Picmeleo Helps Your Users Edit Photos
Picmeleo is a new Finnish photo startup that recently got in touch with us. They're developing a new kind of service which in essence is a photo editing tool, but positioned in the market in a wise manner. The tool itself is sort of an external application that companies providing services online can add on top of their own service, instead of having to come up with their own tool.
The guys have made it dead simple to embed the editor to your website. Let me prove my point. All I did was copy pasted a line of code to this post and you are able to open the service with the following link (obviously you can't save the photo to our server, but you're able to play around with the image):
I haven't seen many executions where this has been this easy - and it actually works according to what's being promised. The smartness of this idea, in my opinion does not lie in the technology itself, but in the way this product has been positioned. Many would think the photo market is saturated to the maximum and it's true, but there are still opportunities for smaller solutions like Picmeleo to capitalise on the opportunities.
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Good simple approach. Swedish JayCut has had good success approaching big brands with their video editor offering.
One major UI glitch: Picmeleo has Undo/Redo, why they have a modal confirmation step for every action you take?
[...] Picmeleo Helps Your Users Edit Photos [...]
Actually I just read another article (http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/03/03/picmeleo-pretty-web2-embeddable-photo-editor/) about this, without knowing that this is Finnish! Good job guys!
I have to agree with Teemu: modal confirmation is unnecessary. Maybe there should be small notification after modification which tells something like "If it doesn't look good you can always undo your actions."
And of course Ctrl+z should work too.
I also checked documentation and I was happy to see that integration was simple also on getting modified image back to server (quote from their site):
The image name is passed in the HTTP GET parameter called image. For example, if your receiver script is called receiver.php, our service requests your receiver script with url:
http://www.example.com/receiver.php?image=http://my.picmeleo.com/34098234092840.jpg
Works fine - though took pretty long to open here in Asia through our crappy connection.
Most of these painting and picture edit programs are done with flash - very competitive space indeed. Very difficult to create advantage over the rest of the bunch. Also this flash stuff don't work on iphone (or upcoming ipad).. yet.
One thing which would be interesting to see is same sort of editor implementation in html5.
Thanks for your comments & feedback!
We're aware of that unnecessary modal confirmation step. Ease of use is one of our key focus areas and that UI glitch will be fixed in future releases :)
As VilleK mentioned, Picmeleo takes pretty long time to open. The editor isn't as fast as it could be. We are also going to boost up the startup time and reduce the file size by progressively loading the tools.
I'm personally waiting for the moment when we can move on to html5. We have already made some canvas-prototypes. Unfortunately html5-solutions are not ready for production use because of the lack of canvas-support in IE (as we all know :).
- jaamo @ picmeleo
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