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Pixelpipe, however, is the same wherever I go: between phones, on the web, or through the firefox plugin. That sameness is key.
I agree that a one-time cost of $5 (well, $8 probably) is fine. It's as good and useful an app as Gravity, which I bought for my 5800, but the single device limitation is a killer (for both, but more for Shozu than Gravity because of the nature of how it works). It makes sense, as it can't be cheap. I am not a fan of subscriptions, but a one-time cost (if it follows me and my devices) would be very palatable.
I also tried to login to Shozu today on the web and found it was not recogniing my username/password. Ugh.
ShoZu isn't just an application, it's a service. And that service has costs. There is the cost of development, distribution (granted, OVI helps with this now but still), advertising and operations (servers, bandwidth etc) as well as the mundane costs of running a business.
What can you get for €5? ... lunch? sure, but not a very good one! I for once wouldn't think twice about paying €5 euros for ShoZu.
Yes, there is an argument that the handset manufacturers should include this functionality out of the box but they haven't done as good a job as ShoZu so until they do, €5 is a bargain, especially when Jen Grenz gets a little bit drunk and talks about getting shit off your phone ;)
j/k ok, i'll pay shozu! i figure either they owe me since i have evangelized their app endlessly and uploaded 28000 photos with it
OR i owe them :-) either way 5 euros is nothing agreed! i used to help run Bryght hosting and I know how much those servers must cost!
So where do i pay :-) and how about 10 euros for just ninja-less :-) uploading functionality
i can't imagine s60 without shozu
on my iphone however i do use pixelpipe
Amen to that brutha! ;)
Problem is justifying that to a new/cold user who doesn't know if it's worth the money.
ShoZu need to start making money at some point!
In any case, as mentioned, I've moved to Pixelpipe, and have no intentions of looking back.
Awful.
I've spent most of the day trying to get it to work on an HTC Magic (where Shozu don't have a client). I agree Shozu has got a bit bloaty recently and the desktop client was still-born, but it works when it counts for me.
The price is more than reasonable for the features it offers - I've paid more for a sandwich. I'd also like to see some pricing for multiple handset bundles for 'power users', but I suspect that will be coming.
Somebody has to pay Shozu for the product they've created - the free ride was nice. This is preferable to them giving up or going under.
The Magic ships with 1.5 and the version of Pixelpipe I was using was downloaded from the Android Market today. It installs fine, but after uploading only a few images the account details are lost and re-entering them (successfully) gives error messages and crashes.
I'll fire an e-mail to support ASAP.
Ben
Awful."
Agreed. Suggest they take a look at this - http://thereallymobileproject.com/2009/05/the-h...
Or more precisely:
"Next, the sharing of that image. The default options are Gmail, MMS or Picasa, none of which I’m interested in. This means I had to download and install an app specifically for this function, Pixelpipe to be precise and - ugh - what a terrible, terrible UI. I was unsure of what images were going where and/or how to upload them. This resulted in erroneous Twitpics, un-titled photos and ultimately, a very unhappy Whatley."
Just select Share from the Menu button, scroll down to Pixelpipe and we'll open a very pleasant dialog that allows you to set Title, Caption and Tags. Press Share to start the upload and then the Home key to put us in the background and you're done.
The main application is really for users that want to upload groups of media (photo, video, audio) or text only posts to blogs and status services. I agree it's busy however it's not an easy task doing all we do on a phone.
You should also have a look at our huge selection of desktop solutions as well, the same Pixelpipe account provides a very robust set of options for media upload for desktop and mobile. Give us another shot and get back to us with any feedback to android@pixelpipe.com.
....
Hi Brett, thanks for the words.
I no longer have the HTC Magic (but I am still having problems - which I'll come to), I appreciate the detailed explanation. It's not entirely clear from first installation that this is how you can share your photos.
Maybe something to review given that I'm not the only one here who's mentioned the UI issues?
Since swapping my Magic with Ben however, I've tried to use Pixelpipe via Share Online on my Nokia. This morning when I tried to upload a 19 photos to flickr, and ONLY flickr - Pixelpipe didn't pick up the 'flickr' tag on the photos and you guys spammed my Twitter account with 19 twitpics.
Really, really not good.
Was this an error or was there something else I was supposed to do before I hit 'upload' ?
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=whatleydude+...
As I explained briefly on twitter the Routing Tags are all prefixed with an @ character. We scan the body of the post and look for corresponding tags associated with your destinations. If we find a tag that's been associated with one or more destinations we override your default services for upload and just send to those associated with the routing tag. So in brief you needed to include "@flickr" and not simply "flikr" as a tag to be utilized for routing.
Here's a few tips:
- Turn off TwitPic and other services that send to Twitter as a default destination and only enable through routing tags
- You can create groups by giving the same tag to multiple services eg. @friends, @status
- We create a tag with the service name by default however you can rename and add additional tags eg. Facebook: @fb,social,all. Now I can include any three of those tags and Facebook will be included in the upload as well as any other service that includes these tags.
Hopefully that makes things a bit more clear then my brief explanation on Twitter, customer support can be frustrating at a 140 char limit. Thanks for all of the feedback, we're incorporating a few of your suggestions now to make things a bit more obvious.
-Brett
Just seen your Tweet, (http://twitter.com/pixelpipe/statuses/2043971546), glad to hear that you're a) listening and b) there's a fix coming.
The Share Online setup *is* confusing and a step by step guide would be best, maybe for each OS/integration option.
'@flickr' vs 'flickr' - who knows? ;)
James.
Let Google make Android, Nokia make Symbian, Microsoft make Windows Mobile all easy to share images with.
Downloading the Share Online config file for my Nokia now...
Until Pixelpipe or ShoZu allow me to post my photos to my blog and actually put the photos onto my server rather than on theirs or Flickr, both of them are relatively useless in my book. I did have a nice exchange on Twitter today with the Pixelpipe folk and they are looking into allowing folks to host their own media and use Pixelpipe as the app to get the media from the phone to your blog.
£5 for Shozu is not bad, but it would be better if they allowed personal blogs to be a destination. I am willing to pay up to $25 for a mobile app that would allow me to put my blog's atom or xml-rpc script path and password into the app so that I can moblog to my blog/server without stopping at a 3rd party server.
If your blog supports Atom you can add it now at http://pixelpipe.com/destination/add/org.atomen.... And you can keep the $25, we've been supporting Atom since launch.
Available now in the Android Market
Pixelpipe has worked OK for me on the G1 on Cupcake, but both the Magic owners I know had problems.
Pixel Pipe does a good job but the overall Shozu interface was better, according to me and all.
“If you’re already a ShoZu user, you’ll be happy to know that there’s no charge to continue using it.”
You should be fine. The charge is for *new* users only.
I have tried Pixelpipe too, and again, another great service, although, i really need to sort out my services tied with this, as it appears to duplicate my images.
Another option I use, is Mobypicture, having set this in my Share Online setup, I can easily upload to Mobypicture, and ping automatically to twitter in doing so.
Tip: You can override your default destinations at the time of upload by use of Routing Tags, simply include the service name and we'll send just to those destination @twitter, @facebook. You can customize the names and even setup groups by using the same name with multiple services eg. @family
A small fee for a decent bit of software + service seems reasonable.
The Gravity guy (@janole) must of done OK by now. Hopefully he'll be back developing something else, providing updates, and so on, because of this.
It is written in Python For S60, so can be a bit slow and not so pretty but it works
Would have liked to give Shozu another go, did try a few days ago honestly, could not setup Flickr account! Gave up and now it's payware - I'll stick with Pixelpipes.
1. The addition of bloat - ZuCasts, etc - they slowed the app down, and made it use far too much resources, which made it unusable on the original N95 and the N95-3. In fact, I was a huge supporter until then. I posted several times on their forums, and never got a clear answer as to why we couldn't get a 'lite' version for phones like that.
2. 10MB vid upload cap - you can't use ShoZu to upload videos larger than 10MB (this might have changed in the past 2 years, who knows). When I got my N95, I was creating even 20-60 second videos that were WAY larger than 10MB, but I couldn't use ShoZu to upload them. Again, posting on their forum didn't help, even when I offered a 'Plus' subscription version with a higher limit (paid monthly or so). No response (and clearly no action, that was in 2007).
3. I switch phones - often. Being able to switch phones and not miss a beat is CRUCIAL, and everything I use thus far can do it - except ShoZu, as Kevin pointed out. Why would I pay for a service (and re-pay repeatedly as I get new phones) that's actually going to make my life harder?
I'll agree, ShoZu's interface is nice, and the auto-upload without asking feature is handy, but I'm not going to pay to download an app that doesn't do things I want it to, and that comes from a company who clearly doesn't listen to their users.
ok, so to up the ante
I'll pay 20 Euro for:
1) non ninja :-)
2) 50MB or higher video upload cap
...Roland 28000 photos via ShoZu to flickr and hundreds more every week
http://flickr.com/roland
This speaks to Dan's point: on its own, 5 euros isn't much. But it's measured relative to the free competition. And I've never bought into the "it's a service, they deserve to get compensated for their costs" argument -- business models don't exist in a vacuum. Just as ShoZu has a choice of business model and pricing, consumers have a choice of whether they want to buy in or not, too.
This harkens back to the flap over the cost of the Gravity app. Seems like largely the same thing: if you don't like the price, don't pay it. Surely that's the risk of any business, and we as consumers shouldn't be compelled to give any business our money because they previously used a business model that saw their services provided for free.
ShoZu does have some nice features over other similar apps and services. But it's hard to see those features justifying the price.
Also, in my personal experience, ShoZu's performance has slipped over my last two devices (N82 and E71). Given that, I'm more likely to seek out alternative solutions than pay the cost whenever it comes due.
But an app you like that works better than a free alternative would be worth 5 euro, I'd think.
My statement was more: *if * there's a good app, surely it's worth the price of sandwich.
As an example, I paid for Gravity (a good app, no complaints), but mostly I just use @dabr in the browser because it's faster.