A little devil's avocate: Isn't Instagram primarily a photo sharing app? I'm not sure why people are complaining that it starts the upload on filter completion.<p>My only question is how long are photos not marked as user initiated uploads kept?
So Instagram has photos I don't click "upload" on. Well that's nice to know.<p>Edit: So I tried to use a proxy on my phone but it looks like Instragram on Android doesn't honour the wireless proxy server. Anyone else want to do some digging?
Gmail used to do that with their attachment. You choose the attachment, and it silently starts to upload. Most applications wait for you to hit "Send" to start uploading.
Chrome does the same, when you right-clic on a file and select "Save as…", the download begin in a temporary file, and then when you select the emplacement where you want to put the new file, it moves the temporary file in it.
I'm not an Instagram user, so I may be off base... but why not start uploading the photo right when the user snapped it, i.e. before selecting a filter. Then apply the selected filter server-side on the original photo. That way you save a few more seconds while the user is selecting the filter.
Does anyone know what the sign up slide is about (<a href="http://speakerdeck.com/u/mikeyk/p/secrets-to-lightning-fast-mobile-design?slide=82" rel="nofollow">http://speakerdeck.com/u/mikeyk/p/secrets-to-lightning-fast-...</a>)? Do they create a user account when you hit the form, then fill it in with your details asynchronously later?
I assumed this was the case because the "time since" label on a freshly posted photo is usually between 10-20 seconds, indicating they had my photo well before I tapped "Done." I think it's a pretty genius little UX hack to make the process feel quick.
The Google+ Android app does basically the same thing. It syncs everything from your camera to the cloud (configurable, but I believe the default is to sync always when on wifi), where you can choose to share them at your leisure. It's actually really handy. My wife is routinely <i>not</i> uploading cute kid photos to Facebook from her iPhone because it's too much of an annoyance (or because she doesn't want to compose the text to go with it). I can do it at my desktop whenever the mood hits me.
Everything he says is completely applicable to online games. Online games need to be designed around responsiveness. Another way to put it: the online game design should be pervasively focused on creating the illusion of low/no latency.<p>An example in an online game I'm designing: damage and deaths are finalized with a one second delay. This way, the clients can optimistically render ships and combat effects, but everything is still verified/finalized on the server.
This is such a great deck. Unless you're working on a photo sharing app, this slide might offer more generally useful advice:<p><a href="http://speakerdeck.com/u/mikeyk/p/secrets-to-lightning-fast-mobile-design?slide=25" rel="nofollow">http://speakerdeck.com/u/mikeyk/p/secrets-to-lightning-fast-...</a>
FYI Google instant (which is integrated, at least in AOSP) or smth does the same, by default. That is it uploads your pictures instantly to Google picture thingy.
You can turn it off thanksfully.
Doesn't that mean they actually start grabbing the photos before really getting permission from the user?<p>Surely they probably got it covered in the Terms, but it still strikes me as playing slightly dirty..
Did Instagram v1 had this feature?<p>They added high-res photos in v2 and the early upload seems like maybe an attempt not to have the app start feeling much much slower.
I trust Instagram to not engage in monkey business with my data. Having said that, this is flirting with the path-address-book kind of privacy-related scrutiny. There has to be a way of telling the user at WHAT POINT the data has started uploading. The progress bar of photo uploads has to mean what it shows or else it is a plain and simple deception (even if it's in the name of performance and user experience). I can't tell if this will erode trust though but don't be surprised if a few make a loud noise about it.<p>Privacy concern and trust form a chicken-egg problem. I wish the Stanford-esque brains behind these tech companies had a better grasp on it.