SmugMug’s Craig Meakin downs a 7×7 for Windows 7 by Chris MacAskill

First, let me preface this by saying this is a great way to kill yourself, and that I rarely eat meat or cheese, let alone 7 patties and 7 slices.  Please go read this book and this one if you’d like to know how I stay skinny, healthy, cancer- and heart-disease free.  Except when Windows 7 isn’t driving our company mentally insane.

So our Windows 7 copies arrived today, and some moron (my brother) decided that SmugMug needed to have a Windows 7 launch party like everyone else in the world.  Except unlike everyone else in the world, we needed to eat 7×7s at In-N-Out Burger.  (Yes, that’s 7 beef patties and 7 slices of cheese on each burger).  And we needed 7 of them, which meant seven Smuggies.

So with the Birthday Boy (a copy of Windows 7) in hand, off we went to In-N-Out.  Dude taking our order explained they no longer make 7×7s (we’ve ordered larger in the past, I’ve seen photos of 100×100s), and that 4×4s were as large as they could go.  We begged and pleaded, then called In-N-Out corporate HQ for special dispensation.  No such luck – 4×4s are the max from on-high.

SmugMug builds their own 7×7 burgers at In-N-Out by Chris MacAskill

That’s ok, we can do math.  7 4×4s + 7 3×3s, plus a little manual dexterity, and we had accomplished our unholy feat:  Windows 7 with seven 7×7 burgers.  Better yet, 5 of us actually managed to eat the whole thing. (I even ate all 4 buns, alone among our triumphant victors).

Seven SmugMugs eat seven 7×7 burgers at In-N-Out for Windows 7 by Chris MacAskill

Whew.

The seven 7×7s race is on! by Chris MacAskill

Welcome to the world, Windows 7!

SmugMug’s Craig Meakin is in it to win it! by Chris MacAskill

Now, O Wondrous Wizard of Windows, can you please tell Internet Explorer 8 to get with the program?  It *really* needs a speed boost, support for rounded corners plus gradients, and by all means, JPEG/GIF/PNG favicons!  Thanks!

See all the SmugMug Windows 7 party photos.

UPDATE: Canon, whom I love, has requested that Vincent take the video down.  As a courtesy to both Vincent and Canon, we have done so, but hope to put it back up again as soon as they give us the green light.  Read more about it over on Vincent’s blog.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Related posts:

• Amazing Canon 5D MkII HD video footage!
• First 1080p video from Canon’s new 5D MkII – Amazing!

A rotten little apple by Ashley Harding

Apple has had a nasty Safari bug since December which breaks SmugMug, Facebook, Gmail, and lots of US banks.

3 months later, it’s still not fixed. Your only option is to use Firefox if you’re affected.

Apple’s known about the problem since December, and has lots of internal bugs on the issue (30+ I last heard). (For my Apple readers, here’s our bug on the subject and the one it was marked as a duplicate of).

I’ve done everything I know how to get this resolved – Apple employees have been internally working on our behalf, we have an AppleCare Enterprise Support case open (#332101), I tried to open an ADC Premier case (it was denied because they don’t “provide code-level support for content creation issues” whatever that means). Still no luck.

Apparently this is fixed in Mac OS X 10.5.7. We have the latest seed, so we’re going to find out, but 10.5.7 is likely a month or more away from shipping, so expect this stuff to be be broken at least until then. Use Firefox.

Safari happens to be my favorite browser, so this is especially disheartening. The good news is you may not be affected. Not everyone running 10.5.6 with Safari is, for some reason, but lots of you are. You’ll know you are if you see SmugMug galleries which appear to be empty (but aren’t) or see ugly white pages with undecipherable error messages. For that, I apologize – I really wish we could help but we can’t. You can help yourself, though – use Firefox.

Put another way, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, sits on Apple’s board of directors. Gmail has also been broken for 3 months. Apparently he’s powerless too.

Yahoo! in cloud OR Hadoop? (Яху в облаках) by Alexander & Natalie

tl;dr: Yahoo adds SmugMug support to Profiles. Windows Live coming. Lots of other services, too.

Wow, what a pleasant surprise! Woke up this morning to this story on TechCrunch about 20 new services they’d added to Yahoo Profiles (here’s mine). Lo and behold, SmugMug is one of them! In fact, in Yahoo’s blog post about the new features, SmugMug was the one mentioned for photos. Cool!

As far as I know, we haven’t talked to Yahoo about this at all – which is part of what makes this so great. Microsoft was supposed to have rolled something like this out to Windows Live profiles awhile ago, but I still haven’t seen it drop. We’re very excited about that, too, but the two company’s approaches were very different: Microsoft came over, chatted with us about the product, then had us sign a contract to participate. That was months ago, and I have no idea when it’s actually coming. Yahoo, on the other hand, seems to have just built it and shipped it.

I can see the arguments for both approaches: Microsoft is probably being extra careful about privacy, and working through their internal rules and regulations about re-using user generated content. Yahoo, on the other hand, is scrambling to catch up now as the underdog. I assume Yahoo realized that SmugMug already has strong privacy controls around our feeds and simply hit the gas – full speed ahead.

Either way, what’s especially heartening is the number of sites, services, and pieces of software that now support SmugMug. At The Crunchies last week, we weren’t nominated (we won for Best Design last year), but it still felt like we were winning – many of the winners use or integrate with us: Google Reader, Windows Live Mesh, Cooliris, lots of companies using Amazon Web Services, lots of apps on the iPhone 3G, and FriendFeed. Very cool.

(And all of that despite what we *know* is terrible and/or nonexistent documentation around our feeds. Yes, we’ll work on that.)

Big Cats by micalngelo

“Every startup CEO is at least thinking about the need to cut back right now” – Michael Arrington

“We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.” – Warren Buffet

I’ll give you one guess as to which man I’m listening to. So no, not every startup CEO is cutting back. Apple spent their time innovating during the last downturn and look where it got them. I’m thrilled to have just passed out big, healthy profit-sharing bonuses to all of our employees this week for the 5th consecutive year. We think and hope they’ll be even bigger next year.

SmugMug was founded in the middle of the last “nuclear winter” in Silicon Valley. Everyone told us we were crazy, and we knew there was no chance at raising venture capital at a decent valuation, even with our impressive backgrounds. So we did what any good entrepreneur would do: We did it anyway, with both eyes firmly on our business model.

So if you’re running a startup, or thinking of creating one, take heart – downturns are a fabulous time to build and grow businesses. Focus on your revenues and your margins, not your growth rate or # of unique visitors. Find some stable income streams and a customer need. Listen to your customers and give them what they want – and what they’re willing to pay for. And take care of your employees – they’re your most valuable asset.

SmugMug is still hiring Sorcerers, Heroes, and all manner of other mythical beings capable of impossible feats. We filled our last position (quickly, I might add) with a *great* hire (and I’m still sorting through the avalanche of resumes we got to see if we can add a few more), but the job door is never closed at SmugMug for true superstars. Our philosophy is to not let anyone amazing get away, even if we don’t technically have an open position for you.

So if you can make magic and want to work for a company that takes crazy-good care of its employees, let us know.

photo by: Bill Evans Photography

UPDATE: This particular position has been filled, but we have plenty more open, especially for front-end JavaScript wizards. Contact us!

How would you like to be the 8th Sorcerer here at SmugMug?  (We don’t hire engineers, programmers, or even coders – we only hire Sorcerers.  If you can’t work magic, I’m sure our competitors would love to see your resume…)

At SmugMug, everything we build is a direct result of customer feedback. We do very little, if any, competitive research – our customers keep us plenty busy. As a result, we’ve largely ignored social networking, especially outside of SmugMug. It just hasn’t been something our customers have asked for.

That’s changing. I’ve started getting tweets, blog comments, and forum posts about our “broken Facebook app”. Problem is, we don’t have a Facebook app.

The good news is we listen. So we’re ready to take the plunge. The geek in me has *always* wanted to dive into this stuff (and I’m the one who built and/or pushed us to build the building blocks we already have: an open API, Atom/RSS feeds, OpenID support, OAuth support, etc), so I’m thrilled we finally have the “ok” from my boss – our customers.

So if you’re high on social networking, particularly sharing photos anywhere and everywhere, we’d love to have you come work your magic. The job is extremely open-ended: You’d create our strategy, build our apps on other platforms, interact with our API developers who’ve already built some, and generally make it even easier for our customers to share their photos outside SmugMug. You’ll have to get your hands dirty – you’ll be writing the software (with the help of the other Sorcerers as needed), so managers and architects who no longer dirty their hands need not apply.

If that sounds like fun, we’re the best company to work for you’ve ever heard of (ok, this list sounds unbelievable, but I swear it’s all true):

• We’re all super heroes.
• We’re a privately held, profitable-for-years, fast-growing company (100%+ year-on-year for multiple years)
• Fun projects. You choose what to work on rather than being assigned some fluff job. (I know, I know, unheard of – but I swear it’s true).
• Small team. Your projects are your projects, not some multi-layer management effort doomed to fail.
• Fast paced. Any week where we don’t do at least one software release is rare.
• Large scale. Top 500 site. 350M+ photos, 800TB+ storage, 300M page views/month. Fun problems to solve
• Big impact. Hundreds of thousands of paying customers and 6.5M+ visitors a month will use your work.
• Family friendly. Full healthcare coverage, kids welcome for company meals and events. (Ex: We’re taking the whole company to Tahoe to ski & relax, including spouses and kids).
• Distributed. Nearly 75% of our employees aren’t in Silicon Valley – they’re scattered all over the world, from Australia to Europe and a dozen US states.
• Crazy benefits. We pay better salaries than the giants in Silicon Valley plus “early” stock options, profit sharing bonuses, matching 401k, 100% healthcare coverage for you and your family, gym memberships, iPhone 3G + minutes & data, 3G data cards, cable/DSL at home. Free drinks, free meals while working (new private chef too!). And more.
• Great office. Walking distance to downtown Mountain View, across the street from train & lightrail, near Highway 85. 7.1 channel home theater, dual 30″ displays + Mac Pro + MacBook Pro/Air, jaw-dropping photography on the walls (and an in-house studio to shoot your own). Healthy cube/office decoration budget. (Ok, this is getting really fun to write )

Whew!  (Yes, I think our employees are our most valuable asset.  Can you tell?)

So, do you have what it takes? At the very least, you’ll need:

• A passion for open data.
• An understanding of how important privacy controls are.
• Experience with web services, especially REST. SOAP and XML-RPC fans, this isn’t the place for you (but knowledge of black magic ain’t bad – just don’t practice it here!).
• Modern scripting language experience (PHP, Python, Ruby). We use PHP (and so will you!).
• History building apps (big or small) for platforms like Facebook, OpenSocial, etc.
• Understanding of current and upcoming social networking technologies: OpenID, OAuth, microformats, etc
• Experience with the SmugMug API a big plus.

If this sounds like your brand of magic, please contact us and let us know you’re our next Sorcerer.   If not, please tell your magic-working friends that the opportunity of a lifetime is right here…

UPDATE: This particular position has been filled, but we have plenty more open, especially for front-end JavaScript wizards. Contact us!

Apparently it’s the best superhero movie ever made, and must be seen on IMAX. And you’re invited! We’re taking our company, family, customers and friends to Batman: The Dark Knight in IMAX! If you read my blog, that means you’re a friend – and eligible for a free ticket out of our block!

WHERE: Regal Hacienda Crossings Stadium 21 & IMAX, 5000 Dublin Blvd., Dublin, CA 94568
WHEN: 12:50pm on Friday, July 18th. Look for people in red SmugMug hats.

If you’d like a ticket, post in the comments, email me, Tweet me, something – I’ll reply to confirm we have enough tickets for you. If you want to bring your SO, friend(s), or family, let us know – we’ll try to accomodate as best we can.

Please arrive by 12:20pm so we can get you your ticket in time. We’ll give away any that aren’t there by the time all the SmugMuggers take their seats.

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!

I’m really honored that SmugMug made LifeHacker’s Five Best Photo Sharing Web Sites.

They have voting open to pick the best – go vote for your favorite!

SmugMug’s API now supports OAuth! We actually rolled out support a few weeks ago, but our documentation has turned into such a mess, I delayed announcing it. Finally, though, I just couldn’t keep quiet – I’m so excited I just had to tell someone!

So I’m sorry the docs are all messed up – they’re in multiple locations and out of date. We’ve been working hard on re-writing them to make them easier to understand and more clear but we’re not quite done yet. David, though, has a great excuse for why we’re behind – you’re looking at her! His beautiful daughter, Caitlin Ann, was born at roughly the same time as our OAuth support shipped. He’s had his hands full.

So go read the new docs on OAuth, the old docs on the rest of the API, and the dgrin API forum so you can get cracking on your own OAuth services and apps. Hopefully lots of the 1200+ apps our awesome developers have already created will adopt it quickly.

For those who don’t know, OAuth is an open standard for secure authentication. It allows applications and services to authenticate to SmugMug and other OAuth-enabled APIs without needed to know or store the users’ sensitive login and password information. I imagine at some point OAuth might become the *only* way to authenticate to our API, so I’d at least start playing with it now.

Your photos are yours, not ours – long live open standards and data portability!

UPDATE: I should have noted that this is totally useable now, you don’t have to wait for the docs update. It’s just mildly painful to go between a few different locations to find all the documentation. This is on a new Beta API branch, 1.2.2, so you’ll need to use 1.2.2 endpoints.