As far as I know it has never been up at the main domain, only at next.smashingmagazine.com. As the notice at the top says, it's an open beta. Having said that I'm curious about the status. The switch to a static site is pretty interesting for such a large site.

The usability of Snapchat always boggled my mind as well, until I realised it might be the reason it's so popular among younger users. Because it's less obvious/intuitive to use it remains to this day a platform mostly used by teenagers which might add to the "attractiveness"of the service to that specific group. Your parents aren't on Snapchat. They won't put in the effort to understand how it works.

As far as the lenses feature goes... Whether intentional or not, I think because of it's poor usability/discoverability it got extremely popular in a short time. I have a younger sister and some younger nieces (I'm 27, so far too old for Snapchat on average), and I send them a snap with one of the new lenses the day it came out. Neither of them knew how to do it but they were very eager to learn how. I can imagine it got people to talk about the feature a lot and try it together at schools and other places.

Stays true to the original but feels more modern. I was just thinking yesterday some elements seemed outdated. Had some issues with the login bar in Safari, but now it works. Clearing cache didn't fix it at first, but now it started working all of a sudden.. So I guess all is well?

... Am I the only one seeing the huge pop-over informing that the app has been sunsetted because the developer was hired by Yahoo in April of this year? Kind of wondered already this morning why it was posted. It got my hopes up since this definitely would have come in handy.

But: this app is history and it's not coming back. If you read the post on the Flickr blog it says the developer will work on improving the Flickr uploader but that Flickr hasn't acquired the PhotoDrive app itself.

That sounds interesting. Could you share one of your proposals or tell something about that?

Pretty neat, but doesn't work as flawlessly as it should. There's some stuttering even on my new rMBP with maxed out processor and GPU. The ending was pretty cool though (switching cars).