iPhone App Reviews

ezimba

Michael (Admin) | Aug 29, 2008 Photo & Video

User rating: (3 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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The iTunes App Store has plenty of apps that let you do all kinds of things with your photos… upload them, share them, deface them, you name it… but what if you just want to rotate your photo? Or make it look all artsy by making it black & white?

In the absence of a full-on Photoshop app, which you probably don’t want on your phone anyway, you don’t have many options. But you do have the simple iPhone photo editor called ezimba.

I’ll never know why ezimba is called ezimba, and frankly I don’t really care. All I know is that it lets me do simple things to photos (and a lot of bizarre things, too) and that’s about all I need.

Most of what you’ll want from ezimba can be found under the Standard Enhancements and Reorient categories. Once you choose your photo and load it into the app, you can go into Standard Enhancements and adjust the contrast, brightness, sharpness, saturation, hue, and perform a few other semi-common operations like blur and soft light.

Under Reorient, you get to rotate your photo, flip it vertically, flip it horizontally, and a couple other things not worth mentioning.

There’s also a Resize & Reduce category that sounds useful, but you have to remember that you’re using your phone to manipulate photos. You can reduce the size of your photos by anywhere from 10-90% (but why? iPhone photos are relatively small as it is), but when it comes to cropping specific parts of the photo you’re out of luck.

Aside from color effects that let you change the image to sepia, monochrome, and other colors, most of ezimba’s other functions are just for fun. Despite whatever fantasies you might have about applying a High Swirl to your mom’s face and then putting her inside a Pirate Cut Out, it’s really not that glamorous.

If you take a lot of pictures and have an occasional need or desire to make something black & white or brighten up low-light photos, ezimba is perfect. It even lets you undo all of those horrible filters you’re bound to apply. If there’s any real downfall in this app, it’s that you will lose any work you’ve done when answering a call or responding to a text message, and this is where you learn the first rule of image tomfoolery: save your work often!

I really could do without all the crazy transformations and filters, but you gotta give ezimba’s developers credit for putting in the effort. If you take pictures with your iPhone and like to tinker with them, you need this app and you need it now.

Tags: free, photo editing

iToony

Michael (Admin) | Aug 18, 2008 Photo & Video

User rating: (7 votes, average: 4.43 out of 5)

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I love making people look like total jackasses. A couple weeks ago I bought an iPhone application called Pictems because I was hoping it would help me do that but, alas, it did not. Dressing people up as pirates just isn’t my thing. I think what I really wanted was something more like iToony where, instead of Pictems’ costumes, you get thought and speech bubbles and some basic drawing tools.

iToony lets you snap a new photo or select an existing one, and then you get to draw over the pic or put your own bubbles and captions wherever you want. After you’re done setting up your text and drawing mustaches on everyone, you can even post your jacked-up photos directly to a Flickr or Picasa account without leaving the application! Just set up your account once and your future uploads will be incredibly easy. In fact, just about everything is easy and pretty intuitive – iToony really makes it simple to publicly embarass the people closest to you in the shortest amount of time possible.

Once you start playing around with the tools and options you should be able to pick up iToony pretty quickly. A note about drawing: don’t forget you can UNDO and REVERT! I forgot this and started to get pissed every time I made a drawing mistake which was a lot because, let’s face it, finger-drawing on the iPhone isn’t easy no matter what app you’re using. Undo is done by swiping two fingers across the screen (something I’ll complain about later) and Revert to Original can be found in the trash can icon at bottom-middle of the screen.

Overall I think iToony is awesome and I can really see myself using this on a semi-regular basis, but as I was messing with my pics I did come up with a few improvements that I would love to see in future updates…

• More alignment options. iToony gives you enough speech and thought bubbles that positioning them in a logical way will usually be possible, but occasionally you’ll run into situations where the person’s head is near the edge of the photo or too close to someone else’s speech bubble… and this is when you start wishing you could position the “bubble connector” (what points to the subject’s head) separately from the bubble itself.
• Font and bubble size options. Right now, all bubbles and speech are one-size-fits-all. It would be so nice to be able to insert some large bold text as well as smaller text… not only would this be more expressive, but it would probably help you fit more bubbles into the picture if you want them.
• Text centering. This would be especially useful for captions.
• Bubble shape editing. When you have several bubbles in one pic, they really start to get in each other’s way. If you could control the height or width of the bubbles it would go a long way toward extending the number of ways you can goof on people.

And as for my only gripe about iToony’s finger gestures: swiping two fingers to undo was frustrating because half the time I’d wind up drawing another line! It gets easier with practice, but I prefer the idea of shaking or tilting as an undo action. Drawing a circle to make a bubble and a line to make a caption works great and I wouldn’t change a thing there (unless it’s in the name of upgrading the functionality).

Crash-wise, it did crash on me here and there… not enough to call it a problem… but I was very happy to see that iToony saves your work in progress. Very classy.

Bottom line is that Standard Widget Corporation has made a very clean and useful app. iToony does enough things well that I believe it’s worth $2.99 right now, and if they can manage to fit in some of the upgrades I mentioned above it’ll just be that much better.

Tags: $2.99, photo editing

Pictems

Michael (Admin) | Aug 6, 2008 Photo & Video

User rating: (1 votes, average: 2.00 out of 5)

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Got a crappy photo on your iPhone that you want to dress up? Got one that’s already disgustingly cute and you want to make it even cuter? Pictems to the rescue! Well, sort of…

Pictems is basically a clipart library that you can add to photos piece-by-piece. The pieces are grouped as follows:

Accessories
Costumes (subgroups: Wicked Witch, Bunny, Cat, Cave Man, Clown)
Faces (subgroups: Noses, Eyes, Teeth, Ears)
Frames
Hair
Jokes

When you browse the item categories for the first time, it might seem like there’s a lot to choose from but the (lack of) variety gets very stale very fast. Look at the costume groupings. Those five costume themes compose about 80% of the clipart. On the plus side, adding and resizing these little costume pieces is pretty easy. Touch the piece of clipart you want to adjust and when you see a white box appear around the piece you can move it with one finger or resize and rotate with two fingers.

Despite certain options that are lacking such as free transform (change height and width independently of each other) and layer ordering (what overlaps what), it’s pretty easy to use the available clipart and put the pieces where you want them. Other options include remove the last item placed, remove all of the items… and if you remove all it can’t be undone because there’s no Undo Button, kind of a pain… and flip an item so it’s properly oriented for people facing left or right.

I bought this application hoping that I’d be able to make my friends look like idiots, but truth is I’m afraid that if I Pictem-ize a photo and send it around the only one who’s gonna look like an idiot is me. The clipart is all pretty juvenile stuff which would be great if I had kids and wanted to email photos of them to grandma, but I’m single and in my 30s and putting bunny ears on my 30-something friends kind of screams LOSER more than HaHa, and even if I did have kids I’m sure grandma would be pretty sick of clown hair and cat eyes by the third or fourth photo. Oh well – that’s what I get for not reading the full description of the app carefully. Notice that their screenshot in the App Store is of a baby! That should have been a big hint that this app isn’t for me.

With that said, I think it’s pretty clear where I stand here: Pictems is (probably) fun for parents with small children, but that fun will wear out fast unless Starchy Tuber adds a ton more of their crappy clipart. However, if you’re an adult with no interest in sharing the supposed cuteness of children with your pals then this app is most likely going to be a waste of your time and $2.99.

How could Pictems have not disappointed me so? I would have been far more content with artwork that’s more geared towards social situations and funny stereotypes (ie: the Office Tramp) than a Halloween party… stuff that lets me point out how stupid this guy is, how drunk that guy is, how bored everyone in the picture is, that kind of thing. And I wouldn’t be charging $2.99 for the app either. I’d be giving it away for free and then selling themed artwork packages, kind of like Photoshop plugins.

Hopefully Starchy Tuber will release something for grownups and give current Pictem customers a free “upgrade” for giving them a chance on this very parent-oriented exercise in photo editing mediocrity.

Tags: $2.99, photo editing, photos