iPhone App Reviews

EffectsLab

T.J. Brumfield | Jul 19, 2009 Photo & Video

User rating: (5 votes, average: 4.40 out of 5)

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This review is also due to a request. My wife wanted me to find her a good photo app for adjusting images on her phone. This site has reviewed apps like LOMO Camera and ToyCamera, which are designed for a very specific purpose. I’ve also come across a few designed more for entertainment purposes, transposing part of your picture with another image. What she wanted was something practical. The iPhone doesn’t have a flash. If she is taking pictures with her phone, she wants the pictures to turn out well.

Christopher Comair’s EffectsLab comes to the rescue. EffectsLab adjusts images. There are no toys or gadgets. There are no extraneous bells or whistles. There isn’t even a splash screen. You open the app, open your image and adjust it. Perhaps the app won’t wow you over with splashy graphics or polish, but this swiss-army knife of image filters gets the job done when it counts.

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Tags: $1.99, Photo & Video, photo editing, T. J. Brumfield

3D Me

Mike Lightman | Apr 19, 2009 Photo & Video

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

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Does anyone else remember the days when your cellphone didn’t have a camera? I certainly do. Having that tiny lens was quite the attraction back in the day. Today, every thing I own takes pictures – even the litter box can upload snapshots to Flickr. The iPhone is no different. Sure, we may scoff at it’s puny capabilities, but the App Store is ready to step in and provide some much needed muscle.

On their site, the developers tell us we can:

Create and share stereoscopic 3D-effect pictures with 3D Me. Just a few clicks with a steady hand and you’ll begin to create an album of 3D pics. No 3D glasses needed. 

You basically take a picture, move your shot just a smidge and then take a 2nd shot. Align the two and 3D Me creates a very cool composite. There’s a small learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, 3D Me takes a perfectly serviceable camera and turns it into an exciting new toy. And by toy, I mean killer new gadget that you can’t help but show your friends and play with non-stop!

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Tags: $1.99, 3D, Photo & Video

Lifecards

Chrisa | Mar 17, 2009 Photo & Video, Uncategorized, Utilities

User rating: (20 votes, average: 3.05 out of 5)

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I’m a fan of postcards.  I collect antique postcards from places I’ve lived, and I still send postcards to friends and family when I travel, especially if I can find one that is either really beautiful or really corny.   So I like the idea of being able to create a postcard-type image and email it from my iPhone to people.  That way I can take a crisp picture of something beautiful or corny in my travels and send it while I’m still standing in front of said beautiful or corny thing, complete with personalized message (i.e. “the weather is here, wish you were beautiful.”). 

Lifecards from Vivid Apps offers all the promise of creating electronic postcards, with none of the joy of easily creating and sending something you’d be proud of. 

There are 20 nice backgrounds and several different layouts to choose from.  You can import a picture from your photos and resize it, rotate it, and position it easily.  But that’s where the ease stops.  Choose the text box on the template to add your text, type in what you want, then use the tools to change the color of the font or resize it.  Maybe.  Sometimes it takes you back to the text entry screen, no matter how many times you choose the tool for font color or size, sometimes you can size the text, sometimes you can’t.  It’s as buggy as my garage in mid-summer.  Save the image and come back later to edit it?  Forget it.  You might as well start again.  You can’t choose a new image, and the text editing bugs are still there in all their defective glory. 

After you create your card, you can save it to your image library, and then, of course, email it from there or use it as wallpaper.  But the resolution of the photographs is somehow degraded in the translation to a Lifecard, and then one of the great things about the iPhone camera – it’s resolution – is lost. 

I checked the developer website for signs of a new release – this is version 1.0, after all – but there was no clue that an update was coming.  That being the case, I’d definitely recommend holding on to your $2.99 until they work out the bugs.   If I was Vivid Apps, I’d make this free until I got this stuff worked out.  It’s got a lot of promise, but it’s just not usable in its current version.  Close, but no cigar.

Tags: $2.99, Photo & Video, Utilities

Make My 3d

Swain Valasek | Feb 17, 2009 Photo & Video

User rating: (2 votes, average: 2.00 out of 5)

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One of the most unique apps I’ve seen to date is Make my 3d from iKKooN (Fred Courtielle).  The core function of the app is to map a person’s photograph onto a 3D model of a human head then grant you comic license to make it look as silly as possible.  The tertiary function is to then have fun with your creation and why not, it’s an amazing thing to render heads using nothing but your iPhone!

This app very impressively whittles a complicated process down to an interface easy enough for anyone to use.  Basically you’ll need 2 photos of your victim, er subject: front-facing and right side (a traditional mug shot) and as neutrally lighted as possible (the less shadows the better).  You can take the photos from within the app or pull from your camera roll.  Once you’ve selected your photos you tell the app about the relative dimensions of the head and locations of the eyes, ears, nose and mouth using stylized onscreen markers.  The app then forms (well deforms I guess) the head mesh and applies your photos as textures and voila, instant 3D head.  You can just stop there if you were trying for a realistic representation but you’re encouraged to go on and just be silly.  You can select from several bizarre head deformations, crazy coiffures, goofy hats, piercings and shades.  You can also set the color for skin, background and all accessories plus choose a light source.  When done (and the app renders surprisingly fast) you can have fun zooming and rotating, take screenshots and of course save the project to show it off later.  Quick note, the website linked above containts some excellent (and necessary) tutorial videos.  Worth noting is the app can’t render the original person’s hair in 3D so they end up bald out of the gate but you can get the color and a general texture map of it by playing with the head dimensions a bit.  At any rate, if you’re trying for an accurate render (and I found this more interesting than the comic stuff but that’s just me), it would be ideal to find a bald subject to begin with (or a baby perhaps).

No app is above gripes and here’s mine (some big ones this time).  The included hair choices are fine for simple effect but don’t cover many styles and there are no feminine options.  Second, a painstakingly long intro plays every time you load the app.  I’ve got no problem with self-promotion but after we’ve sat through it once, we really should have the option to disable it.  Third, it can be quite difficult and frustrating to select the tiny little markers for eyes, nose, face, etc so I’d love to see this improved somehow, perhaps with a menu to select them instead.  Finally and incredibly unfortunately is that the app simply crashed a lot, often causing much lost effort.  The crashes mostly occurred while using the fullscreen 3D preview, even after a fresh reboot (note to developer I’m on 2.2.1 firmware if that makes any difference).  The preview mode itself was a bit buggy, often extremely laggy to input and becoming ‘jittery’ where the model just flickered back and forth uncontrollably.  This is really bad as it’s the primary way you’d ever show this off to someone since to my knowledge there’s no way to export your creations to a common 3D format.  I also had some crashes when trying to save which is very frustrating.  Matter of fact it crashed so much I wasn’t able to explore much of the comic features so the pictures below were as good as I could do before the risk of throwing my phone against the wall set in.

So in summary, this is a wildly creative and an absolutely bizarre use of the iPhone and…I really dig it.  It has niche appeal, the creation process is genuinely fun and the price was reduced from $6.99 to $3.99 in the time I spent reviewing it, sweet!  However, I cannot possibly recommend it until a new version comes out with some stability fixes at the very least.  To the developer, I’d be glad to post an update if you let us know when a new major version is released as I would really like to see the app succeed.

I will say this and mark my words if this prediction comes true; if the author polishes this up and adds meshes for dogs and cats this app will go freakin’ gangbusters.

Version reviewed – 1.0

Tags: $3.99, 3D, make my 3d, Photo & Video, Swain Valasek

Christmas Camera

Michael (Admin) | Dec 24, 2008 Photo & Video

User rating: (No Ratings Yet)

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Christmas Day is tomorrow so you may be thinking that an app like Christmas Camera is already on the verge of becoming obsolete until next year, but that’s not entirely true. Christmas Camera is a collection of photo templates that you can put over your photos, and aside from Christmas templates it also includes “Love”, “Fashion”, and “New Year” designs for making your otherwise crappy photos a little more interesting.

There really isn’t a lot going on in this app… pick one of 31 templates, pick a photo or snap a new one, and save it. I have no problem with simplicity and not every app has to have more features than a Swiss Army knife, but the thing that stands out most in this app is its one gigantic flaw: it sucks at handling photos!

The templates are great. They’re colorful, they’re cute, and some are so sickenly gaudy that it’s kind of funny, but getting your photos to fit these templates is the problem. When you choose a photo from your camera roll you get the chance to Move & Scale, but you can only scale your photo to be larger not smaller. If this doesn’t sound important, wait ’til you’re trying to fit your photo into a template that has cutouts in very specific places… if those cutouts don’t match your photo, you’re screwed because photo repositioning is also a near impossibility.

One thing Christmas Camera does right, however, is it applies the template to your camera view when you’re taking a new photo so you can position it correctly. Nice move.

Wondershare can fix this app, but I think it’ll take some work. They need to cut out the Move & Scale step which is basically useless and allow the user to do all moving and scaling with the template applied. Being able to preview templates before taking or selecting a photo is also an important step that’s missing. We also need to be able to scale photos up AND down, rotate the image freely, and move/scale photos beyond the visible area. I know these things are all possible because I’ve seen them done in other apps! Christmas C@rds is a great example of photo handling done right.

Some of the templates in Christmas Camera, ie: ones with wider photo areas, aren’t so prone to the problems I’m griping about so I wouldn’t call this app a total loss… but I really don’t think it’s quite ready for primetime and it’s definitely not a $3 app. Yet.

Tags: $2.99, Christmas, Photo & Video

Ken Burns Slideshow

Clint McLeod | Dec 15, 2008 Photo & Video

User rating: (2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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What does the Civil War, Baseball and my last night at the local speakeasy have in common?  Ken Burns’ Slideshow effect helped make them better!

The Ken Burns Slidshow by BitWink is actually a cool little app for $3.99.  It equips your iphone with a very iphoto-esque slideshow viewer.  Unlike the built in slideshow, this one comes complete with captions and of course the glorious Ken Burns effect that always impresses your grandmother when you show off your digital pictures to her.

I thought the program was easy to navigate and very straightforward.  The really cool part is you can save your slideshows and basically have “playlists.”  This is great, especially if you use your iphone to display photos and hate flipping through scores of photos you wouldn’t necessarily want to show, like the time you had your photo taken with the roadie from Ratt.  

Two slight nitpicks would be that you can’t “flip” through pictures.  You have to use a forward and backwards buttons.  Also, the captions are limited to 25 characters. 

This program is for anyone who uses their iphone to show off photos on a somewhat regular basis.  It will make your photos look better and make your life a lot easier in organizing slideshows.  It’s also for anyone that loves Ken Burns.  I wouldn’t recommend this program to people who have filled their iphone with pictures of their animals in Halloween outfits.  Nobody wants to see that.  In fact, Ken Burns may come to your house if you use his technology in such a disastrous way.

Overall, I was quite impressed with BitWink’s first iphone app.

Tags: $3.99, Photo & Video