Sunlit version 1.2 is now available in the App Store. It includes a few minor improvements and one major change: you can now use the app with only a Flickr account. It no longer requires App.net.
We hope this will allow more people to try the app. At any time, you can always add your App.net account to the app’s settings and it will unlock the more advanced features: syncing, sharing stories to other App.net users, and multi-user collaboration so that anyone can add photos and edit text in a story.
Making App.net optional instead of required meant rethinking what the minimum features were that all users should have. Obviously you have to be able to create stories, add photos, include text descriptions, and use filters. But we also kept coming back to one thing: we could not ship without also supporting web publishing. The bulk of work on Sunlit 1.2 was creating a parallel implementation for publishing that would seamlessly work with exactly the same UI, with or without App.net.
Some people may ask why we chose Flickr instead of creating our own user accounts system, or simply having no registration. To support publishing, it helps to have some unique username for a user, and a secure way to authenticate them on the server. It won’t surprise anyone to hear that a lot of people have Yahoo accounts. With a redesigned web and mobile experience, plus 1 TB of free photo storage, Yahoo’s giving Flickr something of a new resurgence. There’s a lot we could build on the Flickr API.
At the same time, Sunlit’s App.net support is a powerful differentiator and we’ll continue to improve it. It lets you own your data, share it with other apps like Ohai, and sync to multiple users. I still believe in the App.net API and user community; it’s too good a platform to give up on.
