MacGraPhoto 2 represents the trend that’s become popular during the last few years of offering bulk discounts for Mac software, a model embraced by the popular MacHeist bundle, among others. Like last year, the MacGraPhoto bundle will cost buyers $39.99. That’ll get you $444 worth of software.

Here’s a list and brief description of what’s included:

• AtomicView. This is, basically, an iPhoto or Aperture alternative that lets you organize, browse and convert photos, video and sound. It actively uses your Mac’s GPU to provide advanced multi-threaded task management and quick-scrolling. Looks like a very handy tool for the amateur multimedia enthusiast, or even the budding professional.
• Sandvox. It’s a website builder that offers templates, live previews, and is tailored to both beginners and professionals. It’s an iWeb alternative that’s a little more flexible, without the learning curve that comes with Dreamweaver.
• Snapshot. This app lets you prepare your digital images for printing. It supports cropping and framing, multiple layouts and even some fun features like borders and speech bubbles. It’s perfect for those who don’t want to get into something like Photoshop, but do want to make sure photos look good before printing.
• Sketch. This is a vector drawing app that keeps things very simple, and focused on your drawing. The canvas is continuous and supports unlimited layers, so that you can just get down to work.
• ImageFramer. This app is dedicated entirely to putting frames on your photos, and also allows you to do things like add watermarks and batch frame entire sets of photo files. It could be handy if you’re creating a gallery website to show off your painting, for instance.
• Layers. Take a screencap of your desktop as a layered .PSD file with Layers. That means things like palettes, toolboxes, icons, and the dock are each captured on separate layers. This is a great tool is do a lot of work with screenshots.
• Hydra. This app allows you to create HDR photos from multiple image files. You don’t need to use a tripod with Hydra, as is often the case with HDR photo apps. It also comes with a plug-in for Aperture and Lightroom, so you can create HDR photos right in those applications.
• Posterino. This is a poster, collage, postcard and greeting card creation app for the Mac. Just pick a template, choose an iPhoto album or specific photos, and you’re on your way.
• Swift Publisher. A desktop publishing app that lets you layout, design and print flyers, booklets, brochures and more, Swift Publisher comes with many bundled templates, and a variety of editing tools. One reviewer described it as what “Apple’s Pages should have been.”

The bundle also comes with a bonus app called DVD-Library that lets you catalog manage, and even backup your DVDs on your Mac. My DVD collection is virtually non-existent these days, but for those with lots of physical media still taking up shelf space, this app could help.

All apps included in the bundle are Apple Staff Picks and have been rated four stars or higher by sites like MacUpdate and Macworld. MacGraPhoto 2 is available for another 19 days, and there are trial versions available for many of the included apps, so you can take your time making a decision. For my money, though, Layers alone is worth the price of admission.

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First, I want to point out that I don’t actually need all that much in a Posterous iPhone app. The point of the service is to provide a dead simple blogging tool that just about anyone can pick up and use. Any iPhone app that interacts with the service should reflect that.

The official app accomplishes this, and does so without feeling limited: a thin line to walk. PicPosterous, by contrast, doesn’t manage to stay on the fair side of that divide. It allows you to post pictures, and only pictures, to your Posterous account.

Posterous for iPhone allows you the same access you’ll find on the web-based post editor, including text-only and combined text/photo/video posts. The post creator also allows you to add tags and optionally geotag your post with your current location.

You can set the preferred size of images and video that you upload, too, in case you’re experiencing long load times or you’re working from your 3G connection and want to avoid data charges. Three size options for both are included.

It also allows you to view and share your site within the app, and delete any posts you aren’t happy with. You can’t edit posts, but I don’t think that’s a major flaw. For me, Posterous is about posting quick thoughts and photos relatively unfiltered. If I don’t like something, I’m not going to spend significant time reworking it, so deleting is probably a better option.

You can access any Posterous blog associated with your email from the app, and navigation is simple, so switching between sites takes no time at all. Maybe best of all, you can even add brand new blogs right from your phone. Of course, if you’re like me, this might prove more of a distraction than anything else, since starting a new personal blog seems so much more tempting than building an existing one.

The Posterous app is free, and it’s available now in the App Store. If you’re a Posterous user, or if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to share thoughts, photos and videos while on the go, this is definitely a must-download.

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iTunes

The first time you noticed a smart “anything with a purple icon” was probably in iTunes. Besides OS X, iTunes is the only piece of software to ship with several built-in smart items. You’ve seen them before, specifically the 90’s Music, Classical Music and Recently Played playlists, to name a few. If you’ve read our previous articles, you know how those work now (and can just right click them to edit their criteria).

But when it comes to iTunes, one thing that invariably also comes to mind is an iPod. If you have at least one iPod, chances are you probably have several iPods. As such, you can set each iPod to sync specific music, playlists or even smart playlists. But since oftentimes our music libraries are larger than the capacity of our iPods, Apple has built in a few unique twists in smart playlist support for iTunes to “shuffle things up.” Here’s a few ideas to get some unique use out of them. (Keep in mind, you can sync multiple playlists, allowing you to mix and match some of these unique smart playlists with your own favorite content.)

Random Tunes

If you have a small iPod, such as an iPod shuffle, you might try a smart playlist that just pulls a random sampling of your music.

Music I Never Listen To

As Apple (perhaps secretly?) wants iTunes to become the Google of your media collection, it has built in tracking of how often you listen to your content. You could create a playlist that showed you all items with a play count of less than 1 for a jam list of music you’ve never heard.

My Top 10

If you are one to tag your songs with star ratings, you could create a playlist of your all time 10 best tunes, based on rating and frequency of play.

iPhoto

The iPhoto equivalent is, as you might have guessed, called Smart Albums. Similar to iTunes, iPhoto provides support for specialized criteria for searching, including criteria based on camera settings and support for Faces and Places. Here’s some ideas for unique iPhoto smart albums.

Group Shot

Keeping track of family photos is easy with faces. If you want to easily see all the photos from your own family, create a smart album that shows pictures based on the faces of any of your family members. (Make sure to set this one to “match any” instead of “match all.”)

European Vacation

In addition to tagging your photos by location (or GPS, if your camera is equipped), you could create a smart album that automatically grouped any photos taken in the countries you visited.

Those Pesky Movies

Newer cameras support the ability to record film, and for lack of a better place to store them, iPhoto imports them right along with your photos. But they’re all mixed up in albums and there’s no simple way to pick them apart. Just create a smart album that looks for the usual video extensions in any text. This should find them by their filename and let you view them all in one place.

Holiday Photos

If you have lots of family and friends who all love to take and share photos, you could create a smart album based on the date photos were taken. For instance, all photos that are in the range of December 20 through December 28 are likely my holiday photos. As more people send you their photos from the event, provided their camera tagged them with the correct date, they will automatically populate the album.

Aperture

Apple’s high-end photo management application also takes advantage of smart file management. Similar to iPhoto, you can use criteria based on EXIF metadata (aperture, ISO, shutter speed, etc.). Despite the fact that Aperture doesn’t support Faces and Places like iPhoto, there are a number of additional options that can make photo management even easier.

A word of caution with Aperture, however. When creating a smart album, Aperture will only search the root level of the location where you store the album. For instance, if I’m viewing my entire library and create one there, it’ll search all photos. If I am in a particular project, however, the smart album will only search photos within that project. As usual, remember that deleting a photo in your library will also delete it from the smart album. You’re just “reorganizing” the same content with smart albums and not actually making a duplicate. (This applies to all smart items: folders, albums, playlists, etc.)

Missing Captions & Credit

Aperture provides extensive support for IPTC data (the metadata you add to your photos after the camera is done with them). You can use this to create albums that show which of your photos are missing captions or copyright information, should you wish to make sure all of your photos are properly tagged.

Need the Ratings

If you’re a photographer who loves to use Apple’s star system to rate your photos, consider a smart album that is based on showing you photos without a rating. It’s a quick and easy way to find any of those photos that slip through the cracks.

Apple’s own apps are certainly not the only to take advantage of “smart” organization. 1Password and NewsFire are just two examples of a growing breed of third-party applications that really harness the power of OS X’s database infrastructure to deliver content organized on the fly by your rules. If you’ve found interesting uses of smart playlists in iTunes or Smart Albums in Aperture or iPhoto, share them with us below.

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The seven apps are all new to me, but they seem to have garnered favorable reviews and even some official accolades from Apple itself. They also cover quite a range, meaning that no two really duplicate the functions or features of the others. Here’s a brief rundown of the apps you get in the bundle.

• GraphicConverter – Does what it says. You can open basically any image file, and then save it as another. You can also do some light editing, organize your photos, run a slide show, and automate your image processing to make working with large batches of files easier.
• Picturesque – Provides a lot of easy, 1-click or simplified image enhancement abilities. Great for those who don’t have the patience or time to learn more advanced programs like Photoshop, or who want really quick turnaround times for time sensitive activities like blogging.
• ImageFramer – Add frames to your pictures. A little weird, in my opinion, but if you’re looking for something different for your photos, this could be it.
• Funtastic Photos – Photo correction and enhancement which automatically preserves your original. Also packs a number of sharing features, and a rich print layout system.
• Graphic Designer Toolbox – Combine building blocks to create crazy new graphic effects and images. You use the unique interface to marry various elements together in a non-destructive process that is both deceptively simple and incredibly deep. Weird but cool.
• DrawIt – A vector image editor and drawing app. Tons of shapes are included in the default set, and there’s support for user-created ones, too. A nice little app that will have you creating Mac-friendly icons and more with relative ease.
• HoudahGeo – Add geolocation data to your photos. HoudahGeo lets you specify information like latitude, longitude, altitude and viewing angle in an image file’s EXIF, XMP or IPTC tags.

All of the apps included in MacGraPhoto have apparently been Apple Staff Picks except for Graphic Designer Toolbox, which won a Think Different award for graphic image editors. At the very least, you’ll probably shave a few steps off of your current process for doing light image editing by picking up the bundle. Plus, if you tell three people about the deal and they buy the pack as a result, the price of your purchase is refunded and you get it free. The bundle pricing expires in a little over five days.

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Of all the file syncing solutions available, one of the most popular is Dropbox. As one of the solutions that is also cross-platform compatible, many Mac users have embraced Dropbox as a more reliable and robust solution than other alternatives, like MobileMe’s iDisk. Diehard Dropbox users can now rejoice as the Dropbox team is at it once again with the release of a native iPhone app, allowing users to access their dropbox on the go.

For a while, Dropbox has provided users with an iPhone-optimized web site for accessing their contents on the go, but that left many users desiring more. Even with 3G speeds, web browsing through Mobile Safari is not as fast as an application that can read/write to its own resources and sync with a server.

Native App, Native Features

With a native application, the Dropbox team has managed to provide full access to your dropbox contents as well as several interesting iPhone-specific features.

One of these is the ability to take photos or video directly within the application (or use existing content on your device) and have those photos synced to your dropbox automatically. Dropbox then gives users quick access to generate an email with an appropriate link to view the content and share it with others.

The application itself is very usable and functions like most other native apps. As expected, you can delete items from your dropbox just as you would an email (swipe to delete). To prevent users from experiencing lag (as would have happened with a web app), the application caches a copy of the directory structure once you’ve viewed it at least once. (This later is re-synced if changes occur elsewhere.)

Typical application file types that are supported on the iPhone (images, PDFs, Keynotes, Pages documents, Word documents, etc.) are all supported within the application. Word documents even support copy and paste! If you have video files that are of a supported type (QuickTime and the like), they will also stream from your Dropbox. For those who love sharing content, just like the aforementioned photos, a mail icon in the lower left corner allows users to generate emails for any content stored on their dropbox.

Dropbox also supports a “Favorites” feature which allows you to sync your favorite files directly to your iPhone, even further speeding up response time. To favorite a file, simply tap the star icon at the bottom of the screen when viewing the file.

A Few Shortcomings

One little complaint that I have is that Dropbox uses its own picture browser. As such, when I load an image, I’m unable to pinch to zoom like what happens when browsing photos elsewhere on my phone. Support for the accelerometer is present, though, as rotating my phone allows the photo to reorient itself. I’m assuming this is just a bug and something the Dropbox team will work out in a future update.

Another interesting piece that is missing is the fact that Dropbox supports Growl on its desktop version. Though it may be annoying, some users may be wishing for push notifications for any updates to their dropbox. Again, as this is an initial release, this is something that could come in a later update.

Dropbox is a free download from the App Store but does require a valid Dropbox account. Users can sign up for a free Dropbox account (limited to 2GB), and there are paid options for greater storage (50GB or 100GB). As someone who has used Dropbox for over a year now, it’s a very robust solution for file syncing and in my tests, a lot more stable than MobileMe’s iDisk. If you’ve used Dropbox or the new Dropbox app and have thoughts on the matter, tell us your experience!

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Around the time I first got my iPhone 3G, I used to use Exposure (now called Darkslide) for Flickr browsing, and I was well satisfied, until it became rather buggy with later versions. Not sure what the state of that app is, but I’m glad to see Yahoo finally step forward and release an official iPhone solution for the photo sharing site.

The Flickr app is available now in the App Store for the lovely price of free, and allows you to upload your own photos or videos to the site for publication. On first use, you have to enter your credentials if you want to upload or view your contacts, but Flickr takes you to Safari and then immediately back to the app afterward, resulting in a painless process.

I didn’t even bother doing that for probably my first five minutes using the app, though, because I was too busy just watching the home screen. By default, Flickr for iPhone shows a Ken Burns-style slide show of random photos from the site’s entire public archive. It’s a simple trick, but for some reason on the iPhone’s screen it looks so good it’s absolutely mesmerizing.

When you do log in, which you must do if you want to use any of the app’s features besides Search, the slide show on launch features only photos from your own and your contacts’ photostreams. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you have lots of contacts who are active Flickr users, but I would like to see a settings option in future versions that lets you pull from the general pool. It may not even be intended as a feature, but it’s the most visually pleasing thing the app has to offer.

Generally speaking, Flickr for the iPhone does a good job of looking good. It shows you when its loading using the familiar logo animation it shares with the regular site, and the UI is well and smartly designed. My only complaint is that in comparison to other apps like Darkslide, it actually does very little.

Like many non-photographers I know, I don’t actually use the site for uploading my own content, and I have very few contacts. What I do like to do on Flickr is just browse aimlessly, because while I may not take many photos, I appreciate a good one when I see it. Darkslide (the version I used to use, anyway) provides great features for browsing photos outside of your contact pool. This Flickr app does not, short of searching for keywords.

If you’re a Flickr user who takes a lot of mobile shots with your iPhone, then this app is for you. If you’re a casual appreciator like myself, you may want to look elsewhere for your Flickr fix, at least for the time being.

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If you’re like me, your iPhone does double duty as your average, everyday camera. While I have a dedicated point-and-shoot camera, since my iPhone is always with me, it’s great for quick shots. Sure, the camera isn’t the best, but the convenience is worth the tradeoff.

I heard Alex Lindsay over at MacBreak Weekly offer Autostitch as a “Pick of the Week” a while back and I couldn’t wait to try it. Autostitch is a fantastic app that lets you quickly snap photos on your iPhone and create panorama shots from it. I was ready to call shenanigans on this; I thought there was no way a $1.99 app could create a panorama on the iPhone. So I stood in downtown Boston and snapped a few photos.

After that, I opened up Autostitch and selected the photos I wanted to stitch together by pressing (you guessed it) “stitch.”

About three minutes later it was done and the below image appeared.

At which point I said, “Holy cow,” and called my wife to tell her about the best two bucks I’d ever spent at the App Store. I expected to see some lines, or some imperfection showing that this image was actually four images stitched together, but if not for the people moving in the foreground, it would look like an untouched image. In this photo you can see some black around the edges, but in the latest version you can crop that out.

What’s also nice is this isn’t limited to photos you take on your iPhone. As a test, I took some shots of my messy home office on my Nikon camera and copied them over to the iPhone. Again, about four minutes later, the below image appeared.

Frankly, I’m amazed at how great a job this little $2 app does. If you’re at all interested in panoramic photos, it’s well worth a look.

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Developed by Mobelux, and formerly known as Tumblrette, the official Tumblr iPhone app has now arrived.

Tumblr is essentially the short ‘n sweet side of blogging: Posts are ultra-snappy, comprised of mixed-media uploads such as images, quotes, audio and video. The service is free, via Tumblr.com, and, since the site is so intuitively designed, it’s incredibly easy for new users to dive straight in.

The result of this platform, paired with such a simple and effective interface, is the ultra-diverse Tumblr community. Browsing through various tumblelogs is like sifting through the Lost and Found Department of the entire Internet. It’s a beautiful mess of everything and anything, from the shocking to the spectacular.

Over on the iPhone, the official Tumblr app integrates all the features of the main site, plus a couple of unexpected welcome additions.

Get Ready to Tumble

The app is split in to three panels. First-time users are initially presented with the Tumblr Settings panel (accessible only via the app itself as opposed to the iPhone’s Settings app). From here you’re able to sign in to your Tumblr Dashboard, register a new account and configure Dashboard settings.

Although there’s a Sign up for a Tumblr Account button, the registration process doesn’t occur in-app. This means that tapping the button drops out of the app and moves in to Safari; it works, but it’s certainly not an elegant way of handling new registrations.

Furthermore, the Settings panel displays the name of your primary tumblelog but doesn’t display the name, or otherwise even mention the existence of, any other tumblelogs you may own or contribute to. For prolific users, this could be quite a drawback.

Dashboard Confessional

Once registered and set up, you can configure the Settings panel to always display an iPhone formatted version of the Tumblr Dashboard every time the app is loaded. The Sites panel displays your Tumblr Dashboard — an overview of new content posted to tumblelogs that you’re following.

Clicking on a post in the Dashboard allows you to view it in full, plus there are two buttons: Like and Reblog. Clicking the Reblog button allows you to post content from other tumblelogs straight to yours, automatically crediting the source too.

Rather unexpectedly, and again quite inelegantly, clicking Reblog actually loads the standard web-based Reblog page embedded within the app. It feels clunky to have the standard web-interface within the app and ends up being ineffective for quick-fire tumbling.

Those prolific users that I mentioned earlier may be pleased to note that the Dashboard panel provides quick access to all tumblelogs of which you’re a member. The drawback, though, is that there’s still no configuration options on these pages — it’s simply an embedded page within the app’s browser — so there’s no clear benefit to this feature and as such it feels half-baked.

Mixing Your Media

The Post panel is where the action happens. There are six different post types that can be sent directly to your tumblelog: text, photo, quote, link, chat and audio.

Without copy/paste on the iPhone, the text, quote, link and chat options seem particularly redundant. There is apparently a bookmarklet available, although I couldn’t find it in spite of various Google and Tumblr.com searches.

The other two posting options, photo and audio, are downright brilliant, grin-inducing joys. The former allows you to snap images on the iPhone camera, add text and then upload directly to your tumblelog. The latter is exactly the same, except instead of imagery, it’s all about making sound recordings.

Being able to get away from the computer, snapping and capturing images and sound from the world at large, is exactly what Tumblr is about. It sums up the essence of tumbling while furthering the concept and freeing Tumblr users from their desktop computers.

Summing Up

The inelegant registration process and embedded web page for reblogging only stand out as issues because, the rest of the time, the Tumblr iPhone app is so coherent in its design and ease of use. These niggles will, I hope, get resolved in future updates.

As for the post options for chat, links, quotes and text, these will become incredibly useful once copy/paste is introduced to the iPhone.

The app comes together when you find yourself out on the streets, wanting to capture a moment, an incredible sight, or an odd overheard conversation. The photo and audio features that make this possible are deliciously addictive.

If you’re a regular Tumblr user, or you’ve got an eye (or ear) for interesting happenings when you’re out and about, the Tumblr app will be your ideal companion.

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Acqualia has released a notable update to their 2007 Apple Design Award winning image editing application, Picturesque. Picturesque is a “simple app with a simple goal: to make images more beautiful.”

The latest features include interface enhancements, new saving options, faster loading, and a number of general effect improvements. This review will cover a few of the original features, the new additions in 2.1, and show how the app can impact your image workflow.

Picturesque can turn standard photos in ‘beautiful images,’ allowing you to simply add appealing reflections, perspectives and borders. It’s a great tool for editing images for the web, and makes achieving relatively complex effects remarkably simple.

What Can Picturesque Do?

The app centers around five main ‘effects,’ along with a range of other functionality. These are:

• Perspective: Tilt the image right, left, up or down to create an interesting perspective rather than a simple ‘head on’ view
• Reflection: A simple way to add great looking reflections with customization over opacity and length — far easier than opening Photoshop and doing it manually
• Shadow: As you’d expect, for adding a shadow or ‘glow’ effect behind the image
• Curve: Simply curve any of the four image corners with an adjustable radius
• Stroke: Add a border of varying width/colour around the image

When opening the application, you’re greeted with a very simple window:

This allows you to drag and drop one, or multiple, images into Picturesque. One area where it excels is through applying the same effect in a batch to several images at the same time. This is a simple process, and is far simpler than writing a Photoshop action to do a similar thing.

Preset effects can be saved for future use, which is great if you regularly need to adjust an image in the same way for a website or publication.

Why Would You Use Picturesque?

As with any image application, these effects can be combined to create truly awful effects. Whether it’s the classic overuse of the ‘Web 2.0′ reflection or huge, obtrusive rounded corners — Picturesque can be used for more harm than good!

However, if you take care, you’ll find that it’s easy to save a great deal of time through using these simple effects. I’m always amazed at how a simple change in perspective can add so much more depth and feeling to a photograph.

What is New in 2.1?

Version 2.1 brings a number of enhancements to Picturesque including an improved image browser view, improved cropping & image resizing, and the ability to save straight to your desktop with one keystroke. It also fixes a number of bugs relating to stroke, the shadow effect and saving.

Saving immediately to your desktop is a really handy feature, and can make applying quick effects even quicker. When editing an image, a set of new menu items allow you to automatically save the image to your desktop, or overwrite the imported image file.

The new crop tools work in a way which I’ve never encountered before, updating the preview of the image as you drag and drop the corners to crop. It draws similarities with simply dragging to re-size, while intelligently cropping the image at the same time. As my vague description suggests, it’s difficult to describe easily without actually trying it out!

Pricing and Details

Picturesque 2 costs $34.95 and requires OS X 10.5 or later. A free 30 day download is available to see whether the app meets your needs. I’m not entirely sure whether the $34.95 price tag is justified, but I can imagine that you’d save a great deal of time over applying these effects through Photoshop manually.

Considering the app has been around for a few years, the updates haven’t been all that revolutionary. While this latest release doesn’t add a great deal of functionality in terms of image effects, it does ensure that Picturesque is easier and quicker to use — something regular users will certainly value.

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Unholster your iPhone and boot up iTunes because it’s that time of the week when we all gather round the App Store and have a look at some of the freshest picks from the last seven days.

While I’ve been wandering the boutiques and bars of Berlin this week, things have been busy for Apple. First up was the Q1 conference call where Tim Cook — standing in for Steve Jobs — revealed that the $199 iPhone price point is working well. 

Less pleasing for those in Cupertino was a court ruling that, due to the fact that the first generation iPod Nano is overly susceptible to scratch damage, Apple is going to have to pay up to $25 to owners of the tiny damaged device.

Setting the serious stuff aside, let’s get down to business with this week’s App Store Roundup.

This week, I’ve been looking at iSniper, Slingshot Lite, Fantastic Contraption and Haruzou – Photo Uploader.

iSniper ($1.99)
Back in my student days, I was an avid online gamer; favorites included Counter Strike, Team Fortress and Battlefield 1942. My class of choice was always sniper — you need to be cunning, patient and then quick on the draw when the time comes. While I’ve ditched the gaming PC for my luxurious but FPS-free Macbook Pro, my trigger-finger still itches for the thrill of shooting faces off. Imagine my joy therefore at discovering iSniper, a game which strips away all the running and jumping, leaving just the satsifying snipey bits.

Slingshot Lite (FREE)
Slingshot Lite brings applied physics to your iPhone, as you literally slingshot your missiles ’round planets in a bid to destroy your target. It’s a game of trial and error, constantly refining the variables until you achieve success. The best thing though is that, due to all the number balancing and variable tweaking, you feel exceedingly clever after completing each stage. It’s like an ego-boost in your pocket. And, if you dig the lite version, the full edition is available for a few bucks.

Fantastic Contraption ($2.99)
First things first, let’s get this out the way: this game is an absolute must have. It should sit in your iPhone game collection alongside  that other essential title, Rolando. The idea is that you craft your own clever contraptions which move themselves — through the joys of phsyics — to the goal area. Chuck together a device using cogs, wood and other bits and bobs, then set your creation in to action. The game even features a built in level editor, extra levels and the ability to share your contraptions with the community. If you’re still not positive that you should immediately purchase this game, go try it out now, online.

Haruzou – Photo Uploader (free)
Even though I’ve just purchased an awesome new camera (Panasonic  DMC LX3, for those wondering), my iPhone (with the help of Polarize) is still getting some photo love. In the past I’ve recommended Klick for uploading to Flickr, it’s feature-rich, polished and free; however, some users may want a more bare-bones solution to getting their snaps on Flickr. Haruzou  uploads to both Flickr and Picasa, includes multiple-image uploading, re-size and rotate, plus it’s totally free.

Just One More Thing

Back in the Summer of ’08, Kentaro Kumagai released an app for touch and iPhone called iview. The description on the App Store was lacking, there was only one preview image and, despite being free, the app has only notched up one review on the store (albeit a four star rating).

General App Store fluff? No, it’s anything but, this is an entertaining toy for passing the time and, at best, a feature-rich re-blogging tool for users of Tumblr. The problem is that Kumagai just ain’t the world’s best copy-writer — he’s not so hot at marketing his wares — as such, this app got lost amidst the general onslaught of App Store releases.

The app allows you to view images from several image book-marking services such as FFFFound!, We Heart It and Vi.Sualize.Us – it’s a great way to wallow in weird imagery or browse for creative inspiration.

For users of Tumblr — a site that is somewhere in between Twitter’s micro-posts and traditional blogging — iview takes it to the next level, allowing users to reblog any image with a quick tap of a button. No forms to fill in, no multiple taps, no text entry. Just click the reblog button and it’s posted to your esoteric corner of the Internets.

For creatives on the look out for inspiration, Tumblr users looking for their next potential meme or iPhone owners with a penchant for visual stimulation, iview is a wonderful app in need of some serious championing. Grab it, use it and tell me if you dig it.

That’s all from the App Store this week, I’ll be back next Saturday with more of the latest releases. In the meantime, drop by the comments and let me know which apps you’ve been looking at.

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While our U.S. contingent have been preparing tender turkeys (or veggie equivalents), over in the UK I’ve been taste-testing the latest scrummy additions to the App Store.

This week I’m looking at MobileLinked IM, Project Polaroid, Touchgrind and lo-fi retro freebie Fire Engine.

MobileLinked IM (free)
In terms of iPhone IM clients, everyone seems to have their favourites. I dig Palringo – being able to send voice-messages and photos to my mates while I’m out and about feels like I’m living in McLuhan’s glittering global village. On the other hand, fellow TAB writer Darrell Etherington can’t get enough of Beejive’s sweet features. Choice is a good thing, so it’s wonderful that MobileLinked IM has joined the fray, yet, despite being free, it’s lacking in the features and polish of its older counterparts.

Project Polaroid (free)
The Apple Blog covered a cute desktop app called Poladroid a couple of weeks back. Chuck in a normal photo and it spits out a Polaroid-style processed version. Project Polaroid takes it to the iPhone, so you can get retro with your photos while you’re on the go. Frankly, I utterly adore this app — yes it’s as gimmicky as a diamond-encrusted toilet-seat, but I just can’t abide by the grainy cheap iPhone camera and Project Polaroid is the perfect retro-themed remedy.

Touchgrind ($4.99)
It’s a proper skateboarding game on the iPhone, packed with tons of moves activated through a deceptively simple control system. You’ll need seriously dextrous fingers to bust out impressive moves on Touchgrind, but getting your digits ’round the tough technique is worth it when you’re able to string together massive combo multipliers across the tiny skatepark.

The Classic – Fire Engine (free)
Back in the day, when the closest thing to an iPhone was a brick-sized cellular, the must-have handheld gaming gizmo was Nintendo’s Game & Watch. Now it’s pretty tough to track down of these desirable devices, so in lieu of the real thing, MG Interactive’s series of games brings Nintendo-flavored LCD goodness to the iPhone. Although it’s called Fire Engine, the game actually finds you rescuing escapees from a burning building and ferrying them to your nearby ambulance. Ever so slightly in bad taste yet undeniably classic fun.

As we scurry away from the week that was, there are but a few more moments to ponder an app I missed a few weeks back. Last week a fresh App Store oddity hit iTunes: developed by Yudo Games, SpyBugRadar finds you raising and lowering your iPhone to search for hidden bugs in the room.

SpyBugRadar is part of Yudo’s freshly launched series entitled, “1$ Games.” The game is like having your own piece of James Bond style gadgetry as you physically hunt around your room for the beeping bugs. And it’s free, for the time being, in the App Store. We need more developers like Yudo, designing games that are quirky and stuffed with tons of imagination, like lovingly prepared Thanksgiving poultry.

That’s all for this week, I’ll catch you next Saturday for more from the App Store. In the meantime, drop by the comments and let me know which apps you’ve been downloading.

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• an Open Scripting Architecture (CVE-2008-2830) privilege elevation issue [10.4/10.5 Workstation & Server]
• a filename handling issue in CarbonCore (CVE-2008-2320) which may lead to an application Denial of Service (DoS) or arbitrary code execution [10.4/10.5 Workstation & Server]
• a web-exploitable CoreGraphics issue (CVE-2008-2321) that could lead to application DoS or arbitrary code execution [10.4/10.5 Workstation & Server]
• another CoreGraphics issue (CVE-2008-2322) with PDF rendering, leading to application DoS or arbitrary code execution [10.4/10/5 Workstation & Server]
• an issue with DataDetectors (CVE-2008-2323) where maliciously crafted content could lead to an application DoS [10.5 Workstation & Server]
• a really cool permissions issue with Disk Utility (CVE-2008-2324) that would have allowed local users to act with system privileges [10.4 Workstation & Server]
• an issue with OpenLDAP (CVE-2008-2952) where an attacker could have created an application DoS [10.4/10.5 Workstation & Server]
• another DoS potential in OpenSSL (CVE-2007-5135) if maliciously crafted bad packets are processed [10.4/10.5 Workstation & Server]
• five PHP 5 fixes [10.5 Workstation & Server]
• a QuickLook issue with Microsoft Office documents (CVE-2008-2325) causing either an application DoS or arbitrary code execution [10.5 Workstation & Server]
• two rsync vulnerabilities that may result in data access outside the module root [10.4/105 Workstation & Server]

The “big daddy” of this update is a fix for the DNS cache poisoning problem that has been in the Apple and general tech & security news recently. This is a pretty severe issue as DNS is the backbone of how systems & application get IP addresses from host names (so they know where to send you on the Intenet), and the ability to corrupt those databases means you really cannot trust where your network packets are going. Apple is the last major vendor to release a fix for this flaw and rightfully deserves some flack for it since they could have deployed the patch on July 8th with the majority of the other vendors, but chose to wait until this update bundle was ready to release.

OS X Server is the most likely candidate for actually running BIND (the process that manages DNS on a system) and you need to patch IMMEDIATELY if you are using it. It takes a bit of work to do this on plain-old Mac OS X, but you should run the update as soon as possible as well (especially for some of the other fixes).

A gaping hole still exists in OS X 10.3 and below you will need to do a bit of work (download, compile & install the package from the ISC by hand) if you are still running those systems and hosting DNS . While supporting older operating system releases presents a real challenge to companies like Apple & Microsoft, it is not unreasonable to expect there to be a decent number of 10.3 systems in the wild that need tending to and Apple should have done more to ensure coverage for those installations (or at least have provided a series of steps one could take to fix the issue).

Apple clearly dropped the ball here and has called into question their true commitment to security on their OS X platform or at least their ability to react quickly given all of the efforts they have in play. One also needs to remember that a version of OS X runs on the iPhone, iPhone 3G and iPod Touch and it is unclear whether the issues with CoreGraphics and DataDetectors exist on those platforms as well. It is much more difficult to both issue firmware updates and ensure decent update coverage with those mobile devices and Apple may need to come up with a way to deploy critical security fixes over-the-air directly to them rather than force consumers to do a full sync/update to remain secure.

The security update should show up in Software Update and is also available via direct download from Apple.

Let TAB readers know your take on how Apple handled this situation by dropping a note in the comments!

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