iPhone SDK, NDA, and SmugMug
Getting lots of requests about an iPhone app for SmugMug. As you no-doubt know, we’re enormous Apple fans over here, and iPhone fans in particular. Most of the company camped out in line at the Palo Alto store (see stories here and here), we were the first photo sharing app with an iPhone optimized interface (and one of the first web apps anywhere), and we designed our awesome new video sharing service with iPhone in mind. So I think it’s no secret that we’d love to have rich, intuitive native iPhone applications for ourselves and our customers.
However, the iPhone SDK NDA is still in effect, so I can neither confirm nor deny that we have an iPhone app in the works, or even whether we’ve been accepted into the iPhone SDK program. I have no idea why so many companies have chosen to break the NDA and talk about their apps today, but that’s just not the way we roll around here – we like to maintain a great relationship with any partner companies, and Apple is a company we’re especially fond of. (Ok, ok, so I’m a fanboy 🙂 )
If / when we get to build an iPhone app or two, we’ll do our absolute best to make sure they’re intuitive to use and takes advantage of all the power the iPhone provides. As you can imagine, we’re especially excited about iPhone 3G. 🙂
(Thank goodness Michael Arrington stole the wrong iPhone from me this morning. Whew! 🙂 )
SmugMug's Don MacAskill 
The thing is if you hand *not* been excepted in to the program you would be free to say that you were not. ( I am assuming that the form to apply to the beta program dose not prevent you from saying you were rejected ( seems like it would be hard to do that leagealy)) I think we can there for assume that you were accepted 🙂
No doubt SmugMug already has an iPhone application that they just can’t wait to release. Does the NDA really cover that fact that you are or are not working on one? That sounds a little overboard. But, maybe because you said that there is something more to it, like, maybe you aren’t just a normal application, but maybe the iPhone will be able to upload photos to SmugMug out of the box… now, that would be awsome!
@Jonathan Moore
One plausible scenario is that we applied but haven’t yet been accepted. 25,000 applied and only 4,000 are in, so far, so that could be us… 🙂
I’m all for a cool iPhone 2.0 app, but until then, I’d really love it if my current videos played on my current iPhone. They don’t work through Safari, or through the SmugMug web app (also Safari, technically). If I right click on them, download them to my Mac Pro, and transfer the .mp4 files to my iPhone, they play perfectly (via the iPod application).
Any ideas?
-J
@Jason Warth
Hmm, that sounds like some rare bug. I play my videos on my phone all the time – did it just a second ago, in fact. We designed our video solution from the ground up with iPhone and other Apple devices (AppleTV, iPod, etc) in mind.
Would you mind giving me some links so I can take a look? I’ll bet I have a dumb bug somewhere I haven’t uncovered myself. Sorry about that!
Hi Don. Thanks for the quick reply. I just sent you a link to the gallery so you can see for yourself. It appears as though there may be a correlation between having password protection on a gallery and the willingness of the iPhone to play along. Even when logged in, my iPhone doesn’t play the videos. When I remove the password protection, things seem to work totally fine.
Any thoughts?
SmugShot is out and ready to download,
Just need my iphone 3g to arrive tomorrow.
SmugMug was one of the reasons I bought a iPhone, I loved the idea of easy access to my galleries on my phone on a lovely clear screen