Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Microsoft Lumia posts a video promoting services that don't support Windows Phone

IFTTT and OneDrive

A series of life hack videos will be coming out from the company CrowdCentric, in partnership with Microsoft. The series is called "60 second productivity hacks" and is made by Brain Candy. The aim of these videos is in line with a key focus of CrowdCentric which is "helping people make the most of digital technology." While the series as a whole may be useful to many, the first video is not a strong start to the series.

This video features automated service If This Than That (IFTTT) backing up Instagram photos directly to OneDrive. There's only a few problems with it. First, Instagram was basically forced to bring an app to Windows Phone in the first place and hasn't updated it in a year. Second, IFTTT doesn't have a Windows Phone app so even though it works on Internet Explorer they obviously aren't supporting the platform. Lastly, and possibly most importantly, if you are using a Windows Phone like they are in the video, your photos taken via Instagram are already backed up on OneDrive if you'd like them to be so having IFTTT back up photos taken by a Windows Phone (the video features a Lumia 930) is pretty redundant in this specific case.

All this being said, it's not as if IFTTT isn't a useful application. There are plenty of recipes worth using and it really can make sharing to multiple social media outlets easier. In fact, this same feature might be worth advertising on other platforms where OneDrive isn't already so well integrated. The biggest problem here is that the video highlights a redundant feature that using two services who's developers don't bother to support Windows Phone.

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