flickr posts

I love Flickr (and alliteration, apparently). That is, I love Flickr on my desktop, and often on my Apple TV. I've never really been in love with the mobile experience, mostly due to long wait times and cumbersome navigation. When Mike Bernardo from Green Volcano Software contacted me about Flickit Pro, his Flickr app for the iPhone, I was definitely game to try it. I bought a copy the same day in the hopes that it would bring a little joy to my mobile Flickring.

We've played with Photon before, so we know that Green Volcano knows how to make photo handling fluid and fast. That interface dexterity carries over to the iPhone app. I was impressed by the overall aesthetics, and as I played with it I quickly confirmed that it wasn't just eye candy. There are little details that made me smile, and then ask, "Why all apps don't do things like this?" My favorite of these interface gems has to be the ability to zoom a photo in quite far, drag it to the edge and hold it a sec, and watch it suck back down and load the next image. Whether or not you dislike the usual double-tap-before-you-slide on most iPhone photo browsers as much as I do, it's still a great feature and demonstrates some serious attention to detail.

The speed is impressive, the background loading isn't cumbersome or even noticeable, and the overall experience left a great impression. It was $3.99US well spent. There's a free version, Flickit (without the Pro), but I haven't tried it. I assume it's a cool app, but if you're a Flickr fanatic (or really like well-designed apps), check out Flickit Pro.

I put together a little gallery below, so in case you don't buy that whole "nice interface" spiel, you can dive in and see for yourself.

Adafruit is one of a few companies that has been chosen to test the Square dongle that automagically takes credit card payments on any iPhone. Even though we got to see it in action at Macworld, I think every look we can get at this thing is worth it, considering just how darn revolutionary it seems. The video on Flickr shows just how quick and easy it is -- just swipe the card, and sign with your finger on the iPhone's screen.

I haven't bothered carrying cash for a few years now, and something like this only makes it easier to not only take payments for vendors, but for me to pay. Hot dog guy needs a few bucks but doesn't have a landline connection to run a credit card on? No worries, just swipe and done. Want to give to the Salvation Army guy over the holidays but don't have any money left in the wallet? Just swipe and done. Word has it that the transaction cut will be 2.9% (though the video above shows 3.5% -- maybe you can change the percentage depending on circumstances), but odds are that in most cases, the convenience will be well worth it.

The whole program's still in beta, but it probably won't be long before you'll see (and maybe even use) one of these out in the wild.

[Via Engadget]

Have you ever secretly wished that you could have your own personal iPhone app? An app that you could give to friends, relatives, and your adoring fans?

Now you can have your own iPhone (or Android, if you swing that way) app featuring all of your personal feeds from sources such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Posterous, Tumblr, and more. The really cool thing is that it's not going to take you much time, nor will you need to learn how to program. Through a new service called iSites, you can take all of your life feeds and have an iPhone app created just for you. The cost? Only US$25.

If you think that your hordes of faithful followers are going to download and use the app, you can spend another $99 to integrate AdMob ads into your personal app, meaning that you might be able to become rich (you're already famous, right?) beyond your wildest dreams by giving away your app in the App Store.

Everything about the iSites app you create is customizable; the feeds that make up the content (see photo above), the colors, even your icon and store banner. Anyone using your app can easily share an article with others via Twitter, Facebook, or email, and the app has support for video, image thumbnails, and the ability to mark a post as a favorite.

I'm not sure that I'm ready to bore the world with my personal iPhone app, but when I finally get to that point, I'll probably use iSites to create it.

[via Mashable]

iPhone developer Bill Dudney is well-known for his classes and books on iPhone development. When he's not teaching others how to write iPhone apps, he's writing his own code for Gala Factory Software.

When I met Bill at the 360iDev Conference in Denver last October, it was after a talk he had given about using Map Kit to add location information and maps to iPhone apps. Since he's an expert in the use of this iPhone toolkit, It's not surprising that his latest app is full of map and location capabilities.

Foto Brisko [$2.99, iTunes Link] has an appropriate name -- it's Greek for "photo find." The idea behind Foto Brisko is brilliant, and the app is well executed. As a longtime amateur photographer, I've devoted a lot of time and effort to improving my photography by taking a lot of pictures. Sometimes it helps to know where really incredible subjects are located, so you can increase your chances of taking an amazing photo.

Foto Brisko is the one piece of my photographic toolkit that was missing. Regardless of where I am, I can now pull up the app and look for geotagged Flickr photos taken near my present location by other photographers. If I like the looks of a location, Foto Brisko can give me directions on how to get to that place so I can try taking a picture of the same subject.

This is probably the last time we'll post about the Boxee box, as it's not really an Apple product, but given that it's based on software that lots of Apple TV and Mac mini owners use, and that we've been following its release, I figure we can update you one more time. Over at CES, Boxee has officially announced the strangely shaped media center, and released specs for it: It'll sell for "under $200" by D-Link, play everything from DivX to H.264 MKV and even Flash 10.1, and let you log on to plenty of online services, including Pandora, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, along with the Boxee app itself, obviously.

Sounds like quite a device. Release date is set only for "the first half of 2010," but it seems closer than ever to actually appearing on store shelves. Our only real concern is that shape -- how exactly is that supposed to fit in our already crowded entertainment center?

We covered Flickery a while back, and it's been through a couple of big updates since our initial article. Flickery is a Mac-based client for Flickr that provides extensive search, browsing, uploading, and downloading capabilities. I've been using Flickery since its release as my primary means of working with the Flickr photos and videos for me and my friends. It's good-looking and has been a great time-saver.

Version 1.6, which came out at the end of October, brought batch editing of photos, video trimming, CoreLocation integration for photos taken within Flickery, faster pre-loading when browsing, and a lot of other new features. The latest version, 1.7, brings an impressive list of additional features which build upon the 1.6 release, including a new preferences panel, auto-resizing of uploaded photos, "Set as desktop picture" and "Download to Aperture" options, drag and drop integration with Finder and more. I've never had many problems with stability in Flickery, but the latest releases also include dozens of fixes for potential crashes and bugs.

There's a holiday sale on Flickery running until January 1st that brings the price of the application down to US$13.99 (a 25% savings). Normal pricing resumes after that, so Flickr users in search of a solid desktop client should take a look as soon as possible!

At the risk of invoking a round of reader rage, I'll admit that I've never really been that hyped on the idea of MMS on the iPhone (and, by the way, get off my lawn). If I want to send someone a picture, I've got their email address; I'll just send them a picture. No big whoop.

I do have some friends and colleagues who 'came up' on mainline camera phones and they gleefully pop pics back and forth via MMS. I also appreciate the ability to decode the snapshots my wife sends from her Motorola RAZR, but overall I wouldn't rate it among the top iPhone features I was eager to get from AT&T (not like the ongoing lack of tethering, which is making me grind my teeth in my sleep).

That prejudicial attitude may have made me a little skeptical when I met with FunMobility's CEO Adam Lavine this week to get a preview of his company's new free app FunMail [iTunes link], which promises to leverage the Semantic Media Project and add appropriate imagery to your MMS messages, short emails, Facebook wall posts, et cetera. It's available in the US App Store as of last night.

Sure, the app is simple enough to use (once you register and accept the company's TOS, which may subject you to occasional text messages from them if you don't opt out) -- type in your message, and the system gives you the text (up to 140 characters) atop your choice of image from a list of five, sourced from FunMobility's licensed libraries along with Creative Commons remixable content from Flickr and other repositories. If you want to include a hidden search term, putting it at the end of the message with a double-hash (##) will tell FunMail to search those words without including them in the sent message. You can send it to any mobile phone number in your address book, to email recipients, or to your Facebook friends or wall via Facebook Connect. The result is a little bit inspirational office poster, a little bit LOLcat, and in some ways strangely intriguing... but not really, you know, useful.

We've mentioned Dropzone before as a Friday Favorite, but I just happened across the app while I was trying to solve a problem.

I suspect many TUAW readers find themselves in the same situation that I am in: I use a desktop and a laptop. I often find myself wanting to move files between these two machines, so here's what I do: switch to Finder, click on the shared Mac I want, navigate to the folder I'm looking for, and then track down the file I want to copy there and drag it over. I could drag a folder from the other computer to my "Places" sidebar in Finder, but honestly, I just never do.

What I wanted was something quick and painless. I tried to whip something up using Automator and Folder Actions where it would copy/move files saved in one folder to the other machine, but even that would get messy. Most often I don't want to move the file, I just want to copy it. I could put the files in Dropbox, but some of these files are sizable (i.e. the 30+ MB iMovie update). To use Dropbox for this would take a long time.

Turns out that Dropzone offers the perfect solution: by enabling FTP on both Macs (System Preferences > Sharing > File Sharing, then click the "Options" button, and check the box "Share files and folders using FTP") I now have a drag & drop solution to copying files between computers. Simply drag the file to the Dropzone icon on the dock and then drop it onto one of the many "dropzones" which I have defined, and Dropzone does the rest. Two folders that I added almost immediately? The "Automatically Add to iTunes" folder in the iTunes folder and the Auto Import folder from inside my iPhoto Library (you will have to control-click your iPhoto library and choose "Show Package Contents" to find the "Auto Import" folder).

There are several plugins available to extend Dropzone to other services such as ImageShack, TwitPic, Flickr, and more. For Internet services, not only will the file get copied to where you want it to go, but the URL will be placed on the clipboard so you can paste the URL wherever you want it to go. I often FTP files to my website, and files Dropzone FTPs to a website can also support putting the URL on the clipboard.

There are several other nifty options, Dropzones for starting the screensaver, putting your Mac to sleep, or drag & drop printing a file to the default printer. You can also zip files (or zip and email them) and many other conveniences.

The biggest feature of all was one that I almost overlooked until I watched a screencast from macosxscreencasts.com about Dropzone. A built-in Dropzone called "Install Application" will allow you to drag a .dmg onto Dropzone and have the DMG mounted, the app installed to /Applications, the DMG moved to the recycle bin, and the app launched (it also works with applications which have been .zip'd instead of put into a disk image).

If you are anything like me, the "install a new app" process is several steps that you repeat a lot. Dropzone's handling of it is incredibly fast and works really well. If it opens a DMG it cannot handle (such as an installer), it will simply open the folder. Great, start stuff that saves you time and frustration. Remember how computers were supposed to make our lives easier? Dropzone does just that.

Ever since I first saw heads-up-displays in science fiction movies like The Terminator, I knew that I had to get my hands on one. How neat it would be to get instant information on anything about anything in my field of vision?

Well, just as the iTablet won't be the Knowledge Navigator, the new buzz-phrase of the year, augmented reality, won't give me Terminator eyes. Such is life.

I tested out a pretty decent augmented reality app called Robotvision [iTunes Link], and for US $0.99 what you get, if you have an iPhone 3GS running OS 3.1 or better, is quite cool. Will it solve your problems, cure the common cold, or tell you anything that more established apps won't? Not really. But tossing a buck on a neat novelty is not unheard of in the iPhone 3GS world.

This one does more than most. First you tell it how widely to search and then, if you're in a highly populated area, you can set up a category ranging from ATMs to Travel Destinations. For the most part, I didn't fool with this since being in the suburbs, I can't be too picky.

Run it and the camera shutter opens. Moving the iPhone around, I found Cousin's Pizza, only 8432.1 miles away. Hmmm. The setting was for 5 miles. Wait, I guess it needed to be calibrated by doing the calibration figure eight wave of the phone. It seems that a lot of GPS apps require this.

OK, much better. It found a bunch of places but they were all stacked on top of one another. No big deal, since when you touch one, you get a screen like the one in the picture. The closest place is displayed first and the right and left arrows take you back and forth through the stack. While an item is in the front pane, you can call them, see them on a map (by cleverly pointing the iPhone to the floor, which invokes Google Maps, but all the stick pins aren't really any clearer than the AR view... maybe less so). You can also hit the Bing button where there might be a review or more information.

The problem is that the direction it puts you in is not quite accurate. It might get you to a nearby corner, but not to the butcher shop itself. I don't think we can slight Robotvision on this, since the not quite pin-point accuracy of the iPhone 3GS GPS has already been talked to death.

What else can this bad-boy do? You can see who is sending tweets in the area you specified, read the tweets and see how far the tweeter is from you. Not enough? Wait, there's more. You can find people in your area who use Flickr, and view their gallery. This doesn't work too well. I set the default for 50 miles and found no one. Then I set it for 25 miles and found one person with a gallery of 10 pictures. I live 30 miles from NYC, so I can't blame it on the boonies. You still want Ginsu knives? Okay, hit the Wikipedia button and see if anything in your range is listed. If so you'll get a bit of text and the option to go to Wikipedia to read more.

I don't know if AR will change the world, or be as successful as either New Coke or the iPod. But I'd suggest tossing a buck at this one. You are guaranteed 20 minutes of awe and then maybe some time to reflect on what you have, once the novelty wears off.

Check out this video for a tour and let us know what you think about this or the idea of augmented reality in general.

We've posted before how popular the iPhone is as a camera on Flickr, with people uploading tons of photos, both shot by and straight from the iPhone. But now, The Next Web has covered a huge drop in photos referencing the iPhone over on the popular photo sharing site. The suspected culprit? Flickr themselves.

TNW suggests that the problem is the Flickr iPhone application, which will upload pictures straight to the service -- but not include metadata information like the fact that the pictures were taken with the iPhone. Still, even they sound a little skeptical: not all of that drop can be attributed to just the Flickr app's shortcomings. They also suggest that the iPhone is wearing out its welcome -- lots of people jumped to use it as a camera when the 3GS introduced a better lens and the video capability, and now in day-to-day use, they're not using it as much. Other commenters to the post suggest that the vastly improved Facebook app may be eating away at the use of the built-in Camera app.

I know that my photo habits for the phone haven't changed -- I use the iPhone quite a bit to take pictures, but looking at my own usage, I don't use Flickr nearly as much these days, as I use services like Twitpic and other sites built up directly around the iPhone. A drop in usage on Flickr doesn't mean people aren't using their iPhones to take snapshots -- they could just be sending their photos and media somewhere else.

Update: One of our commenters, echoed by our old friend & past colleague Barb Dybwad at Mashable, notes that Apple's change to the EXIF data recording for iPhone photos (breaking out the different iPhone models to indicate which specific phone took the picture) may be partly responsible for the drop.

At long last, the official Flickr iPhone app is in the App Store. This free app allows Flickr users to upload their iPhone photographs to their Flickr accounts as well as view photostreams that have been created by themselves and others. The app has the following features:

• Shoot, upload and share photos and videos
• Geo-tag photos or add to a set
• View photos by set and tag
• View photos from friends and family
• Search and view photos by contact
• Make comments on photos
• Search by subject, people or places

I'm not a big Flickr user, but decided to give the app a quick look today. There were several things that I wasn't thrilled with. For example, geotagging in the Flickr app has to be done at the time that the photo is taken. If you try to add a geotag to a picture that's already in your photo library, the Flickr app adds your current location -- not the location where the photo was actually taken.

Flickr does the same thing for the photo date -- if you wait a few days to upload a photo, it marks it with the upload date, not the date that the photo was actually taken. In addition, the Recent button is supposed to show recent activity and uploads, but even after 30 minutes it still didn't show that I had uploaded several photos.

I'd also like to see the app offer the ability to look for photos taken near your current location. While this is a long-awaited addition to the App Store, the app doesn't appear to be very well thought out or executed. At least it's a first release, so we can expect upgrades in functionality down the road.

Ahhhh, Milano! The name makes me think about the Milan Cathedral, La Scala, fashion models, and the aggressive drivers in that city. And now, when I think of Milan, I can also fondly think of the new Apple Store Carosello.

TUAW reader Filippo sent us a link to his Flickr gallery of the opening earlier today, which appears to have attracted a huge crowd of Apple fans. PhilApple, as he is known on Flickr, also captured the traditional "running of the geeks" in a short video upload. This is the well-known phenomenon in which the first customers are greeted by the applause, cheers, and general silliness of the Apple Store employees and other customers.

While I wish Apple had chosen to place the store in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in the Piazza Duomo, reputed to be the world's oldest shopping mall, I'm happy for the Milanese to now have their very own Apple Store. Grazie, Filippo, for this set of photos!