I have thoughts on the beta of Sunlit. Not sure if it’s all that relevant for anyone other than @manton but felt like he’d nevertheless appreciate it being in blog form :P

@pyrmont This is excellent feedback, thank you. I agree with pretty much everything you wrote. Two points: 1) @cheesemaker is still involved and wrote most of 2.0; and 2) we had a camera in the app and decided to remove it. It felt too cluttered and unnecessary to me.

@manton @pyrmont I was happy to see there wasn’t a camera built into Sunlit. Other apps are good at taking pictures. Sunlit is good at posting them, which other apps are not so good at.

@manton Apologies to @cheesemaker! I’ve updated the post to correct for this!

@pyrmont no worries! We definitely appreciate the thoughtful feedback. //@manton

@oyam @manton The necessity of the camera depends on what photos you’re talking about posting, I think. If you’re talking about a collection, then yes. But if you’re talking about making quick one-shot I’m here Instagram-like photos, then having to jump in between apps just to do this is really discouraging.

I confess I don’t really understand the cluttered argument. Reasonable people can disagree about these sorts of things but to my mind I don’t see why the ‘source’ for photos can’t just include the camera? That menu already displays a bunch of options, some combination of which I’d have to imagine are superfluous for almost every user (how many people are honestly using Flickr at this point?).

@oyam That was our thinking too.

@pyrmont The clutter was more about what happens after you open the camera screen. We had a lot of custom stuff in there. Although if we brought it back, it could use the default iOS camera.

@gerwitz I think it's important that the whole thing is simply "Micro.blog", but y'all are right that it's confusing sometimes. I'll usually tack on something, for example "Micro.blog-hosted blog" or "Micro.blog timeline".

@manton @gerwitz You’ll no doubt be shocked that I had an even longer footnote 5 in an earlier draft where I spent more time talking about this :P

With the benefit of having spent a bit of time thinking about it, my suggestion would be to use ‘Micro.blog’ for the service and ‘micro.blog’ for a Micro.blog-compatible blog (whether hosted or not).

It would be better to have a clearer distinction (and one with a vocal difference), but I think it’s preferable from an ideological standpoint to what I did in my article where I annexed the word ‘microblog’ (which of course existed before Micro.blog).

@manton Ah, OK. I see what you mean in that case. I think the default camera is enough but I hadn’t considered how a custom camera would be integrated.

@manton This is the essence of my point. If you usually refer to the hosting by saying “Micro.blog-hosted blog”, why not just formalize the brand and call it: “Micro.blog Hosting™” or some such.