Filed under: Software, iPhone, App Review
Upgrade your iPhone camera with LittleSnapper
LittleSnapper from Realmac Software has been available for OS X for quite some time (and was one of the apps available in this year's Macheist bundle), and a few days ago they released a trimmed-down version that runs on your iPhone. While it lacks the basic photo editing and annotation available on its desktop counterpart, LittleSnapper for iPhone is no slouch.
One of the things about LittleSnapper that first caught my eye was the interface, which is extremely slick and shows great attention to detail on the part of the developers. The real jewels of this app, however, are a bit less obvious. In fact, after just a few hours of use, it has supplanted the built-in Camera application on my home screen.
Using the default configuration, when you snap a picture, it's immediately added to your Camera Roll (hence the replacing of Camera). After you've taken your photo, you can then upload it to QuickSnapper (Realmac's companion photo sharing site, which is free to use). Once that's done, you can then email a link to it or post it to Twitter (via Tweetie, Twitterrific or Twitterfon) right from within the app. I don't know about you, but whenever I take a picture with my iPhone, there's a very good chance that I'd like to email it immediately afterward. For me, being able to do this within a single app is huge.
The other killer feature of LittleSnapper is the ability to screenshot any web page from within the application. The only downside to this feature is that you don't have access to your Mobile Safari bookmarks and you must type in the URL manually (or browse to it via another URL, like a Google search). Obviously this issue will be history once iPhone OS 3.0 is out in June (which includes system-wide copy-and-paste), so it's understandable that they didn't bother getting to crazy with the cheez-whiz in terms of browser integration and whatnot. LittleSnapper's chrome is also removed from the webpage snap, which is a nice touch.
Of course, no application is perfect, and LittleSnapper has a few (small) warts. For one, I'd love to see a subset of the annotation tools available on the desktop version, as well as a more iPhone friendly view of the QuickSnapper site when browsing your uploaded photos. Tighter integration with the OSX application (like syncing photos and their metadata) would also be pretty sweet. These aren't anywhere close to deal-breakers for me, but I can see them being becoming popular feature requests.
I'm very impressed with LittleSnapper and, given the amount of half-baked throwaway apps that seem to be cropping up lately, it's nice to see one with a good bit of polish. LittleSnapper [App Store] is available now for $2.99US.


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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Andy said 8:26AM on 4-23-2009
Am i missing something, because I thought you could already take a snap shot of a webpage from Mobile Safari?
Reply
Nick Basham said 8:42AM on 4-23-2009
Yes, you can take a screenshot in MobileSafari...but it's just using the global screenshot feature. I haven't used Littlesnapper for the iPhone yet, but if it's anything like the desktop version it'll let you capture the entire webpage, even what doesn't fit on the screen.
Forsakenzoul said 8:34AM on 4-23-2009
You can, actually you can take a screenshot of anything on the iPhone. Hold power than press the home button.
Reply
Craig said 11:00AM on 4-23-2009
"I don't know about you, but whenever I take a picture with my iPhone, there's a very good chance that I'd like to email it immediately afterward. For me, being able to do this within a single app is huge."
Um, yeah, you can do this from the built in camera app.
Reply
R_man_5K said 11:01AM on 4-23-2009
If it had support for flickr I would pick it up... maybe that will be added later...
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Drakhul said 11:02AM on 4-23-2009
LittleSnapper ROCKS. I use it almost every day. I wish there was a way to demo this app, but for $3 I think I can chance it. :D
Reply
Collin said 11:48AM on 4-23-2009
flickr support would be nice
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Unregistered said 11:54AM on 4-23-2009
This app "upgrade(s) iPhone camera" because it can upload to Quicksnap?
You need to be more specific cos the title is VERY misleading
Reply
ryaneanwalton said 3:17PM on 4-23-2009
Not only that it give you the ability to upload directly to Twitter, But I guess you can do that from most iPhone Twitter apps.