A look at Apple’s .mac web gallery
Subscribers to .mac will be pleased to try out Apple’s new web gallery. It looks great, and is a sure example of how well offline applications can be translated into online web apps. Instant image resizing, different viewing modes, and lots of reflections make you quickly forget you are viewing the photos online.
Great features like live image resizing make Apple Web Gallery really give Flickr and other foto services something to catch up to.
Although Apple did a great job thinning the line between offline and online photo viewing, it still needs some major work. All of the web2.0 goodness make just the home page clock in at more than 1.4MB, which even on my 6Mbit connection feels sluggish and irritating.
A table of download times from Websiteoptimization.com
| Connection Rate | Download Time |
|---|---|
| 14.4K | 1171.17 seconds |
| 28.8K | 614.79 seconds |
| 33.6K | 535.30 seconds |
| 56K | 344.54 seconds |
| ISDN 128K | 146.03 seconds |
| T1 1.44Mbps | 66.01 seconds |
Sure waiting a minute on a T1 doesn’t seem too bad, but showing these images to your mom on her ISDN line will take her more than 2 minutes just to download the index page! Pure blasphemy
Curious, try out Apple’s Live Web Gallery for yourself.