Nikon Image Space (NIS) has now gone live. If you have a Nikon camera, you can download a utility that will let you register for 20GB of free space instead of 2GB. Okay, let's do that, then try to upload a file using the preferred method in NIS:
Sure enough, apparently Nikon hasn't gotten around to OS-X Mountain Lion's requirements, which require that applications be signed. Are you kidding me?
Sigh. I was actually hoping for progress from my Picturetown, even if only a little. Nikon has chosen Adobe Flash and Adobe Air to power features of the site. Even Adobe has moved on to HTML 5, so one has to once again wonder about the Nikon software group's ability to assess and choose appropriate platforms and technologies to build on. Much of the problems we've seen with Nikon software in the past have resulted from their choices of platform, licensed DLLs and packages.
Nikon's naming practices don't seem to have improved, either. The utility you download is named (on Mac) S-UG_UTL_0100000MF-ALLIN-ALL___.dmg. Yeah, that's friendly. As usual, if you're not paying attention to file names, you'll end up with odd stuff in your Downloads folder that you don't know what it is. Note this: all the Nikon file names for downloads tend to not have the word "Nikon" in their file name. For example, S-VNX2_-020701WF-NSAEAN-64BIT_.EXE is the name for version 2.7.1 of ViewNX2's installer.
These names are instantly recognizable to Nikon employees, as Nikon has standardized their naming policies internally (a good thing). But it shows just how little they think about customers. Over the course of a year I collect all kinds of installers and files in my Downloads folder, not just Nikon stuff. I can't even do a search on "Nikon" and find the Nikon-related files in the folder. Or a search on "ViewNX" even. I just did a quick look in my Downloads folder: the only products by which I couldn't search for by product name are...you guessed it, Nikon files.
Maybe the promised linkages to social sharing make it worth all the pain of joining NIS (I wasn't able to figure out how to move my myPicturetown account, by the way):
Well, if you're a Facebook user, you can share. Seems to me I recall that there might be some other social sites out there these days. You know: Twitter, Google+, just a few others. Plus I'm guessing that Nikon isn't going to consider sharing sites like Flickr as being useful to link to ;~).
For now I believe the initials NIS stand for Not Interesting Software. Perhaps things will improve with time, but this is Nikon's second start after several years of trying to get cloud photo support right, and they haven't made any useful progress yet.