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.
@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?).
@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.
@manton allow me to stumble uninvited into this thread only to +1 his last footnote. We need some public brand guidelines. 😉
@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.