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It's the iOS paradigm to make feature simple standalone apps. Why do you think Apple has both a "Photo Album" and "Camera" app? And both a "Phone" and "Contact
by dominostars 14y ago
It's the iOS paradigm to make feature simple standalone apps. Why do you think Apple has both a "Photo Album" and "Camera" app? And both a "Phone" and "Contacts" app?
Many users upload photos to Facebook, so there's a huge incentive to make an app that makes it simple to do this. Even if the main Facebook app has feature parity with FBPhotos, it's still going to come with all of the cruft.
- freehunter 14y agoIt's somewhat in following with the Unix paradigm; do one thing, do it well.
- tferris 14y agoNot always. Regarding core Unix commands yes (like 'ls', 'cat') but look for example at 'git' which is a real beast.
- austintaylor 14y agogit is just a facade for the git-* commands.
- Smudge 14y agoNot to veer too far from the main discussion, but 'git' isn't just some giant monolithic binary. The 'git' command is a wrapper around a bunch of different, relatively modular binaries. They each even have their own man page. (e.g. 'git push' maps to 'git-push'). Each is just a unique action that can be applied to a common data structure (the git repository).
- tferris 14y agoI know. And still all these different libs are accessible by one UI/route ('git').
- krakensden 14y agoDo an ls /usr/libexec/git-core/ (or your operating system's equivalent) some time. The fact that the porcelain exists does not mean that the plumbing does not.
- natep 14y agoLook closer at git, and you'll see that it's actually a collection of smaller programs (each of the git commands is made as a separate executable before being combined into git)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- cooldeal 14y agoSo when can we do $ camera | fb-photo | facebook | sed 4 | awk ? Chaining the utilities is the crux of the Unix paradigm, remove that and you're left with individual utilities that are far less powerful than when chained together.
- freehunter 14y agoWhich is why I said "somewhat". However, you can upload a picture from one app and interact with it in another, so that's... something I guess.
- scotu 14y agoNow. With android intents (ok, not cool as pipes, but the idea is there)
- clarky07 14y agoYou can do it on iOS as well. You can go from the facebook camera app to the main fb app. (Any app can do this, but the point of the article is fb so i used them as the example)
- ZeroGravitas 14y agoIs the link between the two apps hardcoded on iOS? On Android you can have any camera app | any photo editing/filters app | any social network upload where each app is chosen by the user which seems closer to the idea of pipes to me.
- clarky07 14y agoYeah it's something that Facebook would hardcode. Click on this person and instead of doing something here it sends you to that person's profile on their other app. It isn't like intents on Android, but from the perspective of Facebook it is probably preferable. They don't want you to go to your choice of photo or social network or chat app, they want you to go to their app.
- 14y ago
- niketdesai 14y agoThis. Two things people do that FB wants channeled through their systems: Photos & Chat. Replacing your camera app with FBs means that all photos go to Facebook, which also represents the most important content on Facebook. If your photos and your friends photos are all on FB then they go to FB. If everyone you know is on FB then you'll probably use FB to talk to them. Thus, the chat ecosystem. Because FB is device and OS agnostic, it works even better than what Apple is trying to do with iMessage. So why separate apps? Because people today already do these things as separate apps. You take a photo with your camera and then upload to FB. Now you just take a photo. This is actually what Google does with G+ and its automatic photo uploads. But FB can't do that, because they don't own the device ecosystem so this is their technique...for now.
- smackfu 14y agoPlus it's pretty seamless replacement. Same label "Camera". Same icon, just with a blue background instead of grey.
- jmathai 14y agoSmart move. Didn't realize it at first :)
- timjahn 14y agoI noticed that when changing the location settings in "Settings". The default Camera app was listed immediately next to Facebook Camera, confused me for a moment. I wonder if Apple will make them add "Facebook" to the app name to avoid confusion, since it's the exact same name currently.
- malandrew 14y agoTBH, I'm kind of surprised Apple is totally cool with this since one of the AppStore guidelines is to not create apps that replicate core iOS features. Now I know that Facebook's Camera app does more than take photos, but they are a direct replacement for the Camera and Photos apps that are native to iOS. Making the name and icon so very similar is close enough to be construed as an obvious intent to confuse/mislead.
- RandallBrown 14y agobut what's weird is that the Facebook app also does both of these things already, just not quite as well. It's especially weird with Messenger because I think both apps can get push notifications.
- bookwormAT 14y agoWe call the unix paradigm now the iOS paradigm?
- baddox 14y agoThe Unix paradigm is more about even smaller composable tools.
- Timothee 14y ago"Why do you think Apple has both a "Photo Album" and "Camera" app? And both a "Phone" and "Contacts" app?" I'd say that in any case, they had to have Contacts and Photo Album apps for the iPod Touch and iPad. Why also include them on the iPhone? Well, Photo Album has more features than the Camera app (access to Events, Faces…) so it might be simpler to have one codebase for a Photo Album app shared with iPod Touch and iPad, rather than trying to put all the features of Photo Album in the Camera app. For me, it's better too because it makes the Camera app more easily replaceable. (as seen with the OP) For the Contacts app, I'm not entirely sure since it seems to be a clear subset of the Phone app.