Man, to say I’m excited about this would be a major understatement. We’re huge Apple fanboys over here, so when we got accepted to the first wave of SDK developers at Apple, we were stoked. Shizam went to town almost immediately and after a few months of hard work, SmugShot was born. (And as I’m writing this, we’re #1 in “What’s Hot” on both iTunes and the iPhone interface!)

So what is it? Well, we knew early on we wanted something very simple and elegant that did only one thing – but did it extremely well. We didn’t want a kitchen-sink photo-sharing / -browsing / -taking application. We already have a fantastic iPhone application on Safari, so the obvious thing to tackle first was actually taking the photos on your iPhone and getting them up to SmugMug.

SmugShot makes it incredibly simple to simply whip your phone out at a moment’s notice and take as many snapshots as you’d like. The photos will be automagically geotagged with your location, should you wish it, and you can quickly and easily enter a caption and some keywords – or not. Your call. We’ll queue them up and send them along to the SmugMug gallery of your choice – over EDGE, WiFi, or 3G.

And that’s basically it. Simple, elegant, clean – just the way we like it. If you’re new to SmugMug, you can create a free trial account right from SmugShot. You can set up a default Caption and some default Keywords to make entering them a breeze. And you can even upload photos that are already in your Photo Library, rather than from your camera (and you iPod Touch users can do this, too). One big Apple bug with that, though – the SDK only give us access to 640×480 versions of photos in your Library. I’m hoping they’ll fix that soon.

The really wild thing is how much I actually use the app. I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to things like cameras and lenses, and lets face it – the iPhone’s lens can’t compare to some fabulous Canon glass. But as the app has spread throughout the office, everyone’s learned the same lesson I have: There’s an awful lot of value in convenience.

SmugShot is so shockingly convenient and easy to use, it trumps the limited image quality for almost all of my normal everyday shots.

So go grab it from iTunes, read more about it, or even get some answers. Definitely let us know if you like it and what we can improve on – we already have our own list but would love to hear yours!

Getting lots of requests about an iPhone app for SmugMug. As you no-doubt know, we’re enormous Apple fans over here, and iPhone fans in particular. Most of the company camped out in line at the Palo Alto store (see stories here and here), we were the first photo sharing app with an iPhone optimized interface (and one of the first web apps anywhere), and we designed our awesome new video sharing service with iPhone in mind. So I think it’s no secret that we’d love to have rich, intuitive native iPhone applications for ourselves and our customers.

However, the iPhone SDK NDA is still in effect, so I can neither confirm nor deny that we have an iPhone app in the works, or even whether we’ve been accepted into the iPhone SDK program. I have no idea why so many companies have chosen to break the NDA and talk about their apps today, but that’s just not the way we roll around here – we like to maintain a great relationship with any partner companies, and Apple is a company we’re especially fond of. (Ok, ok, so I’m a fanboy )

If / when we get to build an iPhone app or two, we’ll do our absolute best to make sure they’re intuitive to use and takes advantage of all the power the iPhone provides. As you can imagine, we’re especially excited about iPhone 3G.

(Thank goodness Michael Arrington stole the wrong iPhone from me this morning. Whew! )

The state of video codecs online has been a mess and there’s been no clear choice, making it very difficult to do awesome video sharing. Luckily, all of that changed when Adobe finally added H.264 support to Flash.

Thanks to Adobe, we finally have a video codec that we can get behind and that’ll be great for our customers. And so back in December, we released a major new update to our video offering that’s 100% based on H.264. And it supports resolutions all the way up to 1280×720p. That’s right – SmugMug has truly awesome hi-def video sharing.

Today, I’m thrilled to announce that our Flash player is out (we used QuickTime for a few months while we polished up our player), so it’s easier than ever to embed on your blogs and share with your friends:

Here’s all the gory details:

• Upload almost any video format you like. We’ll do our best to convert to H.264 in an extremely high quality way. (Thanks EC2!)
• We’ll generate multiple sizes for you, so you’ll have a version that’s perfect for sharing on the web (YouTube size), perfect for using on your iPod/iPhone (DVD size), and even your Hi-Def TV in your living room.
• We’ll automagically display just the right sized video for whichever browser and monitor you happen to be using. Ditto for your friends. Example from my friends in Dallas hard at work on Duke Nukem.
• You can embed the videos in your blog, website, or wherever else you like online. And you can do so at DVD quality resolution – 640×480 – more than 4X the pixels and quality of YouTube.
• You (and your friends and family, if you let them) can easily download all the different sized versions of your videos so you can do whatever else you’d like with them, like add them to YouTube or burn to a DVD.
• H.264 means it’ll play on a huge, wide variety of computers and devices, not just SmugMug. iPods, AppleTV, Playstation 3, and the list goes on…
• Speaking of Apple devices, we provide a complete podcast RSS feed for your account that you and your friends can subscribe to with a single click in iTunes. All your iPods, iPhones, and AppleTVs will then magically stay up-to-date. All your online videos in your pocket, and your living room, all the time. Neat, eh?
• I’m thrilled we’re making good use of the OpenShareIcon project, too. Rather than use some trademark-encumbered, company-owned, non-open ShareIcon, we’ve chosen to use the real deal. Viva open web standards!
• One gotcha: Flash takes 200% more CPU to play video on the Mac than QuickTime does, so in-gallery, Mac users will still see QuickTime. We can’t wait until that’s not true – but that’s up to Adobe, not us.

So there you have it. I’ll probably post again soon with lots more detail about how great the integration is with Apple devices: iPod, iPhone, iTunes, and AppleTV. We love us some Apple over here at SmugMug.

Oh, and you can count on our video player to continue to rapidly evolve. This is definitely just a 1.0 product – it may have some warts and it’ll get even better over time.

So go wild – share your crystal clear video with the world!

Oh, and demand your video to be awesome (sorry about the quality – that’s the best I could find from Verizon. SmugMug *did not* make it all blocky and ugly):

Been getting lots of questions about the iPhone SDK in general, and a SmugMug app in specific. Unfortunately, I think we’re covered by all kinds of NDAs so I can’t say much, but here are some of my thoughts:

• The iPhone SDK is a monster, huge, awesome thing. It once again leapfrogs Apple’s phone way way ahead of all of the competition. Just watch – the scope and breadth of the apps that’ll be available is going to take your breath away. And they can’t run anywhere else, because all the other phone companies have been ignoring us developers for years. They’re all scrambling around, now, though.
• The iPhone Apps Store is a bigger deal even than the SDK. Yes, you heard me right. Currently all the buzz is coming from developers, but since I wear both developer and CEO hats, I can tell you the deployment and business side is at least as critical. Being able to easily and rapidly get software and updates to your customers is a nasty problem, and the fact that Apple’s solved it for all of us is a huge, huge win.
• The combination of the two is where the real magic happens, obviously. I can’t imagine anyone else doing something quite as integrated anytime soon.
• We are building a SmugMug app. It’s already in the works. Of course, it’ll be free. And of course, it’ll be awesome. I don’t think we can say anything else, though.
• No, this doesn’t mean the end of our iPhone interface for on-phone Safari web browsing. We’ll keep developing it, and we’ll keep integrating your feature suggestions.

If you have any suggestions as to what you’d like to see in a SmugMug native iPhone app, here’s your chance. Leave me a comment.

My iPhone Stocks application now shows me data through February 2008. I’ll bet yours does too – open your Stocks app, pick your favorite, and then select “3m” or longer.

Wonder if Apple has a patent on future prediction?

I’m happy to announce a few API-related things:

• v1.2.0 is now marked as stable. Everyone should be safe to use this.
• v1.2.1 is now the new beta release and introduces lots of new stuff. The docs aren’t fully updated yet, but you can read about the new methods and variables on this dgrin thread.
• A SmugMug API contest! Win an iPhone (or something of equivalent value if you’re not in an iPhone territory or just don’t want one)

I’m hoping we can make contests like these a regular occurrence, but we’ll see how this one goes first.

You can find all the details over on this dgrin thread announcing the contest.

Oh, and don’t forget that SmugMug API developers get lifetime free Pro accounts. So there’s no cost to enter and play.

Good luck!

Apple made a brilliant move today that’ll earn them lots of happy customers as well as lots of free press coverage. Everyone wins.

However, I’m with Scoble: Take my $1400 credit back, Apple, and instead release an SDK. SmugMug’s iPhone interface is totally awesome – about as good as it can possibly get in-browser. With an SDK, though, I promise – we’ll make the best mobile photo sharing app the world has ever seen. And guess what? It’ll help you sell even more phones.

So how about it?

Free idea for anyone who’s got a little time on their hands: Set up a site where those of us with rebates can “pledge” our $100 credits towards an SDK instead. Who knows? Maybe something will come of it with enough pledges.

When I’m not busy screaming at my iPhone because it’s hard to sync with my LOST episodes, I’m busy rolling out new SmugMug features specifically for iPhone with the help of GreenJimmy and BigWebGuy. Here ya go:

• Global SmugMug interface now. You can search & browse through the entire SmugMug site using iPhone, not just individual homepages.
• Added search to both the global and user interfaces.
• Added Friends & Family links so you can easily browse through your social network and that of your friends and their friends and….
• Added a Keywords browsing interface. I’m not really happy with it, so I think we’ll keep playing, but traditional keyword clouds don’t work well with finger tips on this small of a screen, so we’ll have to get creative. Ideas in the comments, please?
• Spiffy UI improvements to make things look nicer and feel faster.
• Fixed a rotation bug where the images wouldn’t properly re-render.

Enjoy. I know I am.

Ok, love my iPhone, but that just means that when it lets me down, I’m even more upset. Passion’s funny that way. Here we go:

1. Bought a season pass to LOST on iTunes Music Store so I can catch up.
2. Loving watching it on my AppleTV in my home theater.
3. Want to sync episodes to my iPhone to watch on-the-go. I’ve watched up to episode 16.
4. Selected “All unwatched” and hit Sync.
5. “Not enough space” error. Fair enough, it’s only 8GB.
6. Selected “3 most recent unwatched” and hit Sync.
7. Ended up with Episodes 24, 23, and 22!
8. Realized “Most recent” is useless because what you really want is “Next in line by episode #”
9. Realized that there’s absolutely no way to get episodes 16, 17, and 18 onto my iPhone short of manually editing playlists, which gets really tedious.
10. Blogged about it, because it’s the only way I can vent.

Basically, you can’t watch TV on the thing. Because you can’t drag shows to it (like you can with an iPod), you can’t sync them (because it sync’s them in wrong order), and it doesn’t have enough storage to “Sync All”. Even Smart Playlists don’t work, because you can’t have a formula that orders by episode #.

Isn’t this stuff supposed to *slurping noise* Just Work?

Has anyone smarter than I thought of a solution? Please share!

UPDATE: The magic Smart Playlist recipe to make this behave, thanks to reader Nick T, is as follows:

• Show is ‘LOST’
• Play Count is ‘0′
• Limit to 3 items selected by album

Still not great, but much improved. Thanks Nick!

Last week we released some great updates to our iPhone interface, and today I’m sitting at Apple in the iPhone Tech Talk workshop. So if you’ve got any feature requests, now’s a great time to leave a comment – there’s a good chance I’ll ship it today.

Here’s what we released on Thursday:

• A link from your homepage to iPhone if you’re browsing on your phone.
• A link on your iPhone back to ‘Full Homepage’ so you can go back to regular SmugMug
• A cookie so if you’ve visited your iPhone interface, it remembers that you’d like to browse that way. Don’t want it anymore? It clears itself if you hit ‘Full Homepage’ on your phone.
• Browsing your most popular photos.
• Browsing through your photos by date. Full timeline supported.
• A green & black interface to get more similar to SmugMug’s traditional color scheme.

Anyway, leave a comment if you want me to build something for you