Narrative Clip 2: Better battery life, uploader still unreliable
So Narrative is continuously updating the components of its Narrative Clip ecosystem, which is good.
The Clip 2 firmware is up to version 1.3.6 now and the battery life has improved to the point where you no longer have to constantly worry about running out of juice. I got a full 12-hour day with continuous use (at the standard 30 second interval) out of it recently and ended up with 4% battery left when I came home.
The weakest component at this point turns out to be the uploader. To recap, I'm not using the Clip's WiFi upload capability since I'd rather have local copies of all my photos. So I run it through the uploader, just like with the original Clip 1. The uploader has been updated to support the Clip 2 now and does get the occasional upgrade itself (though you'll only notice this when you quit it and it asks you whether it should install its update now). One tiny feature that's still missing, btw, is the option to set a path for the local backups. I have a big external hard drive that I'd rather use for these, but the uploader only lets me save them on the computer's internal disk.
Anyway, my real gripe with the uploader is that it sometimes pretends to upload photos but doesn't actually seem to do so. My internet connection isn't so fast, especially in the upstream direction, so I recently found myself with a backlog of over 4000 photos to upload. It took the uploader quite a while and when it was done - the photos didn't show up in the Narrative App. But when I quit and restarted the uploader, it started uploading the 4000+ photos again. And lo and behold, there still were over 4000 files in the upload queue directory on my computer. So what exactly had it been uploading all the time? I have no idea. It did work on that second try.
And a few days later, the same thing happened again. There were only about 400 photos this time. It went like this: Plug in Clip 2, photos are transferred to the computer, upload of 400 photos starts and finishes after a while. No new photos to be found in the Narrative App. Quit the uploader, start it again - upload of 400 photos starts again and succeeds this time.
This is really annoying and needs to be fixed.
The other unreliability I'm experiencing is on the clip itself and hasn't improved with the 1.3.6 firmware: It can take quite a long time to wake up from sleep mode. Where the Clip 1 could take up to 2 minutes (but reliably so), the Clip 2 has now repeatedly (but unpredictably) failed to start taking pictures after even 10 minutes of use. But it only happens on occasion and I haven't been able to figure out what may cause this delay.