and preventing me from browsing other images). And, if I want to see an even larger version of that image, I double click on that image in the enlarged slide window and it takes me to a webpage (slide’s webpage for some channels or a 3rd party website for some other channels). When I do this, I would expect for the enlarged slide image window to go away but it doesn’t. So now I’m looking at the enlarged-enlarged image in a web page, I close that, I have to go back and close the enlarged and then I’m back to viewing the slide bar. Basically, this whole (important!) part of the app doesn’t seem to be polished from a usability standpoint. The dynamics should be slightly different I think, at least for the way I want to use it.
Also the slide thing can be annoying and distracting. I used the Google Sidebar for a couple of days (before I decided it wasn’t a useful enough allocation of desktop real estate) and I like the alternating single image in its photo plug-in a lot better.
So those are some scattered notes and first impressions.