Sometimes I find myself getting lost in the vast sea of the app world. I get wrapped up into all sorts of games that provide fleeting fun, but lose site of some of the little things that make me the happiest. I’ll never forget the dumb laughs that we would get playing iBeer or flicking the stupid Zippo Lighter over and over again. Don’t get me wrong, I’m super grateful that I get to play games like geoDefense Swarm on my iPhone every day, but it’s important not to lose sight of the little things that keep me entertained. Since the app stores inception, these little novelty apps have grown from being digital beers to somewhat impressive things, like augmented reality apps and highly entertaining photo manipulators. Fortunately for me, while digging for the next great novelty app, I found Ransom Letters sitting in the ‘What’s Hot’ section of the app store and decided to give it a go.

Ransom Notes is a simple little app that let’s you put ransom note letters (you know, the ones that are cut from magazines in all different sizes) on any picture you take. Within the app, just take the picture, type in the sentence you want to display over the picture, and KABLAM, you have a ransom note made up that you can send to any of your unsuspecting friends / co-workers.

As a typical customer, I’d just leave it at that, but as a reviewer I feel the need to dive in a bit in order to fully grasp what I’ve got here. The apps controls are fairly simple, giving you a small but effective number of options to work with. Typing your word in is as simple as clicking on the ‘type it’ button. It’s extremely intuitive, but there is definitely a glaring flaw. I can type words out to my hearts content, but what is typically the point of a ransom letter… to get money right? Well, I hope you’re prepared to type in the word dollars, because the dollar sign is not part of Ransom Letters repertoire, an omission that will hopefully be fixed on a later version. Once you type your word in, it is quite simple to move words around the page with your finger and the sizes are batch changed by pinching. There is no individual word sizing unfortunately, but I hear it may be included in a future update. Also, to make your words that much more cryptic, you can shake to shuffle, giving you scrambled sentences that will have your victims panicking in cold sweat.

Assuming that you are a fan of the concept, there really isn’t much not to like about Ransom Letters. It’s fun, it’s fast, and it only costs 99 cents. I know that it’s simple, but I’ll probably be happily using this app long after I’m done playing larger, more expensive apps like Rock Band and Madden.

Adobe Photoshop. It’s possibly the most useful and used photograph editing software this side of Mars. The sheer functionality the software offers is now a main selling point for both hobbyists and professionals alike. In the market it’s seen as an industry standard, along with the vector creation software, Adobe Illustrator.

Last week, it finally happened. Adode released the software for iPhone and iPod touch, to huge fanfare. But don’t get too excited. The app is currently only available on iTunes US, and although good, it’s far from the standard or functionality you’ll likely find on the desktop version. The app is actually entitled Photoshop.com Mobile, and with good reason. This is Photoshop, and it is made by Adobe, the only difference is it’s been designed with touch in mind and links up (I have to say – pretty seamlessly) with their pay-to-use storage service at Photoshop.com. I like to think of it as – yes – a photo editor, but also a little extension onto their existing online service.

I like photography myself, and while I don’t shoot things that often, when I can I will. With that in mind I need an editor I can use on the move which is both reliable and produces great results, first time. When the App Store launched, and still today, there are hundreds if not thousands of mobile photo editors available. From free to paid and the good to the awful. You’d think Photoshop would knock them all off their perch. After all, being the most known, you might be inclined to think they would want to make a great first impression. The sorta “Photoshop is here, all is well.” impression, right? – Well don’t be too sure.

Opening the app you’ll be greeted with a very bog-standard and plain looking UI. There are 4 tabs along the bottom including; Edit, Online, Upload and Settings. On the ‘Edit’ tab you’ll have the option to open a new document to edit, either choosing a photo from your current library, or if you want, take one right then and there, with the iPhone’s build in camera. Only once you’ve chosen a photo to edit, will you be introduced to the app’s editing UI.

Once you have a photo open, you’ll see two toolbars appear. Both top and bottom. The top bar consists of your main editing functionality, while the bottom bar carries functions like undo, save and exit. Starting at the top you’ll find four main sections in which these effects are split up onto. Starting left and moving right, the first button you’ll encounter offers three core functions a photo editor wouldn’t be without. Crop, Rotate and Flip. Now, although the crop function in this app is pretty standard, seeing you dragging a box over the area you wish to crop and that tapping done, when using both Rotate and Flip, Adobe have focused more on the multi-touch aspect – and it works.

Unlike most photo editors I got to try, Photoshop.com Mobile makes rotating or flipping a photo incredible easy. Both use multi-touch gesturing. To rotate you use one or two fingers, and simply draw a circle of the screen. To flip you take your finger, and depending on whether you want to flip the photo horizontally or vertically, it’s just a swipe away. The app also performs these two functions with live animation. Unlike like most, you can actually see these two effects happening. Usually you would perform the function gesture, and that result would appear. In my opinion, it’s little things like this which has people liking the app.

Moving to the second tab, here you’ll find your lighting effects. These include: Exposure, Saturation, Tint and Black & White. If you’re a power user of Photoshop, I probably don’t have to tell you what these four options do. What I will say though, is they work very well. Tapping an effect such as ‘Exposure’ sees the introduction of a further touch gesture. Tap and drag. Sliding your finger from left to right over the photo will either increase of decrease the effect, with the scale running from -64 to 64. Some effects you encounter though will just be applied, with no input from you. For example, Black & White.

Then we come to what i like to call our ’specialised’ effects. In this version there are only two available, including: Sketch and Soft Focus. Sketch is in my opinion like the desktop ‘Poster Edges’ effect. Found in Filter, Artistic, Poster Edges on the desktop version, the effect enhances the photo by simplifying the objects and their edges. A cool effect, to have on the go I’m sure you’ll agree. Soft Focus on the other hand is just how it sounds. The effect is triggered by the same tap and drag gesture I mentioned previously, and simply softens the focus on your photo. It is worth noting though that the effected ‘area’ cannot be controlled by you. It is just applied to the whole photo.

The last tab on the top toolbar though is where Photoshop.com Mobile really starts to show what it could be capable of. Entering this section of the app displays a list of of eight different preset effects, including: Vibrant – which increases the vibrancy of the photo, Pop – which creates a ‘Pop-Art’ style mosaic, Border – adds a border to the outer frame, Vignette Blur – one of my favorites this effect adds a soft blur around most of your photo leaving the center un-touched, Warm Vintage – adds warm ‘brown’ tones to your photo, Rainbow – this effect adds a spectrum of colour, White glow – rather like increased exposure and finally, Soft Black and White – which is an effect which turns your photo black and white, but also seems to lower it’s exposure.

As expected, each time you perform one of these effects you can choose to accept or decline it, with undo options afterward if for some reason you feel you don’t like a certain effect.

Moving to the bottom toolbar now, and here, running from left to right you’ll find an; exit button, undo (in red), redo (in green) and save & upload options. In order to use the upload feature, you’ll need an Adobe account, and you’ll be pleased to hear you get 2GB of online storage, with the ability to purchase more if needed.

Exiting the ‘edit’ screen, and going back to the app’s main four tabs, the rest of this app is simply to do with Adobe’s Photoshop.com service, with the online tab allowing you to see what photos are currently in your online library and the upload tab allowing you to upload photos to the service, on the move. In the in-app settings tab you also have the option to turn ‘Tips’ off, and sign out of your Adobe account.

Overall, Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone is a simple and free app, which allows you to perform the most basic of adjustments to your photos on the move. While it’s not a fully-featured version of Photoshop (far from it), its basic functionality should serve the general hobbyist with photo editing whilst out and about. This isn’t an app though for Photoshop power users, or professionals. While the apps effects feel greatly more enhanced compared to other photo editors such as Photogene and Photoforge, if you’re a professional you’ll probably want to stick to an editor which is more fully featured.

Personally, I hope Adobe are planning to release a full paid version of this app, with more functionality aimed at power users. As it stands, although I like this version, I see it as a lite version. Maybe this is all we will see from Adobe (at least for now), but in my opinion this app isn’t anywhere near or comparable to the desktop version – yet.

I feel that I’ve come to a point in my life where there are more pressing matters than making sure every photo one of my friends and I are in is tagged as soon as it is taken, or as close to that point as possible. That being said, I’ve got some sick pix on my facebook you definitely need to check out.

My good looks broke the software.

Face Match is an application that brings the iPhone facial recognition software, much like that in iPhoto ‘09 for those of you that are familiar with Apple software. For those of you that are not, the formula is simple. You tag faces that the software has not seen before and from that point on it will automatically tag that individual on its own.. Face Match attempts to work much in the same way. It serves as an alternative photo library and another way to upload pre-tagged photos to Facebook. To do this you open up the app, sync it with your Facebook information, and then can choose photos from your phone’s photo library to tag and upload. The facial recognition software works. It’s not amazing, but it does work under the right circumstances. The target must be facing forward, can’t be wearing a hat or sunglasses or anything that will obscure any part of the face, and the lighting has to be just right. The face also has to be just big enough, but not too big, and not too small. Are you writing all this down?

Who's really two faced?

An app like this will only find success if it can make a task easier than it already was. Face Match, in many situations, is only a different path to the same destination. Uploading your photos straight to Facebook and tagging them the old way would be just as fast, if not faster. The first time that you tag somebody within Face Match, it can be somewhat of a lengthy process. Getting Face Match to load a photo up on my 3G sometimes could take up to around 10 seconds. The actual process of tagging the photo was a lengthy one as well. My phone experienced a ton of lag when trying to type and allow the app to search through my phone’s contacts and my Facebook contacts. Things get easier once you have already tagged a friend, but not by much. If Face Match recognizes the face (which it honestly does a pretty impressive job of, assuming the previously mentioned conditions have been met) you have to tap the square around the face and verify Face Match’s hypothesis, which takes maybe a second or two shorter than simply typing somebody’s name in on Facebook.

I'm upset it doesn't work right too. But I'm not crying...

Where the convenience is supposed to come in this app is the ability to have an application upload AND tag your photo’s for you, but Face Match just falls a bit short in the long run. I really hope this app improves in the future because I actually enjoyed using it. It didn’t really save a TON of time, but for whatever reason it did feel a bit more convenient than dealing with Facebook’s crappy mobile interface. The app never once crashed on me which is more then I can say for Facebook. I will definitely use this app again, but if I woke up tomorrow and it wasn’t on my phone, I probably wouldn’t be too devastated. Face Match does what it says it will do… just not amazingly well. Hopefully after a few updates this one can live up to it’s full potential, and TO will stop crying.

Overview
Impress is an app that’s easy to use. After installing it on my iPod Touch I quickly grabbed a picture (iPhone users have the option to shoot a picture too) and started painting. I was impressed with how easy it is to change the brushes, and the variety that these adjustments give the user.

When you’re painting you can zoom in and move around the picture with the pinch control. There are about 6 brushes or so which can be adjusted by moving the crosshairs around the screen. The settings are such that you can get almost any kind of effect you want out of a brush. If you make a mistake there’s an erase mode available too.

Pros
It was really easy to start painting with this app. I grabbed a picture of my night stand from my iPod and started working on it. Don’t ask me why I grabbed this one, I’ve just always liked this picture for some strange reason. The way the app chooses the colors automatically is nice. I like not having to worry about that. I also worked on a picture of the old Transformer Jetfire (not the new one) that I found. This was cool too, but I didn’t post it here because wasn’t patient enough for all of the details.

Cons
There are a couple of things I would like to see added as Impress develops. It would be nice to add layers, and the ability to add text. I think these things can be done without ruining the simplicity of the app. Maybe revising the way zoom and painting are handled would be recommended too. Oftentimes I accidentally painted when zooming or moving the picture around, which then required me to move to Erase mode.

Conclusion
Impress, for what it’s designed to do, is quite impressive. It’s no Brushes, but it’s not trying to be. It’s made so that anyone can make a nice looking painting with just a little bit of time and patience. Impress’s aim is simplicity and it hits the mark. It’s a great app and you can’t go wrong for only $0.99.

Impress Gallery: http://marioguimaraes.com/impress/Gallery.html

What is Pano?
A simple application, Pano for iPhone and iPod touch allows you to create seamless panoramic views (or photos), right on your device – or so Debacle claims. I took the app for a test drive, on the new iPhone 3GS (with auto focus) and here’s my experience.

What is a Panoramic View?

“In its most general sense, a panorama is any wide-angle view of a physical space. It has also come to refer to a wide-angle representation of such a view, whether in painting, drawing, photography, film/video, or a three-dimensional model.”

Using Pano
Opening the app, you’ll be presented with the normal ‘camera’ view, ready to take a photo. Pano numbers your photos from 1 to 16, with 16 being the limit of photos you can physically take with the application, to create any one pano. Just like you would on the normal camera application, to take a photo with pano you simply hit the camera button bottom center. The app starts you off in portrait mode, and this is especially good if you want to take a panoramic view of say for example, a waterfall.

However, there will be times when you need to switch landscape, to capture that perfect moment. To do this simply hit the ‘Cancel’ button in the bottom left of the ‘camera’ screen. From here Pano will throw up two further options; Switch to landscape mode, and Resume shooting. Hitting resume shooting is pretty self-explatatory, and the app will continue to let you shoot your pano in portrait. Tapping ‘Switch to Landscape’ does just as it says. The app will swicth modes and instead of taking photos in portrait, will allow you to take them in landscape. This is handy if your taking for example, a panoramic view of a sunset, or skyline.

Once your done with creating your pano, simply hit that ‘Cancel’ button again, and select ‘Create my Pano now!’. The app will then stitch your photos together. The pano I took consisted of 6 photos, and took about 20 seconds to process. While the app processes your photo, you’ll see a progress bar which states ‘Merging’. Every panoramic view created by Pano is automatically saved into your iPhone camera roll, or in the iPod touch’s case, your Photo roll. Once you connect your device to your Mac, your pano is then available via iPhoto, for import – and I have to say, the quality is pretty great.

Here’s one I took earlier:

Aligning
As mentioned before, the app can be quite hard to align the photos manually – especially if you haven’t got the most of steady hands, like me. But, it does help you along. Taking the first photo with Pano will result in the app switching to the second photo view. When it does this, it also overlays (very faintly) the last piece of photo 01. To a degree, this helps in allowing you to perfectly align your photos, for that seamless look – and I’m sure, if you do have steady hands, you probably will get a perfect panoramic, but so far, I’m yet to create one without noticeable photo overlap.

Overall

Overall, what can I say? Pano is a great tool for panoramic shots. Although not perfect, as advertised, Pano’s output quality and easy of use shines through. If you’re a keen photographer, and want to be able to capture a full scene on the move, Pano is for you.

An intuitive app is important to me. I don’t like reading directions and learning all the features. It’s a phone app, people, let’s make it simple. GPS Photorino is a simple and intuitive picture app. Take a photo, or select one from your Library, select a frame, let GPS Photorino do its locating work, and voilá! There’s your customized picture.

Upon starting the app you’re presented with a shiny, jolly, candy-like button which prompts you to take a picture. Once the photo is taken your location, date, and time are filled in the frame. Swipe your finger across the picture to choose a new frame and theme.

Likes

GPS Photorino is a cute app. It’s nice to customize your picture with a snazzy frame and the text editing is great. You may not always a literal location like ‘I-17 & Union Hills on the photo so Photorino lets you customize the text by clicking on the ‘Edit Text’ button.

While, this isn’t an everyday application for me because I just like to shoot occasional pictures, I do find it useful when it comes to catching cute pictures of my kids. The appeal of this app is being able to put together a quick, memorable picture to send to friends and family, or just to create a neat wallpaper for the iPhone. The themes are professional and good looking and the right one adds a nice touch to any picture.

What I’d Like to See

I’d like to see the ability for more customization. There are only 13 themes to choose from, so it left me wanting when trying to find an appropriate theme a couple of times. It would also be nice to see a few more options with editing font size and or layers on the themes to add different elements.

Summary

There are more features coming in 1.2 as advertised on the App Store, and the developer seems very active with this app. In spite of its shortcomings, the app is rating very well on the App Store and I’m sure as it matures it will be a must have. Personally, I would wait and see what’s in the next update before plunking down $2. Otherwise, if you take lots of iPhone pictures and want to customize them easily, this is the way to go.

GPS Photorino, iPhone App from Imagebakery on Vimeo.

Last week I almost bought a digital picture frame for my desk, but debated its price and necessity within the confines of my own head until I finally gave up and went home. The appearance of DreamStream in the App Store this week makes me very glad that I hesitated. It is a straightforward application for your iPhone or iPod Touch that greatly enhances its utility as a wireless picture frame.

Simply put, DreamStream allows you to customize a digital slide show on your iPhone or iPod touch by accessing and displaying photos from your device’s Camera Roll and/or Photo Library, MobileMe iDisk, your and your friends’ Facebook albums, Flickr tags, RSS 2.0 photo feeds and Windows Live Framelt. Setup is as easy as tapping the info button in the upper right hand corner to access the ‘Settings” page. All of DreamStream’s settings are within the app itself, which is convenient. Tapping on “Photo Sources” is where you add pictures from any of the aforementioned supported sources. After signing in to my Facebook account via FB Connect, I was permitted to choose from among my seven albums and all of my friends’ albums to display in the slide show. DreamStream does not allow you to choose individual photos however; you must select an entire album to display. With hundreds of friends and thousands of photos to choose from, you can vary the display as often as you like. MobileMe photo access was seamless as well. I found that adding photos from my iPhone itself to be the least convenient in that each picture must be selected individually. That is, unless I’m missing something, you cannot select an entire album for display from within your iPhone’s Photo Library—and adding individual photos gets pretty tedious pretty quickly. Once your photo sources are set up, you can choose which of them to display by checking the little box next to each source, a nice customizable touch.

The slide show is able to be tweaked in two further ways. The length of time each photo is displayed can be set from the Settings page. DreamStream also includes a ‘Widget’ display which can be turned on or off. There are three so-called Widgets, a calendar display (which also includes day and time), time display and customizable weather display. The ability to select individual Widgets for display, rather than all or none, would be appreciated.

DreamStream crashed a few times during setup; after that my slide show ran for hours without a hiccup (turn off screen auto-lock under the iPhone’s Settings app). If you don’t mind the small screen and have a dock for continuous charging, your iPhone or Ipod Touch can make for a great wireless picture frame. DreamStream offers an affordable way to provide users a near endless, not to mention interesting and fun, source of photos for your viewing pleasure. I highly recommend it.

There are so many photo-enhancement and camera applications currently on the App Store that it’s very hard to make an informed choice. With crashing and slow response time in most every review in the Photography section, consumers are getting skittish. In the realm of apps that promise to provide a Camera.app replacement, developers tend to release either simple preset-based efforts or in-depth interfaces full or sliders for tweaking variables. Chimera (with it’s punnish name) stands firmly in the realm of feature-rich functionality and offers some tricks that are unique to the platform.

Image Stabilization and Basic Image Adjustments

Chimera touts its image stabilization loudly. I’ve tested several highly-rated apps with this feature and the results have generally been mixed. In this case, the ad copy seems to be very accurate. Chimera demonstrated great results. It holds up pretty well to even continual motion, which is not its purpose. While it won’t fix the iphone’s slow shutter time, it will make sure you don’t have to worry about shaky hands ruining your photo.

Another aspect of Chimera is some simple photo tweaks like high-contrast and white balance adjustment, which it combines with face detection (I’ll talk about that later). Used without the face detection option, the app seems to do a good job in both cases, though high-contrast, in my opinion, seems less useful and almost seems like it should reside in their list of filters.

A Veritable Army of Filters Without Waiting

If there’s one area where Chimera’s a beast, it’s in the filters. Pressing a button that looks like a mix between a brush and a wrench brings up camera, faces and color settings along with a screenful of filters. These vary from glow effects and blur to Predator® vision and watercolors (for the sensitive and the interstellar hunters). There are twenty-two in all, and that would be impressive, but they also are displayed in a preview grid that allows to see a (almost) realtime preview. In testing, the preview took about a second to refresh. This seems like a reasonable rate, since you have a grid of eleven filters at a time on the screen (a swipe will reveal the other eleven). Once you’ve selected a filter, you can deselect the brush/wrench icon and select a magnifying glass to give yourself a half page, almost realtime, preview of the filter. This moved a faster, 3-5 frame per second rate.

The filters were nice overall, my only complaint was with the intensity of the filters. A lot of these are the sort of techniques that you expect to decrease some detail, but must scale to the image size. In other words, a brush simulation that looks great in 320 x 480 will lack detail in 1200 x 1600 (that app’s default resolution). This renders them pretty much unusable for anything except low-res and defeats the purpose of the higher output resolution. I’m hoping that an intensity slider will be added to the app along with selectable resolution. Because, chances are, if you’re using the filters on the app, you’re going to email or text the photo, and if not, you’re probably going to tweak it with photoshop at home. If the developers want to provide a usable filter gallery for hi-res situations, they’ll need some way to zoom into the native resolution for a preview.

Face Detection

It works. Mostly. There were a few cases that I won’t post here where it incorrectly identified other, less flattering body parts as faces, and, in one case, a wall. For most portrait situations, however, it works pretty well. The only problem is that, if it does happen to be confused by a wall, the white balance function will have some issues. Still, it’s an interesting feature that has impressed me with it’s initial implementation.

About That Interface

After using Chimera for a while, it makes sense. This is, unfortunately, not because of the icon designs or arrangements. The brush/wrench icon means nothing to a user and the magnifying glass icon means something entirely different that what it’s supposed to mean. The ? icon sends you to mobile safari, which is something that a lot of developers do but requires a relaunch of the application and doesn’t provide an easy way to get help on the actual phone. Meanwhile “Saving Image” progress indicator comes up a lot, which would make you think that you won’t lose your image, but, in fact, it’s only saving filter results to memory and you must press a disk icon to save to internal storage. Which brings me to my next problem.

Taking and Saving Your Images

Anyone who has ever worked with a camera application that has resolution options knows that higher resolution settings dramatically increase the time it takes to do anything. It’s not anyone’s fault that it happens, but sometimes the application needs to be designed with this in mind. I took my iPhone to a wedding for testing and found that two of the shooting modes (Preview and Instant) were a little slow for even casual picture taking. On average, saving a shot takes about ten seconds, and with a filter it can take anywhere from twenty seconds to a minute. In continuous mode it took between 10-20 seconds for each picture to save after they were taken, and did a pretty good job keeping the shots coming. After three to five shots, however, the app began to slow. I also wouldn’t advise using (especially heavy) filters in continuous mode, as it crashed the app every time. This weekend I did a clean restore of my iPhone (and didn’t restore my settings) and still got the same performance results. Depending on your usage, these things might be annoyances or dealbreakers.

Conclusion

This is certainly an ambitious effort and should be applauded for trying to expand perceptions of what the platform can do. The attempt at previews in realtime is truly impressive and the filters within Chimera are diverse. The interface could use some work and giving the user a choice on resolution would give casual shooters an option to sacrifice quality for speed. Some of the current limitations stem from the hardware it must employ. Still, this is definitely an application to watch as it reaches maturity.

The iPhone’s camera quality (or lack thereof) may be one of its most talked about features. Regardless of the opinions of its capabilities, chances are that most people end up using the camera fairly regularly. Photo FX provides a robust set of twenty-six filters and fifty-four presets that allow users to easily edit your photos from anywhere. Layers, cropping and rotation are also added in the 1.2 update which greatly expands the capabilities of the application.

When opening Photo FX, you are sent to your photo library. From there you may select a photo, go to options or go to the camera to take a photo. The options page works in the same way that a lot of 3rd party photo apps on the iPhone work. You can select the resolution to use for saved photos (640, 800, 1024, 1280 or Full) and set Photo FX to save the original photo. These options allow for higher resolution photos than Apple’s default settings.

Once you’ve taken a photo or selected one from your galleries, you are presented with five collections of filters. These collections consist of Face FX (generally for portraits), Outer FX ( generally for Landscapes), Fun FX, Classic FX and Wild FX. The effects vary greatly from light bloom effects to night vision simulation. Sometimes the presets are subtle (as with the various Black and White filters) and sometimes they are fun or over-the-top. This variance fits the App Store market. Casual users will find presets they like that can be quickly applied. More discerning users will be able to do wonders with sliders within each filter and preset. The subtlety that is achievable in the app with a little patience is hard to display in a few thumbnails, but I hope that those provided will give less subtle examples to interested folks. I should mention that shaking the phone on the filter selection screen randomly selects a filter, and shaking the phone in the filter resets that filter’s settings.

Beyond the filters, the new features in 1.2 have added both complexity and usability to the application.

Layers have been added to allow the addition of several filters without saving. This can’t be emphasized enough as a great addition. Layers add a level of complexity that couldn’t be reached previously in the app. It should be the favorite feature of those looking for more complexity.

Crop and rotate are another welcome addition for those who need to send that quick photo in an email. Both of these are available when you select any filter. Just hit the reload/refresh button if you don’t want the filter and tap the crop icon. You’ll be given a set of handles to grab and manipulate the crop area. By default the crop area maintains the aspect ratio of your photo. If you want more control, simply tap the lock icon. If your iPhone was a little crooked when you snapped the shot, a clockwise and counter-clockwise arrow allow you to rotate the picture a degree at a time until it lines up to your preference. There is also a little button on the left beside a grayed-out crop icon that allows for freeform rotation. This consists of drawing a line at the angle where you’d like that side of the picture to rotate. Most of these controls work extremely well.

The stability of the app is good. Even when using high resolution settings the app rarely slowed. Of course, as with all 3rd party photo apps, a restart will boost performance.

After finding my way around the application there were only a couple of things that didn’t work to my expectations. The freeform rotation tool does allow for faster rotation than the other two buttons but I could not control that rotation at all. I ended up hoping that some random swipe would get the picture close to what I wanted and then saved it. I also believe that going to crop and rotation thru the filters is counter-intuitive. Whether redesign involves adding a button at the top or bottom of the filter selection pages, adding it as an “effect” in the classic section, or some other interface solution, I believe at least casual users would prefer fast, hassle-free access to this important feature.

The only other thing is a minor interface opinion. It seems to me that four icons on the rotation/crop page are some form of arrow in an arc or a circle. I guess this is fine for the two incremental rotation buttons and the freeform tool, but begins to be confusing when all of them are there with the refresh/undo button. I don’t know what sort of button would be a good replacement, but I’d throw out a button that simply says undo and switches to redo when pressed.

Lastly (this is probably impossible) I’d dearly love a way to manage, delete and edit layers. Just a wish.

I’ve included a video tutorial from the developer. Unfortunately it only shows the 1.1 interface.

If you’re a user who is frustrated with the output that the iphone produces, chances are nothing will change your mind. If however, you use your phone’s camera a lot but wish those pics could look a little better when you email them to your boss or Grandma, then Photo FX is worth the price. The addition of cropping and layers really adds value to this app. If rotation can be implemented in a more user friendly manner, any reservations I have about this application will be removed.

While no one can really convince me that the iPhone’s camera is anything other than average, a host of truly creative yet simple apps have cropped up that make your photo experience a whole lot more interesting and fun; ColorSplash by Hendrick Kueck is one of these. Colorsplash can dramatically transform your photos by converting them to black and white while keeping selected details in color, a process known as color desaturation.

The in-program tutorial is concise and will get you started quickly. To begin a session you may choose to load an image from your device’s photo album or take a new photo. The app then converts the image to black and white and allows you to selectively add color back in using one of 4 available brushes–hard or soft edged, opaque or transparent color. There are two view modes within ColorSplash; the ‘normal’ mode shows the image in black and white with part color and ‘red mode’ shows the colored areas of the photo in a vibrant opaque red (to make it easier to see and edit the borders between colored and b&w areas). You can pan and zoom the image to make coloring individual areas easier. When you exit ColorSplash your work is automatically saved as a ’session’; anyone who has ever accidentally hit the home screen or received a phone call mid-edit will appreciate this feature. Multiple sessions can be stored and completed images are then saved to the camera roll. It is important to note that some of ColorSplash’s preferences are only accessible from the iPhone’s Settings app; here the brush size can be adjusted and auto-rotate can be turned off.

There is a lot to like and little to criticize with ColorSplash. I was a little disappointed to realize that only a photo’s original colors can be added back. Also it would be nice to have all of the preferences within the app itself. But overall ColorSplash does what it does well and for a reasonable price.

Toy cameras are simple inexpensive film box cameras made of plastic, often including the lens. Many were originally developed as novelties or prizes, however became popular even among professional photographers due to the strange and unique optical effects they often produce. Prototype toy cameras were mass produced, such as the Diana and LOMO LC-A; in fact, the term Lomography is now essentially synonymous with toy camera photography.

In his series of toy camera apps for the iPhone, Takayuki Fukatsu has implemented many of these whimsical effects for the digital age. QuadCamera is described as a multi-shot-camera app for the iPhone. It takes a series of 4 or 8 photos in succession and saves them as a single photo arranged in a grid, similar to the LOMO ActionSampler camera which actually has four lenses.

Upon launching QuadCamera the user is presented with an active camera screen. A tap in the lower right hand corner brings up the settings pane. Here you can adjust the time between photos (0.10 to 3 seconds), grid size and layouts, and color effects. Your images are automatically saved to the camera roll for review and upload at a later time. That’s pretty much all you need to get started experimenting with your photography skills. I’ve been amused and amazed at the results I’ve gotten.

But that’s not all. A companion application called QuadAnimator can be downloaded from the Art&Mobile website. This nifty addition is a flash extension for QuadCamera that animates your stills. This alone makes QuadCamera worth the $2 cost—no SLR required!

In summary, QuadCamera is a sweet little app that adds fun and creative effects to the often flat and ordinary iPhone pics and is especially great for capturing action sequences. I have found it to be stable and easy to use. Upcoming are two more effect settings and a price increase, so get it while the price is right.

The word Kirie speaks of traditional Japanese cut art work, where paper is folded and then cuts are made so when it is opened again, geometric patterns emerge. The app Ki-Ri-e serves the same purpose. Choose from a number of folds, styles of origami paper, as well as backgrounds and then use you finger to make cuts. Finally, open the paper to view your creation.

When the Ki-Ri-e app starts it offers to show you the YouTube video available below. Once you get past that, you are shown a list of already completed Kirie artwork. To create your own, tap the + sign and select the fold you want to use.

While in the main work space you can zoom in or out using the standard iPhone multi-touch gestures, undo your last actions, select a cut setting (from smooth to jagged), select different origami paper to work with, as well as a background. You can select from a number of solid colors and patterns as the origami paper and background or use photos from the camera roll.

You use your finger to cut the folded paper. If you zoom in close you can make very detailed cuts. Once a cut is made you can tap the paper to “shake” out the cut piece and then continue your work. At any time you can open your creation to view and even rotate it. If you are unhappy with your progress you can go back to the cutting stage to revise it.

Once a Kirie is done, you save it, which not only stores it within the app but also to the camera roll so you can share it with others or print it from your PC or Mac. It is a relatively low resolution (320×480) image so it won’t necessarily look great when you do that, but they are still fun to create and share.

Even after you save your Kirie you can go back later and revise it. Sometimes this is a little buggy as I have had issues with the Kirie not displaying correctly at the cut stage when either opening an existing one or going back from the save stage. Overall the app appears to be crash free though.

Ki-Ri-e is one of those apps you can fire up and spend a few free minutes being creative with. It is surprisingly satisfying and is wholeheartedly recommended. I found myself creating more than just a few Kirie as I prepared this review and will definitely continue to use it from time to time.

Wanted can take a photo from your iPod Touch or iPhone, or can use the iPhone’s camera to snap a new picture, and turn it into fairly slick looking wanted poster. While it doesn’t include a wide array of props to decorate your outlaw with, the app is still fun and well designed.

Wanted simply creates wanted posters, nothing else. It offers a slick looking user interface and is stylish, with a shot-up, wood grained design, which suitably invokes the Old West. That motif is maintained at every step of the process. It does include some props that you can add to the picture to dress up the person in the posture.

Wanted takes you step-by-step through the process, starting with either selecting a picture from the “camera roll” or taking a picture using the iPhone’s camera. It has music playing throughout the process that sounds like it came out of a Western movie, and thankfully it can be turned off. You can alter the poster’s title, reward amount, status, as well as the outlaw’s name. You can then position the photo in the frame and add props, like a mustache or cowboy hat. You can easily move, rotate or resize these props using standard iPhone multi-touch gestures. Finally, you can save the wanted posture and it is then available from the device’s built-in Photos app.

Wanted only gives you two cowboy hats, a mustache, a pistol, and a badge to add to your poster. The author has promised to add more. There is only one style of poster, and while you can edit all of the text that appears on it, you’re not given any other options in creating it. And the text fields don’t have the usual “x” to the right of them that allows you to delete their contents. These are all minor complaints for such an inexpensive app, but the long term appeal will definitely depend on the author’s commitment to add more content.

Ultimately Wanted is only useful if you take a lot of pictures and enjoy creating gag photos that you want to send to others. The final photos look great, and are a lot of fun to create, but the limited styles and lack of props takes away from what could be an app you might depend on anytime you capture a new portrait and want to have a little fun with it.

There have been a variety of applications in the store that allow you to overlay clip art onto photos. Gene Blender takes it a bit further and allows you to apply some pretty good blending to those clip art images to make them seem a little more natural.

You start by taking a picture of a person — or animal. Or you could grab an image that you’ve already taken, or one from the web (via Safari save image feature). Then you can place items from the included (but too small) clip art such as animal noses, mustaches, etc. When you place the clip-art you can use the usual pinch sizing and rotating gestures to get the item placed just right.

Once you have the item placed, you then switch into mask mode via the switch in the lower left. From there you draw over the pieces to blend them into the image. This is where the real magic comes in. Using this you can blend them in to make them look more natural by feathering the edges and allowing some of the background image to show though. Oddly the pieces I placed on Mr. Rove in the sample images all seemed to fit without too much blending.

The one down side we see is that the provided clip art is rather slim. While what is there is pretty good, we’d like to see a lot more included.

This is a fun little app to play around with. Considering the very competitive pricing in the store right now, I’m not sure the price is right for this app. While it is a good app, I think most people will tire of it quickly. On the other hand, the situations where it will be fun such as parties, with kids, etc that make the price seem not too bad.

Earthscape is a virtual globe application for the iPhone OS. It features both overhead views and 3D/terrain view that shows you the contours of the earth. It is, of course GPS enabled to show your current location, but you can easily swipe the screen to navigate to another location. The app uses the usual pinch method for zooming in and out as well as a double tap to zoom in to a location. Navigation around the globe is amazing smooth for such a small device.

There are limitations to the application though — you can’t look up a location, map an address from your contacts, or store locations. You can only manually move around the globe. While this limits the usefulness of this application, it doesn’t limit the coolness of the look and feel.

This latest version includes something very interesting — location based photos. While this is something that other applications have done for your current location, Earthscape is the first mobile application to place them on the globe — so you can see exactly where the photos were taken. There are three options for using photos, your Earthscape photos, Earthscape photos from all users, and interesting Flickr photos. Obviously at this time there are more photos available from Flickr, but expect to see more and more Earthscape photos over the next few weeks.

The My Earthscape Photos options allows you to see what photos that you have take in the Earthscape application. Over time this could be interesting to use to see what you have where. The Recent Earthscape Photos option shows these photos from all users. Note that one bad thing is that these photos are not stored in your camera roll — so once you have taken the photos the only way to see them is in Earthscape.

The third option, and currently the source with the most photos, shows interesting photos from Flickr that are geo-tagged. I think an interesting option for photos in Earthscape would be to allow you to authenticate with Flickr to see only your geo-tagged photos as well. And also upload the photos taken in Earthscape to Flickr.

Another great feature is the integration of location tagged Wikipedia articles. Wherever you see the little Wikipedia w icon you can click to be taken to the article. Useful feature for finding out more about locations you are near or are traveling to.

Here’s a short video of Earthscape from the developers that shows the 1.0 version:

The resolution of the satellite images in the United States is just as good as those in Google Maps for places I compared — though the quality outside the US is not nearly as good. Resolution outside the US is, according to the developers, limited to 15 meter resolution. Not very precise but good enough for regional details. For outside the US you will need to use Google Maps to get higher resolution.

While this is a fantastic toy, currently that’s all it is. It’s fun to zoom in and out and view other parts of the world. The pictures feature is a huge one and make this program 10x more interesting. But, without the ability to look up a location or address, it remains just a zoomable globe. Still, to me, it’s worth the $5 as it provides some great and possibly even educational entertainment.