Filed under: iLife, Software, Blogs
Should Apple have used Cover Flow in iPhoto '08?
TUAW reader o!ivier has posted a mockup to his Flickr account of how he believes the iPhoto '08 Events UI should have been designed. Seeing it as a more natural evolution of what Apple is doing with Mac OS X and their apps (iTunes, Finder in Leopard, etc.), o!ivier believes Apple should have built in Cover Flow for browsing events instead of the new 'skimming' UI, where users run their mouse over resizable thumbnails to see all the photos contained in the event scroll by. Instead, this Cover Flow mockup proposes the idea of scrolling left and right through Events just like you scroll through albums in iTunes. Clicking an event produces thumbnails of all the images laid out in the area below, which can then be resized independently from the Cover Flow area.
I rarely prefer design mockups like this over what Apple produces, but I have to admit: I think Apple dropped the ball here. O!ivier's mockup looks far more useful, as you can browse through Events and view resizable thumbnails of all the photos they contain without leaving the Events UI. Don't get me wrong, skimming is cute, but Cover Flow + iPhoto looks like it would look just as slick but provide a far more useful working environment.
Who knows - Maybe Apple just wants to wait for users to get used to Cover Flow in Leopard's Finder. After all, they need to give us at least a few reasons to upgrade to iLife '09, right?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Matthew said 3:48PM on 8-15-2007
No way. I'm so over Cover Flow.
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vandlism said 3:48PM on 8-15-2007
I really like the Carousel view in the .mac galleries. It's the same
concept as Cover Flow but just has a little better look to it for
photo browsing. So if something like this does make its way to the
app, here's hoping its Carousel.
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Al said 3:56PM on 8-15-2007
I'm not with you on this one. The skimming makes it incredibly fast to look at multiple events and find out what pictures are in them. If coverflow were implemented you would have to click on the events one by one and coverflow through them. Sexier yes. More useful, I think not.
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Scott said 3:55PM on 8-15-2007
I absolutely disagree. I tried iPhoto '08 in an Apple store this weekend, and the skimming feature in Events BLEW ME AWAY. This is incredibly slick, and incredibly useful! I couldn't WAIT to be able to look through my own photos this way. I would've walked out with iLife '08 if I weren't planning to buy a new 24" iMac in a few weeks. On the other hand, I've found CoverFlow to be neat to look at, but awkward for actually looking through things.
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bebop said 3:58PM on 8-15-2007
I think cover flow is cool looking, and fun to show off on my iPhone, but in reality it isn't very useful and when I want to go find something I never use it.
The skimming is useful, however, to get a 1 second glimpse into what that event contains.
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Sascha said 4:02PM on 8-15-2007
I see what you mean, and yes, the should have implemented coverflow here. Skimming is nice, but would be better another place..
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Simon Arch said 4:02PM on 8-15-2007
Well, I never use it in iTunes, which I use about a billion times more often than I use any other iApp, so I doubt I'd use it much in iPhoto. Still, yeah, it SEEMS like it might have made sense.
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inrpce said 4:09PM on 8-15-2007
I think they Yes, they should have, and not because I use it. Just after I installed it yesterday, it was the first thing that I noticed.
I only use Cover Flow when I've got the laptop on dual monitors and I'm having a party or something, but It seems that Apples Pride and Joy has been Cover Flow lately. It just seems really odd to me that it wasn't included. Oh Well.
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Johnny Dangerously said 4:09PM on 8-15-2007
I have to disagree with this; I think CoverFlow is too often used carelessly and for short-term flash over long-term usability. It *is* sexy, but only for about five minutes when implemented poorly. I *like* skimming, and it works well with photos. You *can* have different UI metaphors for different physical representations. CoverFlow works well for music because we're used to *physically* flipping through our individual albums. Skimming works for photos because we *physically* skim through real photos to find the one we want. However, I can't seem to decide if skimming would have a place in the Finder. Probably, but no bigger a place than CoverFlow.
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Joe said 4:14PM on 8-15-2007
I have to agree with everyone who disagrees here, although I haven't used iLife 08 yet. If you consider the amount of work the user has to do in either case, skimming requires less work - move the mouse to the event, and move the mouse back and forth to preview the images. With coverflow, the user has to click on the event, and then move the mouse up to the coverflow pane and either scroll with the mouse (assuming the user has a mouse that can scroll horizontally), grab the scrollbar and drag it left or right, or click in the coverflow pane and use the left and right arrows.
It might look better, but there are more steps involved for coverflow than skimming.
However, once in an event, it might be nice to have coverflow available as a view option.
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Johnny said 4:38PM on 8-15-2007
I think it would be nice to have both. Skimming is great for quick 'skimming' and cover flow would be nice for a larger view. Just to point out, 'skimming' is also used in the new iMovie and will probably show up again somewhere else before all is said and done. It's purpose is different than cover flow. In this instance, I think I might want to use cover flow the opposite of shown with the events in thumbnail and the images appearing in cover flow. I care more about seeing the images larger than just the event 'cover'.
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Cody Cowper said 4:43PM on 8-15-2007
Sorry for being off topic. But has anyone else had iWeb 07 completely ruin there site. Literally all my files are missing it wont publish, even new pages i have created have disappeared. The apple forums have a lot of people that have experienced this too
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Moburkhardt said 4:55PM on 8-15-2007
I believe that Cover Flow would work nice with new intel machines but I have ran iPhoto '08 on one of my older mac a 433MHz PowerMac and it worked really nice, even the skimming. I can assure you that this would not be the case if Apple had implemented Cover Flow. I actually tried iTunes Cover Flow and all my machine does is display a n image of my current screen as each of the album art, it is probably due to the fact that my graphic cart doesn't even support quartz but still I am happy that iPhoto '08 runs on old crappy machines, too
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Michael said 4:56PM on 8-15-2007
Is there another Apple application, besides iTunes, that has this functionality on OS X version 10.4.x?
I'm pretty sure this will be available in Leopard, since their OS X info pages show it available in iTunes and the Finder.
I seriously doubt that they would skip adding "cover flow" functionality to this application in Leopard. It would seem to be a natural.
If you think they missed the boat, maybe the boat hasn't even reached the "docks" yet.
"They did it for iTunes, why not for iPhoto?"
They probably don't want to have to maintain two sets of code for each shipping app, and I don't blame them, if that is the case.
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Chris said 4:58PM on 8-15-2007
I much prefer the skimming interface. I can literally pass hundreds of photos through my eyes in a couple of seconds. This isn't possible with coverflow because the animation and larger thumbnail generation times slow it down.
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mike said 5:02PM on 8-15-2007
oh god, the last thing we need is more coverflow ANYWHERE in the OS. Gimme a break--why do people think this is useful? It's slow, it's annoying...and, I mean, the skimming works (if a bit jarring)...
but no. no more coverflow. take it out of everything; it's a waste of time...IMHO, of course
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Robert B. Lay said 5:11PM on 8-15-2007
Personally, I really hate Cover Flow. I think it's terribly inefficient and limited. And I'm not sure why Apple is so crazy about it. But, in response to the proposed topic I'll add my two cents.
Either Apple hasn't figured out how to implement Cover Flow for the web effectively for everyone's photo albums, or even if they have... it might tax the majority of slow machines out there right now. I have a really slow Mac in house to test on... and Cover Flow performance kind of sucks in iTunes. Additionally, I'm not so sure about how "clean" Cover Flow would make a site look unless, as a previous commenter above stated, once in an event, it might be nice to have it available as a view option.
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David Chartier said 5:16PM on 8-15-2007
But with clicking a single event in Cover Flow like this, you can see 10, 20 or 50 images all at once - you don't even have to skim them. All the thumbnails appear below the event, and you can *still see other event thumbnails farther up and down the line in Cover Flow.*
That's really what caught me, you get the best of both worlds: the ability to keep viewing your events while simultaneously looking at a large group of thumbnails.
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Brian Allen said 5:30PM on 8-15-2007
Cover is too slow with a large number of images.
iTunes crawls through my album art having to load each image.
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Mystic said 5:49PM on 8-15-2007
I am SOOOO glad ol!ver does not work for Apple!
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