Monday, June 2, 2014

WWWDC 2014. Biggest take for me. Mail Annotations on OSX 10.10



From today's Apple's WWWDC conference. The biggest surprise to me today was the large file attachments and email annotation (aka Markup tools).

Seem very simple, huh?

Well, I work in the advertising industry; working with clients and various agencies across the world. This is exactly what they've been looking for. They deal with super large files. Other fields may be sending 2-5MB Excel attachments, but in creative media, they're sending large files either video or images. Have you ever seen a 2GB TIFF before? I've seen people try to send those large of files as attachments. And in the past 14 years of my life, I can tell you clients and vendors are always sending large attachments.  40 MB Attachments are the norm and they're always FTPing them, using box or some sharing service like yousendit. Yes, the dreaded email bounce back is a fairly common sight.

Also, many agencies use expensive markup tools. Some cost $60K to $300K. They have more advance collaboration features like real time markup, realtime zooming of large files over the network, and precise onsite monitor calibration. This is not the answer to those highly specialize workflows which are used 5% of the time. For the other 95% of the time where people are marking up PDFs and images, this solves it.  People use third party apps, some even use Photoshop, Illustrator or Indesign to do mock-ups. But now, it is built into a mail client.


In the grand scheme of things, these are relatively small features and none of the tech blogs even picked up on this but I  sure did. Considering 98% of the creative agencies I've worked with, they all use Macs. This is a big deal for those users.

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