Vignette: add photos to your contacts by searching public social media profiles

https://www.caseyliss.com/2019/5/22/vignette

by k2enemy • 7 years ago

118 66 7 years ago

jph• 7 years ago

Take my money! :)

Your project is great, and I especially love that you're doing this for privacy reasons on the device, instead of in the cloud. Congratulations on launching.

Wishlist: add LinkedIn, because about half of my contacts are for business.

tibbetts• 7 years ago

Yes please LinkedIn.

george_perez2• 7 years ago

Some people have asked for LinkedIn support on Twitter but the developer has stated that he's not a fan of storing login information to download those pictures (since LinkedIn loves to put profiles behind a sign up/log in screen)

scarface748• 7 years ago

ATP is one of my favorite podcasts and I wanted to like this app.

A long time ago, FB for iOS would sync contacts to your iPhone and include an fb:/... link. I still have a few old contacts with the link. Those are the only ones that were updated and one that had a gravitar link.

None of my more recent contacts with FB links worked nor did my professional contacts from LinkedIn. The app was kind of useless to me.

robotmlg• 7 years ago

The facebook link problem is fixed in today's 2019.4 update

https://twitter.com/caseyliss/status/1132335799817691136

bdcravens• 7 years ago

Maybe I'm just old, but when I hear that name in a software context, I think of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignette_Corporation

sehugg• 7 years ago

Thanks for the nightmares I'll be having tonight about URLs with commas.

glandium• 7 years ago

I was going to post something similar. The name triggered "fun" memories.

striking• 7 years ago

I would totally pay for an app that kept my contact information in order without selling it to other people. Is this coming to Android anytime soon?

george_perez2• 7 years ago

I can almost 100% say that this is never coming to Android. Casey Liss is one of the co-hosts of Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP) and they are Apple users through and through. Marco Arment, maker of the great Overcast podcast client, is also a co-host alongside John Siracusa of Mac OS X/Ars reviews fame.

TL;DR No this is not coming to Android.

scarface748• 7 years ago

Well Marco did outsource porting Instapaper to Android before he sold it...

https://marco.org/2012/06/06/instapaper-for-android

But I doubt he would do the same for Overcast.

darkpuma2• 7 years ago

Surely on F-Droid there must be a contacts app that isn't spyware.

nerdbaggy• 7 years ago

Our support desk enriches the data about who e-mailed in, and among that is a picture. Now every time our most import client submits a ticket it’s a picture of him and his wife in a hot tub

VvR-Ox• 7 years ago

Haha nice that came to my mind, first :-D

userbinator• 7 years ago

For some reason the idea of having pictures of people in my contacts just feels creepy in an indescribable way, even if it isn't my picture but those of others. Perhaps this is because it increases the "you are being watched" feeling.

Yet the trend seems to be to plaster every single UI everywhere with the faces of users (and pestering them to upload "profile photos")... I do not need to see a picture of myself every time I'm logged into a site.

davidcollantes• 7 years ago

I disagree. It bugs me not to have an image of the person together with its contact information.

Vignette approach is way too plastic for my taste. I carefully curate my contacts and associate photos I take to them. Many people use avatars they do not reflect who they are, I can’t stand that on my contacts. That, mainly, and the fact that the app costs $5 (way too much in my opinion) are the only reason that will keep me away from it.

jwr2• 7 years ago

$5 (way too much in my opinion)

I wish people considered how much it costs to develop an app and then looked at the cost, keeping in mind that somebody out there needs to make a living, and apps do not sell in millions.

I am really annoyed by what Apple did to software pricing: it seems most people want stuff to be FREE or $1.99 these days. If that is your expectation, do not expect good apps, because it simply doesn't make any sense to write them.

unfunco• 7 years ago

You remind me of Robin Williams in One Hour Photo, and that's not a good thing. Carefully curating your contacts and thinking that you know more about what reflects them than they do is strange to me, it would feel wrong to override someones appearance with what I think is a better portrait of them.

scarface748• 7 years ago

And this is why we have all of the crappy apps with ads, pay to play, loot boxes, subscriptions and other dark patterns.

AlphaWeaver• 7 years ago

It's nice we've gotten to the point where we don't have to put that its an iOS app in the title, since people assume that iPhone users are the only people who care about using a new product.

myroon5• 7 years ago

Facebook Messenger on Android does something similar. Names and pictures from Facebook are shown by phone numbers

SoReadyToHelp• 7 years ago

I couldn't find the vignette filter in this app. Can anybody help?

kyriakos2• 7 years ago

Any android plans?

spiderfarmer• 7 years ago

Will never happen.

kyriakos2• 7 years ago

Then someone else will make it

thomasfedb• 7 years ago

Having tried the app, some honest UX feedback:

1. This app doesn't have a good reason to depart from the usual Apple UI style, so don't. The gradient buttons in particular feel very Web 2.0, and out of place in 2019.

2. You need to persist content in the app when I close it, or switch between apps. Ideally the app would work away in the background while I do something else, but if not it should at minimum not need to start again from scratch every time I open it.

3. When I tap on a photo to preview it's not obvious that I need to tap on the old photo to get back to the list. Offer a close icon in the corner.

Good idea, useful, execution could take some polish.

scarface748• 7 years ago

Because of purposeful limitations on iOS. Except in special cases, an app can not run in the background for more than ten minutes.

starik36• 7 years ago

I would like to buy this app but having hard time understanding why it requires iOS 12.1 or later. What new API call had to be in the app to justify this limitation?

I am on iOS 12.0.1 and plan on remaining there for the foreseeable future because I like my jailbreak.

hoistbypetard2• 7 years ago

Unless you very carefully preserve a stable of old devices with old versions of the OS, it's very challenging to test new software on older operating systems.

That's one of my least favorite parts of the ecosystem.

If a customer reports a problem on an iOS 12.0.x device, and I didn't go out of my way to keep one of my devices stuck on 12.0.x or to preserve the signatures from an old build, there is no way for me to go get a 12.0 device to troubleshoot their problem (unless I get lucky on eBay or similar) and no way for me to install 12.0 on a device I have sitting in my desk drawer.

Apple does not want people sticking to old versions of the OS, and makes it hard for app developers to support those who do.

scarface748• 7 years ago

Especially now that it means supporting both 32 bit and 64 bit versions for the very small percentage of people who have pre-2013 devices.

scarface748• 7 years ago

It makes no financial sense to waste time supporting older versions of iOS. Any phone introduces since 2013 can run the latest version of iOS - except for the 5C.

BozeWolf2• 7 years ago

Cool! Well done!! Love the techniques used and the way you find photos. Also like the design. Good luck with being indi developer.

I launched a similiar app a few weeks ago (LibreContacts), but did not make much fuzz about it yet because: busy. It adds profile pics from whatsapp to your contacts.

danpalmer• 7 years ago

I just tried LibreContacts and am finding it a bit confusing. The launch experience is unlike anything I’ve seen on an app before, and I’m not sure many people will understand it or be able to use it.

I’m out with just my phone for a long weekend. I can’t imagine the rest of my family using this - my parents would find it too complicated, and my siblings wouldn’t be bothered if it doesn’t work on the phone.

What’s the reason for it?

BozeWolf2• 7 years ago

I do not want to hijack this topic. But in short: whatsapp has all the contacts i have in my phone. Those contacts have profile pics. The qr thing is for tech reasons. Will pm if possible. Update: no email in bio. (I do though.)

oarsinsync5• 7 years ago

Scanning the website, it looks like it depends on you having populated the user's Facebook, Instagram & Twitter profiles in order to use those services. If you have an email address, it'll use Gravitar, and if you have none of the above, I guess it does nothing?

Given that Facebook already takes a full copy of all of my contacts (I use WhatsApp) I'd really rather not spend the effort curating a more detailed database linking phone numbers, email addresses and real names to various social media profiles, for the benefit of Facebook.

I realise this app, and Casey, are not responsible for the actions of other apps on my phone, but second order effects should be a real concern for any app that claims to be privacy focused.

I realise that's probably secondary to the claim that it's supposedly privacy focused, and relying on your contacts not being privacy focused in order to be effective.

All that said, and I apologise for raining on the otherwise sunny parade, this looks like a beautifully executed app, and I will be purchasing it shortly, mostly because I have enjoyed listening to Casey on ATP.

icebraining3• 7 years ago

I don't know about iOS, but on Android, you can use Whatsapp without giving it access to Contacts. It'll refuse to show the user's name, despite having it (they show in the group conversations), showing the phone number instead, but it works fine.

oarsinsync5• 7 years ago

This is true, but it significantly reduces usability. Which feels like a hilarious step to take in order to be able to use this app. Give up peoples names in a major IM application, in order to be able to have publicly available pictures automatically imported into my address book.

For me, that's not a net positive. YMMV.

dwheeler• 7 years ago

Given that Facebook already takes a full copy of all of my contacts (I use WhatsApp)

I recommend using web apps, not native apps, for things like Facebook. Your browser will not hand over your contacts list to the world, so preferring your browser is often a good move. Won't work for everyone, but it works for me.

You can also choose apps from orgs that care more about privacy. Signal works just fine instead of Whatsapp.

oarsinsync5• 7 years ago

You can also choose apps from orgs that care more about privacy. Signal works just fine instead of Whatsapp.

Network effects means that despite me being on iMessage and Signal, almost all my comms arrive on Whatsapp. I could remove myself from Whatsapp, but already abstaining from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn means my choices realistically are to either use IM platform as a selection criteria for my friends (which I've already done to a degree, and lost a lot of casual friends by not being on any of the above), or accept that there's no suitable alternative and give in to this particular beast.

randyrand• 7 years ago

Another alternative, I used this years ago (only works with FB):

'GoSync' https://itunes.apple.com/be/app/gosync-contacts-social-photo...

IloveHN84• 7 years ago

Why no Android version?

tastyface2• 7 years ago

This is going to come off as quite bitter, but the more I listen to podcasts like ATP, the more it angers me how incestuous the Apple indie community is. There are about a million of these kinds of utility apps in the App Store. Many are potentially useful to thousands of people like this one. None of them get widespread podcast coverage, writeups on Techcrunch and Macstories, and trending posts on HN. This is exclusively fame and personality driving sales, and yet nobody on these shows seems to want to acknowledge it.

Worse yet, this might make fledgeling indie developers believe that they, too, could make a living with their first or second projects. But I know from experience that merit isn't nearly enough: getting even a single journalist to pay attention will require weeks or months of unanswered e-mails to everyone you can find—and even then, only if you're lucky, and your app actually does something incredible.

Perhaps the unstated prerequisite in this market is that if you don't have a network, your app almost certainly isn't going anywhere, no matter how good it is. And if you know a bunch of people within the Apple indie community, you're going to have some degree of success, no matter what. I recently released an app that performs an important task substantially better than all the existing competition, and yet getting anyone at all to pay attention is like pulling nails. It's hard not to feel dejected when you see a newcomer with a comparatively simple app enter the stage and immediately get widespread acclaim.

As a long-time fan of the show, I'm happy for Casey's success (because he's a genuinely nice and well-meaning person), but I'm probably going to have to stop listening soon. This release is just an absolute distortion of the app developer experience, and it ticks me off that everyone in this sphere is acting like it's completely normal. In reality, almost anybody else would be lucky to make $100 from the lifetime of an equivalent app, and nobody would be donating $5 to you just because they like you.

graeme2• 7 years ago

Worse yet, this might make fledgeling indie developers believe that they, too, could make a living with their first or second projects.

Where did Casey or anyone else give this impression? I think you're reading a LOT into this that isn't there.

Obviously the app has done well because its creator is well known. That's a very viable method of marketing. Anyone hoping to start a business needs some sort of marketing angle, and fame or network is one of them.

Not just that: the app has to work, and Vignette works well. And it solved the problem of the people recommending it, too. That's part of why everyone who knows Casey is eager to talk about it: the app genuinely helped them.

Can you point to something anyone said, anywhere that backs up your own interpretation? Ie. someone saying "see, anyone can do it"

I didn't listen to this week's ATP yet, so maybe I missed something grotesque, but what you're saying doesn't sound like how Casey talked about the app in the runup.

tastyface2• 7 years ago

"Where did Casey or anyone else give this impression? I think you're reading a LOT into this that isn't there."

Maybe you're right. I admit there's quite a bit of sour grapes on my part. On the other hand, I think it's more a matter of what's not said. On ATP, the relative fame of the three co-hosts is rarely brought up as a causal factor of success, and Vignette's development has been talked about as if it were an an entirely conventional process, with no asterisks or caveats. To paraphrase several episodes of discussion: "You make the app, and if it's good enough, people will write about it and you will make on the order of several thousand dollars over its lifetime. Maybe you'll even be able make a living out of it." But that's just not how it works for ordinary people. Either the co-hosts are out of touch, or they assumed that Casey's connectedness would substantially help his sales, but didn't outright say it.

To be clear, I don't blame Casey for any of this. He did nothing wrong. More than anything, I'm frustrated by the Apple media for (what I perceive to be) favoritism when it comes to picking apps to write about and prop up. Where's the journalistic integrity? You pass over so many fantastic apps, yet a tiny utility app by this one famous developer (who's friends with the higher-ups) gets a full writeup?

"Not just that: the app has to work, and Vignette works well. And it solved the problem of the people recommending it, too. That's part of why everyone who knows Casey is eager to talk about it: the app genuinely helped them."

I think it helps connected people in the Apple indie dev scene more than anyone else. If you read the feedback in the corresponding Reddit thread[1], you'll see that most regular people aren't able to make use of its functionality.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/bs7z8a/vignette_for_...

Vignette: add photos to your contacts by searching public social media profiles

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