.Mac Sample Gallery
If you saw the .Mac web gallery post the other day, you may have noticed that Apple has published a sample gallery online. Take it for a spin and see what you think.
My comments:
- The new galleries sport a number of features familiar to Mac OS X users, including a Cover Flow styled view (called “Carousel”), and the concept of flipping photos over to see more details “on the back”. I’m not sold on the former, but the latter is a neat way of presenting metadata.
- On the main gallery page, you can move the mouse back and forth across album thumbnails to see previews of all the photos in an album. However, while this works fine in Firefox, it doesn’t appear to work in Safari 2.0 until after you have visited the albums in question.
- The albums are reasonably slow to load. Not as bad as some Flash-based galleries out there, but nowhere near as fast as Aperture’s plain HTML galleries. Web surfers are an impatient bunch: No matter how good the photography, if the gallery is too slow, people lose interest.
- Some of the pages seem to continue loading indefinitely in Safari. Presumably this is due to the underlying scripting. While this is mainly an issue if you want to view the source, you may also find the constantly spinning progress indicator annoying.
- It does not appear possible to open albums or photos in new tabs or windows. This is a huge annoyance if you want to load multiple albums in separate tabs.
- As usual with Apple’s galleries, HTML and CSS validation fails miserably.
Overall, not a great effort. It’s surprising and vaguely disappointing to see that Apple has failed to carry their considerable software and usability expertise across to their web galleries. Perhaps it’s time to contract out this work?
August 12, 2007 #