Some lessons Apple could learn from Glide Effortless
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Sep 22, 2006 at 3:38am
If you want to see some ways Apple could add some functionality to .Mac, its US$99-per-year suite of Internet tools, take a look at Glide Effortless. Apple can certainly go Glide one better by combining its premise and implementation with the applications on the local Mac like iTunes does. But services like Glide do Apple one better by integrating the computer with the web and with the mobile device.
Glide is a Mac compatible web app that sports powerful, user-friendly tools for saving and sharing all kinds of digital files, including music, videos, photos, word processing documents and PowerPoint presentations. In his USA Today review of it, Leonard Fischer noted that “in many respects, Glide is a lot like having Apple’s iPhoto or iTunes programs running inside of a web browser.” Photos, songs, movies and documents are represented as thumbnails on the screen that you can drag into “containers” that act like Apple’s albums and play lists. Roll over a thumbnail of a song, and it will start playing. Videos also play back as you roll over their thumbnails. “These added touches aren’t something you’ll see in the latest versions of iTunes, iPhoto or any comparable tools we’re familiar with,” Fischer adds. But the touches could be implemented in iPhoto and in .Mac. In fact, with the right touches, a Glide-like .Mac could offer a “portable desktop” that could link your Mac with an online repository.
As author, columnist and Mac guru David Pogue points out in a New York Times tech colum, on a Mac or PC you have to learn and use a different program to work with each file format: one to play music files, another to display photos, a third to play videos, and so on. Sending your work to other people is cumbersome, as well.
“If you attach your photos or videos to e-mail, you usually wind up overflowing the recipient’s in-box and causing headaches for everyone. Posting your files on a Web site or a blog (Web log) is a better solution, but that requires more geeky knowledge than average people care to acquire,” Pogue notes. “Glide avoids all of these problems. It treats each file type – photos, songs, videos, documents – nearly identically, representing each file as a thumbnail icon in your personal stash. You use a menu to switch from one ‘environment’ (say, photos) to another (like music). At the bottom of each environment is an area where you can create ‘containers’—that is, playlists (for music and video clips), albums (for photos), address book groups (for e-mail), and so on. You fill up these containers by simply dragging the appropriate thumbnails from the top part of the screen. You can even drag music files into photo or video containers, thereby creating musical soundtracks.”
And guess what the Glide service costs? The same as .Mac: 99 bucks a year.
Apple may be planning on a nice technology bump if and when they introduce the much-rumored, long anticipated iPhone. Perhaps, at that point, .Mac will incorporate some Glide-like features. But I think that Apple is doing themselves and their customers a disservice by not stepping up the features of .Mac faster. Our favorite computer maker is being out-innovated in some cases by smaller pure-play web companies.
Thoughts? Write me at daseller@earthlink.net
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
