iPhone 4 FaceTime is going to be absolutely fantastic killer App provided the person you’re calling has an iPhone 4! With several Million predicted sales chances are the person you’re calling will have one!

iPhone 4 On sale June 24th Pre-orders from 15th June. Available in 88 Countries by end of September!

It’s surely not long before touch is the standard way to interact with large high-quality static screens, not just portable devices.

There’ll even be amazing nanotechnology that means zero fingerprinting and no smudges.

I’m saying standard widespread use by 2020.

Totally agree with everything you’ve said. The iPad has changed the way we do a number of things. As with many of the comments before, we now use the iPad as a way of showing our portfolio to clients. Not really as a way of showing them their showreel, even though Photomagico now exports to iPad (very quick to get on board), but as a way of promoting other areas of our business. When we are in a viewing meeting for a wedding for instance, if the conversation gets on to portraits we can now just say, hey, take a look at this selection of images and pass over the iPad. As someone said previously, at the moment it has a real wow factor just bringing out the iPad.

Of course it’s a great toy which all gadget heads can’t put down, but it’s definitely proving its worth beyond that. But as you say in the original blog, it’s part of a bigger toolkit and definitely not a replacement for the MBP.

Showing client images sounds like an absolute winner. All we need now is a tog-friendly app that allows client to rate whilst viewing in the iPad.

Good information (not that I needed much convincing!).

It was a talking point; they loved the concept and the idea of showing work on the screen. If i was an apple reseller i’d have sold 2 of them then and there!

TThe other good news is they booked me too…

I’m happy for the comments to go off topic because I’ll clean them up in a week or so to get the post back on track for archival purposes but I like the discussion feel and the way this is heading.

As far as my understanding goes, one of the big problems for SEO in flash based sites is that each page of some sites has the same URL and therefore can’t be landed on directly without going via a splash page of some kind. So if your site is configured in this way, whatever text you may have on a particular part of your site to attract organic hits may not be accessed by the URL alone and therefore it gets ignored by the search engines. Search engines want to deliver people directly to relevant information, not to a splash page.

So what are our options. I’ll create a new post called life beyond flash just as soon as I have my work done for the week and I’ll migrate the comments there with permission of course.

Please feel free to continue on the Flash or iPad routes with comments.

Regards, Damien.

My site does have text on all the pages that have Flash Slideshows which does get around the SEO issue, or so I’m led to believe?

Yes Flash can be an issue but it depends on what your viewing habits are. I rarely come across flash sites except those of photographers. I have what remains of a flash site at http://www.lovegroveportraits.com but it has never generated any work for me, it just looked nice. Flash is great for online portfolios but not SEO or as a delivery of information.

It all comes dow to politics, power and money in the war between Apple and Adobe. HTML5 is the way forward for webkit browsers and I’m sure it will become the standard. It will be worth the upheaval in the long run.

Lovegrove Portraits site is going to a WordPress format in the next month or so and it will be far easier for us to optimise it with dedicated landing pages and the like.

I’ve struggled with all the video formats myself. Flash as we know is useless for a site that is pitched to photographers because the iPhone dominates in this market. MP4 can’t be played by some viewers and H264 seems to give me huge files with poor dynamic resolution.

We all need a solution to the ‘flash’ problem if we are going to utilise the HD video capabilities of our dSLRs.

All suggestions are welcome.

Kindest regards,

Damien.

HTML 5 – that’s the Apple & Google way of doing things….

And you’re probably right… that’s a whole other topic :0)

Cheers,

Iain