One of the first applications I used and enjoyed on my iPhone, Sketches, has updated to version 1.5. New in this version is the ability to change the alpha settings for colors (so you can change the opacity of the drawings you make on photos you take), and an edit mode for the corkboard view, to rearrange your drawings with. Additionally, they've moved uploaded photos off of a third-party server and onto their own page, so (for right now, anyway) no ads to get in the way. Not new in this app: a quality, fun, and surprisingly robust photo and image editor designed for the iPhone.

We've heard from the devs that there is a version 2 on the way as well, and both this version and that one are free to anyone who's purchased the app. But if you haven't picked it up yet, it is available for $4.99 over on the App Store, well worth it if you often take and share pictures with your iPhone.

12seconds.tv is a site that started up a little while ago that seems to be aiming at a "Twitter-for-video" kind of idea -- you upload just twelve seconds of video, whether that's you saying something, video of a short scene, or whatever else you want. The site was in alpha but has recently opened up to beta (so anyone can join), and they've also released an iPhone app, available for 99 cents in the App Store right now.

"But wait, Mike," I hear you saying, "the iPhone doesn't record video!" And it still doesn't, but it does record pictures and audio, and the 12seconds app will combine a slideshow of three pictures you take with any 12 seconds of audio you record, thus creating a close approximation of a 12 second video. You can see my sample upload here, just a few pictures of my apartment's hallway and some Mountain Goats playing from my speakers. You can use pics you've already taken, and the whole process of recording, combining, and uploading works pretty well. You don't have any control over how the images slide across: it's more of a "throw it all into the mix and hope something good comes out" thing.

It's an interesting idea, and while you're paying a buck for a social networking video app that can't actually record video (not that that's 12seconds' fault, Apple), you could probably come up with some pretty creative stuff, from the artistic and witty to the requisite cat videos (because no video site is complete without a cute kitty). It's definitely not a video replacement for the iPhone, but for uploading quick and simple snippets of experience from wherever you are, it does the job.

For a different approach to photo-based videos generated on your iPhone, you can check out the free Animoto app, released last week by the website of the same name. Animoto will take 8-16 photos from your iPhone or iPod touch, let you order them and select musical accompaniment (from a provided but fairly ample list of tracks; you can't use your own music or record a soundtrack). The app then uploads your images to the Animoto site and cranks out a 30 second, montage-style video for you. You can stream the video back to your iPhone, or send it along to friends. If Techcrunch gushes about it, well, you know it must be just awesome, right?

The crew at Holocore have seen it fit to begin teasing users of PictureSync, a slick app for both Mac and PC that makes it easy to upload pictures and videos to various social media sites, with screenshots of a forthcoming update to version 2.0. The app has clearly taken on a very i-App UI, placing image and video sources such as iPhoto in a left sidebar, with any services you upload said media to just below that list. The scaling slider in the lower right is a very nice touch, as the current version only displays fixed thumbnails that can sometimes make it difficult to pick out images in a lineup. These new features are, of course, in addition to PictureSync's present abilities which include turning your iPhoto keywords into tags for most services (including Flickr and Vox), as well as being able to edit extensive amounts of metadata, even in batches, and grab geolocation data from Google Earth.

PictureSync at present is free when used with one online service at a time, but its real power comes from spending a mere $15 for a license which enables uploading to as many services at once as your heart desires. An alpha of this v2 update is expected to be ready for Windows by the middle of next month, with a beta shortly thereafter. The Mac version will apparently follow a little later.

Fraser Speirs, creator of the highly useful FlickrExport and other apps, is asking for feedback on his blog as to whether users would be interested in a similar ApertureExport app. He warns that ApertureExport wouldn't be quite as well tied into Aperture as FlickrExport is to iPhoto, and this is due to the current version of Aperture (apparently) lacking a plugin API.

Still, if the idea of being able to point at a feature in your own copy of ApertureExport some day and telling your friends "that was my idea!" sounds appealing, head over to Mr. Speirs' post and toss in your $0.02.