TUAW's Daily iPad App: Sadun's Collage

To start off this new series of daily apps, I thought I'd pick something close to home -- an app by TUAW's own Erica Sadun. The free, ad-supported app is called Sadun's Collage, and it produces fun photographic collages of pictures taken with the cameras in your iPad 2.

Sadun's Collage is very intuitive to use. When you launch the app for the first time, you see a corkboard with a live image frame on it, as well as a group of buttons that are at the top of the screen. The buttons fade out, but are summoned back with a tap on the corkboard. To take a photo with Sadun's Collage, you tap on the live image frame. Once the photo is "pinned" to your corkboard, you move it by sliding it around with your fingers, use the pinch gesture to make it bigger or smaller, and rotate it by twisting it clockwise or counterclockwise with two fingers. Every photo has a white Polaroid-like frame, and displays shadows for a feeling of depth as you layer the images.

To take another photo -- there doesn't seem to be a limit to how many you can place on the corkboard -- just tap on the corkboard and then tap the + button that appears in the toolbar. If you've been snapping photos of your friends with the rear-facing camera but want to add your face to the board, there's a button for toggling between the cameras.

You're not stuck with just the cork background; there are also slate, marble, sandstone, and limestone to use as backgrounds. Once you've captured, sized, and placed images on the background, a tap on a "photo" button sends the collage (sans advertising) to your iPad photo library. Another button opens a blank email with the collage attached for sending to friends.

Any individual image on a collage may be removed by tapping on it to display a minus sign (-), and then tapping the minus sign to confirm the deletion. If you decide to erase the entire collage and start over, a tap on the "recycle" button offers up a clean slate to start with.

I asked Erica why the app doesn't let you place images from your iPad photo library into the collage. Her response was that the app is designed for spontaneous fun with groups of people more than after-the-fact collage creation. It's also possible that the standard iOS photo browser was omitted because it tends to be a bit slow and is a memory hog, but that's just my opinion.

While you're hanging around at a picnic, hiking in the mountains, or waiting for the fireworks to start over the Independence Day holiday in the U.S. this weekend, be sure to download Sadun's Collage, have a little fun passing around the iPad 2, and enjoy those holiday memories in a clever photo collage that you created.