Now, with iCloud and Photo Stream, that hassle has been eliminated. Once I take a photo with my iPhone, as long as all my devices are connected to a Wi-Fi network, my photo will appear on all of them. My photos also appear on my Mac (in either Aperture or iPhoto, so long as they’re installed), or in the My Pictures folder on Windows. It’s one part of iCloud I can say worked exactly as advertised, but even so, it has both strengths and flaws.

Setting up Photo Stream

On a Mac: Go to the iCloud System Preferences pane and make sure Photo Stream is checked.

iPhoto: To enable Photo Stream in iPhoto, just go into the Preferences and make sure Photo Stream is checked.

Once you’ve done that, click on Photo Stream in the sidebar and you’ll see your photos.

Aperture: To enable Photo Stream in Aperture, just go into Preferences and make sure Photo Stream is checked. In this case, I’ve intentionally left Upload unchecked since I don’t want photos imported from my DSLR to go into the Photo Stream; just those I sync.

Once that’s done, click on Photo Stream in the sidebar to see your synced photos.

On a PC: First, download and install the iCloud Control Panel. Once you launch it — you guessed it — make sure Photo Stream is checked. You will also need to click on Options next to it to specify the Upload and Downloads directory.

The gotcha: You can’t delete from Photo Stream

Photo Stream’s directive is simple: keep either the last 1,000 photos you’ve taken or the last 30 days worth, whichever comes first. Update: It’s only the last 1,000 photos you’ve taken on an iOS device, not on iCloud.com. But right now, it seems to require a chicken, two goats, and a shaman to get a photo deleted. None of my devices can delete directly from Photo Stream, and deleting the source image on the device where it originally appeared doesn’t delete it from Photo Stream.

I’m perfectly fine with Photo Stream uploading my Camera Roll on a moment’s notice. What I’m not thrilled with is not being able to delete from Photo Stream. Part of my job description is taking iOS screenshots and during a heavy review week (like this week), I’ll take a ton of screenshots. I don’t need them or want them after they’ve been put in the article. Now, I’m kinda stuck with them. There’s been a lot of attention paid to this Photo Stream failing, so I expect Apple to issue a fix soon.

Update: Apple points out that you can delete photos, but only by completely resetting your Photo Stream data, and removing all images stored there:

• You can reset your Photo Stream at icloud.com. This removes your photos from iCloud but keeps photos already on the device. For more information, see Photo Stream Help.
• Photo Stream photos can be removed from your device by turning Photo Stream off in iOS settings or in OS X Lion System Preferences. You can also delete any photos imported into your iPhoto or Aperture library on a Mac, or in the folder they’re imported to on a PC.

Until then, be careful what you take pictures of if you plan to make Photo Stream a part of your digital life.

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Many people have a collection of recipe clippings culled from magazines, newspapers, and the supermarket. But where do you put the clippings? Ideally, you type it out and put it in a recipe manager (my favorite is SousChef). If I only had the time. What I do instead is either scan the recipe directly into iPhoto from my Mac, or if I can’t easily clip the recipe, I’ll take a picture of it with my iPhone. When I see a recipe I like on the web, I take a screen shot to easily get it into iPhoto, too.

Once in the iPhoto, I rename the photo to match the actual recipe title, and then in the keywords I put the important ingredients that I’d need to know when shopping such as “chicken breast” or “celery.” This is also a handy way to search for recipes when something is on sale or in season. Then I just drop it in an album I call “Cookbook.”

I also have an album called “Current Recipes.” I, and other members of the family, will put especially interesting recipes into this album. I’ll sort them in the album to create both variety and efficiency in shopping. I have the recipes synced to a password-protected MobileMe site as well for ease of browsing. With iCloud’s Photo Stream feature, which arrives in September, this should be even easier.

You can also sync those albums to your iPhone and iPad so that you always have all your recipes close at hand, which can be useful if you stop in at the grocery store on the way home from work. Not only is this a great reference, but recipes can be easily emailed from the iPhone to whoever’s doing the shopping.

With the recipes in digital form, cooking with iOS in the kitchen is also breeze. I’ll use either my iPad or my iPhone to check out the recipe(s) I need. After cooking, I’ll return to iPhoto and modify the ratings and notes for the recipe so we know whether to make it again. If it was lousy, we delete it from the album.

Keeping my recipes in iPhoto has reduced our reliance on eating take-out, as well as being a great way for everyone to contribute to dinner. Considering every Mac comes with iPhoto, it’s also cost-effective and easy, too. Anything you think might add even more to my system?

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Take Photos of the Current Time in Safari

First, you’ll need a photo of the current time taken from each camera whose internal clock is out of sync. Be sure to disable the flash to avoid screen glare before you complete these steps:

1. Launch Safari on your Mac and open the URL of an established “time authority” that will display the current time  (http://www.time.gov/ for example).
2. Using each camera, take a photo of Safari as it displays the correct time.
3. Import the photo of the correct time from each camera into your iPhoto Library.

Create Smart Albums for Each Camera Model

Now that you have photos of the correct time imported into your iPhoto Library from each camera you own, you will need to isolate the photos for each camera:

1. From the File menu on iPhoto, create a new Smart Album (one for each camera).
2. Use the drop down list to set the “Camera Model” condition of the Smart Album to match the relevant camera model for each album you create.
3. Keep creating Smart Albums until you have a unique Smart Album for each camera.

More Than One Camera of the Same Model

If you happen to have multiple cameras of the same model, then you must add a second field, “Any Text”  to the conditions of the Smart Album and set the value for this field will be set to the serial number of the camera as follows:

1. Select one of the photos for each camera of the same model.
2. From iPhoto’s File menu, select “Reveal in Finder” to show where the original photo is located in the Finder and open the photo using the Preview application.
3. From Preview’s Tools menu, select the “Show Inspector” menu item and navigate to the EXIF tab to find the value of the serial number.
4. Enter the serial number as the value for the “Any Text” condition of the Smart Album.
5. Again, keep creating Smart Albums until you have one unique Smart Album for each camera.

Determine the Time Adjustment for Each Camera

By comparing the time represented in the photo to the time stamp on the picture itself, you can determine the amount of the adjustment that must be made.  To determine the adjustment for each camera:

1. Select only the photo of the correct time as it was displayed in Safari within each Smart Album.
2. From the Photo menu in iPhoto, select the “Adjust Date and Time…” menu item and copy down the time difference between the time shown in the photo and the time stamp of the image file.
3. Click cancel, and repeat for each camera’s Smart Album.

Adjust the Time for Each Camera

Now that you have a unique Smart Album defined for each camera, and you know the exact time adjustment required for each camera, all that’s left to do is adjusting the time for all photos in the iPhoto Library for each camera.

1. Select one of the Smart Albums you created and select all of the photos in the same Smart Album.
2. ‘From the Photo menu in iPhoto, select the “Adjust Date and Time…” menu item and modify the date/time of all of the photos in these Smart Library, using the interval you discovered when comparing the time displayed in the image to the time stamp of the photo from that camera.
3. Be sure to check “Modify original files.”
4. Click Adjust, and repeat for each camera’s Smart Album.

It may seem like a lot of work, but once you’ve done it once, it should hopefully help keep your iPhoto Events in chronological working order for a long time to come, without requiring you to make manual changes each to the metadata of each photo you add.

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Snow Leopard’s Image Capture Application

Most of the time you can isolate the culprit by individually selecting other images with Apple’s Image Capture application. Upon launching it, select the iPhone from the list of devices on the left. The contents of the iPhone’s camera roll should then appear on the right. From here you can select files individually, or choose to import all images. There’s even a drop down selector where you can choose where to download the images to.

This is also a great utility to use if you just want to delete a large number of images from your iPhone. Unfortunately, this application utilizes the same technology as iPhoto, and will therefore choke on the same erroneous images.

iPhone Filesystem as a Flash Drive

There are several third-party applications for the Mac that will allow you to mount your iPhone as an external flash drive and retrieve files. I like to use Macroplant’s iPhone Explorer. Since this application is looking at the images on the iPhone as files, it uses a subtly different technique than either iPhoto’s or Image Capture’s import functionality.

Once launched, navigate to the folder titled DCIM on the iPhone. This folder will contain all of the images stored in the iPhone’s camera roll. Simply drag and drop the folder onto the desktop or any other location. If all you want to do is get rid of all of your iPhone’s images, then select all of the contents of the DCIM folder and delete. There have been times when my iPhone’s camera app would start behaving badly and it appeared as if the camera was not working at all. Clearing out the DCIM folder fixed the issues I was having.

iTunes iOS Backup Files

Now we’re entering extreme desperation territory. Image Capture has failed to import the images, and all attempts to copy the files directly have failed. The only course of action remaining is to see if the latest backup of the iPhone in iTunes still has the photos.  For this reason, I always backup before I import photos.

Besides being useful for a restore operation, you can directly access the = files included in any device backup. The backed-up files are located in the user’s /Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup folder.  The problem is that the names of the content don’t make any sense. There are however third-party applications that can translate this layer of misdirection.

I’ve been using Padraig’s iPhone Backup Extractor for a while now.  After launching the application, I simply choose which iOS device’s backup files I want to extract. After making the selection, I scroll down until I see a line item labeled “iOS Files”.  Select it and click on the extract button, and you’ll be prompted for a location to extract the files too.  In the extracted folder ,there will be a DCIM folder containing all of the photos from your camera roll.

Even if the iPhone is a closed platform, that doesn’t mean you have to access its content only via official means. Hopefully these three different methods for getting at your device’s photos will help you out of any jam you may find yourself in with the camera roll.

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The only real problem is a dearth of quality photos for the screensaver. My own photos aren’t up to scratch, and the limited ones Apple includes get old pretty quickly. What I really wanted was a screensaver with a large and constantly renewing set of high-quality photos.

Flickr Integration

The first thing I did was to have a look at the included Flickr integration to see if that provided a solution. You can use saved searches, and pull photos from Flickr contacts, but neither of those options really solved the problem. A saved search limits the scope and reduces the overall quality of the set, while contacts, no matter how good or prolific, just can’t provide enough material to keep things interesting. Eventually, I realized that the photos showing up on Flickr’s Explore page were the ones that I wanted.

Things Get Interesting

If you’re not familiar with how photos get picked to be featured on the explore page, it all has to do with a mysterious algorithm cooked up in the Flickr labs that calculates a photo’s interestingness. No one’s really sure exactly how a photo’s interestingness score is calculated, but it’s thought to involve some alchemical mixture of a photo’s tags, groups, comments, views, traffic, favorites, and other sundry properties. Whatever the exact ingredients may be, the top 500 interesting photos that end up on the explore page every day seem to be exactly what I’m looking for.

The problem is that there’s no real way to tell the Apple TV to use just those “interesting” photos for the screensaver. So, inspired by a couple of old and now defunct attempts to overcome this very same roadblock, I decided to write a quick PHP script and take advantage of the nice Flickr API to make it all work. I created a dummy flickr account named TABScreensaver which, thanks to my script, now marks each of the day’s most interesting photos as a favorite.

A Solution

Now, anyone who wants a large and constantly renewing collection of interesting photos for their Apple TV screensaver can simply add TABScreensaver as a Flickr contact and choose it’s favorite photos for the screensaver. Every evening, the set will be automatically updated with those photos picked to be featured on the Flickr explore page.

In the long run, I’d really like to see Apple improve the photo sharing features on the Apple TV so this kind of workaround isn’t necessary. It would be great if we could subscribe to RSS feeds with image enclosures, or add Flickr groups, or pull images from a Twitter stream, or combine sources, or lots of other cool stuff I’m too dim to think up. Who knows? Maybe if we get an App Store for it, our biggest problem will be sifting through a glut of Apple TV photo sharing apps trying to find the right one. It’ll be a nice problem to have.

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It’s great to see Apple finally getting on the update wagon with its own apps. Remote recently got the universal treatment, bringing much-needed improvements beyond just multi-device support. Now it’s time to get cracking on those universal versions of the iWork suite, Cupertino.

I love having the luxury of video capture on my iPhone 3GS, because it’s available to me anytime I need it. The only problem is, it’s either video or photo capture, so I’m potentially out of luck if I captured one and decidedly would have rather had the other. Yeah, I kind of like having my cake and eating it all in a single sitting too.

The good news — in this particular case at least — is that if you capture the event in video, you have a pretty good chance of getting decent still photos out of it when you’re through.

While this tip is aimed at iPhone 3GS users who can shoot their own video, it’s possible to use on any model when viewing video. The beauty of editing 3GS video that you’ve shot, is the frame scrubber that is made available for editing purposes. That feature just makes it a lot easier to pinpoint the image that you want to pull from the video content. (This becomes important when one frame is blurry, and the next is not.)

Once you’ve found the frame that you want to make into a photo in your iPhone album, we just need to capture it. For the best results, make sure the control bezels are hidden from the screen. Usually tapping the screen once will cause them to slide out of view. Then, to perform the screen capture, press and hold the Home button. While holding the Home button, click the Sleep button on top of the phone. You’ve now saved that movie frame to your photo library as a stand-alone picture file.

The quality of your resulting photo depends completely on the video that was captured first. If there are slow movements that limit or eliminate blur, that will give the best outcome to this process. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s better than no photos from an event at all!

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Now owners of legitimate, non-jailbroken devices can take advantage of the nice little suite of usability enhancements and feature additions that Snapture brings to your iPhone’s static media capture capabilities. The app has been approved by Apple and is available via the App Store.

This isn’t a pale, feature-reduced version of its former self. According to Just Another iPhone Blog, who received word directly from Snapture’s developers about the release, the app is making the switch from renegade to law-abiding citizen feature-intact.

For those of you unfamiliar with Snapture, those features include:

• Patent-pending Picture-in-Picture Technology (allows users to view and delete recent photos directly on the viewfinder)
• Multi-Touch Pinch and Pan Zoom (5X max)
• High Speed Multishot: 3 rapid-fire snaps to capture every moment of action.
• Easy Snap: Tap anywhere on screen to take a photo.

Those who’ve already been shopping around for a solid camera app alternative may rightly point out that these features aren’t really anything new (aside from that PIP thing) and can be found in other apps, but can they be found altogether in one program? Snapture is meant to be a true replacement, so that you never have to open another camera app again.

By default, your view is unobstructed in Snapture, thanks to the tap-anywhere shutter controls. Tapping an unobtrusive arrow icon at the bottom of the stream brings up your detailed controls, which allow you to turn on or off the auto level aid, and change your image resolution, along with accessing the zoom and burst fire modes. You can also email photos directly from the app, so you shouldn’t even have much cause to open up Photos.

If you’ve purchased Snapture via Cydia, you’ll be disappointed to learn that legitimate App Store customers get a special launch pricing deal on the app. For a limited time, Snapture will sell for $1.99, making it 75 percent cheaper than its jailbreak predecessor.

Kudos to Apple for being open to the advances of developers who are willing to come in from the cold. It’s one of the few reasons I still have some hope for the future of the App Store as a fair and well-run software distribution platform.

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Syncing in general has been improved in the sense that users can now drill down and sync more specific content. Music can now be synced by a combination of playlists, specific artists or genres. Podcasts can be synced by specific episodes and TV shows can be synced by specific episodes or seasons.

New altogether is the ability to sync iTunes U content which also has its own category, instead of being mixed in randomly between podcasts and music. Photo syncing has also been greatly enhanced, allowing support for specific albums, events or faces. Searching has also been enabled in many of these areas to allow you to quickly narrow down your choices. While these are all great features, they have really intensified the syncing interface. Hopefully it’s not too much for some users.

Still No Love for Audiobooks?

As mentioned in my wish list, I was really hoping for an improved way to sync audiobooks. Apple answered my hopes in an odd way. In the Music section, you can now search through your artists and, upon searching for a particular author, I was able to sync up those specific audiobooks. This isn’t a perfect solution though as a user may have multiple audiobooks from the same author. Why not just add another tab across the top? Apple added one for iTunes U. (I’m completely kidding. Remember, the interface is getting too complicated. iTunes 8 had eight tabs for syncing options while iTunes 9 brings the number to 10.) I personally feel the number of tabs across the top is too many, but I do feel audiobooks are important enough to warrant a more selective approach for syncing instead of just creating playlists for them.

Home Screens, Sweet Home Screens

Of course, the part most of you will really care about is the ability to organize your iPhone and iPod touch home screens via iTunes. This is simply amazing and is surprisingly quite functional. You simply navigate amongst the home screens, deleting or adding as needed and dragging applications between them. If you want to drag an item from the first screen to the fifth, just click and drag the app and hover over the fifth screen. It’ll pop up in the main view and you can place your app.

You can also select multiple apps by holding down the Command (Mac) or Control (Windows) keys. Moving complete screens around is also a snap, just by clicking and dragging them. All in all, this feature works quite well and should give users no excuse for messy randomly placed apps on their iPhones (or at least quell frustrations of people who attempt to switch between pages while editing apps only to grab and app and move it instead).

Generally speaking, these new syncing options do give users more flexible options to manage content on their devices, but I’m curious to see if any of you feel the interface itself has become a little overblown?

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In my experience, a year’s worth of photographs is around 4,000 strong. Of those 4,000 image files, somewhere between 5 and 10 percent get four- and five-star ratings. Sure, most of my photos are important to me personally, but the majority aren’t the ones I’ll go to when showing off the kids to a friend on my iPhone. Now take into consideration your yearly (or whatever) iPhoto library backups, and you’ve got a mountain of photos in several different libraries to traverse before you find your those standouts.

The solution is pretty straightforward, actually. Pull all of your four- and five-star photos (assuming you’re consistently using ratings) from each of your archived iPhoto libraries. If you’ve created Smart Albums in iPhoto in the past (such as anything with four or five stars), you can create a simple Automator workflow that filters photos from that album, selects them, and copies them to a designated folder of your choosing. This effectively exports all those photos you want, from whichever iPhoto library is currently set as the default. Is it easier than just opening that library and dragging and dropping them by hand? Probably not, but that’s your call.

Once you’ve got a folder full of four- and five-star photos from over the years, it’s time to create a new iPhoto library. Open iPhoto and hold the Option key. This allows you to select a new library to create. With that blank library open, drag all of those photos from (their file location) above into iPhoto. Moving forward, you’d just open this Favorites library and add the latest keepers to it.

Perhaps I’ve answered my own question to the iPhoto Backup issue. I don’t need to cart all of those so-so images around all year long. I could just roll with a Favorites library, and then my current yearly library. Either way, this should help you access those great photos from years passed more quickly, without having to spend time digging through multiple libraries.

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This update for iPhoto also includes three new travel-related photo book themes: Old World Travel, Tropical Travel and Asian Travel. Each is based on the existing travel theme, but includes several unique backgrounds. Apple has also provided additional greeting card themes.

This free update is 161MB and can be downloaded automatically via Software Update or through Apple’s Support Downloads website.

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iPhoto is perfectly capable of displaying your photos as a slideshow or one at a time. But you’re limited to a flat display that doesn’t exactly “wow” anyone. With one simple download, you can view your iPhoto collection on a visually stunning 3D wall, right in your web browser.

Cooliris is a browser plugin available for Safari and Firefox that allows you to view photos and videos in a beautiful full-screen, 3D-wall format. You can scroll across the panoramic wall with your mouse, clicking on photos to enlarge them. At its core, the plugin allows you to view images on web sites such as Flickr, Facebook, and Google Images, as well as search through news outlets and movie trailer sites.

But one of the great features of Cooliris — that few people even notice — is the ability to quickly view photos located in folders on your hard drive or inside your iPhoto library.

Viewing images with Cooliris

First you’ll have to install the Cooliris plugin for either Safari or Firefox and restart your browser. Once installed, you simply activate it with the button in your browser toolbar. You will enter Cooliris in Full-Screen mode, and start out in Discover mode — which will show off a images from a variety of sources. Navigate to the upper left corner and click the My Computer tab from the source column. The tab will expand to allow you to select folders on your hard drive, as well as choose your iPhoto library, and any albums you currently have available.

Choose your iPhoto library, or the album you want to view, and the magic begins. All the images appear on a wall against a dark background. You can use the futuristic scroll bar at the bottom of the screen, or a mouse with side-scrolling capability (such as Apple’s Mighty Mouse) to navigate. Scrolling left or right speeds you along the wall of images until you get to an image you want to view. If the image sizes aren’t to your liking, you can scroll up or down to enlarge the images on the wall. Once you’ve found an image, you simply click to enlarge it. Your image enlarges and a frame includes more information about it, such as the file name, camera settings and more. As an added bonus, you can click a button to reveal the iPhoto image in the Finder, saving you a trip into iPhoto to drag it out manually.

To enjoy a slideshow of your photos, click the Full Screen button in the lower left corner of the Cooliris interface. This will zoom your image to fill your screen, as well as provide a horizontal frame-by-frame preview of your images.

Cooliris is absolutely free, requires OS X 10.4.11 or later, and is available for Safari 3 and Safari 4 Beta, as well as Firefox versions 2, 3 and the 3.5 Beta. To install the browser plugin, simply visit the Cooliris home page, and the proper version of the plugin download link will appear at the top of the page.

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The Missing Sync recently received a major update that will likely leave BlackBerry owners much more content to wait while RIM drags its heels. One of the most significant new features introduced is over-the-air syncing via Bluetooth, which is something I really wish my iPhone could accomplish, since it has everything needed to do so except for the software implementation.

Not only can you sync via Bluetooth, but with Proximity Sync, you can do so automatically whenever your Mac and your BlackBerry are in range of each other. As an added bonus, Proximity Sync does not interrupt anything else you happen to be doing on your computer or your phone at the time, either.

The Bluetooth features may be the show stopper, but there are other new features as well. The Missing Sync now supports iTunes playlists, syncing of other media, and video transfer to and from your BlackBerry device. Not to mention storage and archiving of your SMS and call history, which can be very handy if you bill clients for call time and/or need to settle a lover’s quarrel with hard evidence that yes, she did in fact say that, and you have the text to prove it.

The Missing Sync for BlackBerry 2.0 is available now for $39.95. Existing users of version 1.0 may qualify for a free upgrade, depending on when you purchased it, or special upgrade pricing of $29.95 is available.

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The original source of one of the photos, iPodObserver, and the source of yet another that appears to be of the same casing, MacRumors, are both of the opinion that the case-back is made of metal, though I have my doubts. Metal casing would be a move backwards in iPhone development, since the original reason for switching to plastic was to improve signal reception by reducing interference. It could be a rough or rubberized plastic finish with the same shiny inlay as the current generation, though, which in my mind would be a sexy improvement.

Many suspect a new iPhone to be slated for a June release, marking the one year anniversary of the iPhone 3G’s official unveiling. Never before have images of the actual production model been leaked so early, which doesn’t say much for the authenticity of the photo. At the same time, the original source, iPodObserver, was responsible for leaking images of the iPhone 3G that turned out to be genuine, so they have a good track record. The apparent source of the photos is also China, which is where Apple has its manufacturing facilities.

If the photos are fakes, they’re very convincing ones. In fact, they already have me budgeting for this purchase come June. Yep, all it takes is photos of the back case that may or may not be real. I’m very weak.

More photos (from MacRumors):

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This week I pick my 12 favorite apps of the year as we lead 2008 around the back and shoot it’s face off, while gently beckoning a fresh-faced 2009 through the front door.

Just because it’s the holiday season, doesn’t mean Apple news stops happening. Quite the contrary in fact because this week we got all existential with Psystar’s ever-more-fantastical litigation, waxed lyrical with the creators of 12seconds.tv, and even chucked in a special Mac-themed gift — from us to you – for good measure.

Seeing as it’s not just the end of a week but the end of an entire year, I thought a special year-end Roundup was in order. Below I’m bringing together some of the best apps I’ve featured over the year and a few that I didn’t have space to mention. (Note, those looking for my Twitter app recommendation should check out my 12 Twitter Apps article.)

This year, I’ve been looking at Evernote, Harvest, Urbanspoon, Locly, Klick, iPolaroid, Backgammon Online, Cookie Bonus Solitaire, BeatMaker, FourTrack, Stanza and Palringo.

Organization & Productivity

Evernote (free)
It’s the app that tends to be a constant in everyone’s list of essential iPhone apps, enabling you to create quick lists, voice memos and even geo-tagged photos when on the move. Plus, paired with the fantastic (and also free) desktop app, it’s a tool that’ll keep your life in order and your mind clear. Combine this with Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders, providing organizational tips and tricks for creative folk, and your life should be a little less stress free and lots more productive.

Harvest (free)
The folks over at Harvest have created the ultimate tool for freelancers and small businesses wanting to stay on top of time-keeping, invoices, estimates and project management. Alongside the app itself, there’s also a desktop web app and even an OS X dashboard widget. Note that this is an old-school web app — installed by visiting the site and bookmarking it to the home screen. 

Out & About

Urbanspoon (free)
Having just made the move to London, I frequently partake in the many gastronomical delights on offer in the city. When I’m at a loss as to a suitable dining location on one of my frequent food-themed expeditions, Urbanspoon makes the decision for me using a natty little shake-activated slot-machine-style interface (complete with clunky sound effects).

Locly (free)
And for those times when I need other local services, or just a point in the right direction to the nearest ATM, bar, restaurant or hotel, Locly is my multi-faceted GPS-enabled weapon of choice. It can even search for nearby points of interest using Flickr and grab Wikipedia information on the local area.

Photos & Images

Klick (free)
It’s the Swiss Army Knife of Flickr apps, albeit without the toothpick, tweezers or tiny protective shiv. Klick allows you to upload direct to Flickr (with tags), browse photos from your contacts or based on your GPS location, plus even mark favorites and comments. A wonderful app, bewildering both in its feature-set and for the fact it’s still, inexplicably, free.

iPolaroid (free)
Frequently perturbed by grainy photos from my iPhone, I set out to find an aesthetically effective solution to this problem. Rather than employ an iPhone photo editing app — many of which on the store tend to promise much more than they deliver — I settled on iPolaroid. This app applies various retrotastic digital processes to your photo before setting it in a Polaroid frame. It’s silly, brilliant and draws attention away from the dire iPhone camera.

Games & Play

Backgammon Online ($4.99)
Steeped in history and consistently exciting, Backgammon is a wonderful game: skill, luck and competitive yet inane banter makes it an essential multiplayer experience. The thing is, the few Backgammon apps that are on the store are designed more as singleplayer time wasters. This game steps up to the mark by incorporating the FIBS.com game server, meaning there’s an almost constant stream of potential contenders to take on.

Cookie Bonus Solitaire (free)
It’s sometimes the simple games that really endure. Downloading Cookie Bonus Solitaire back when it was originally released, I expected a basic (and perhaps boring) solitaire experience. My expectations were duly slapped to the floor and stamped on, like a young Gary Coleman fighting an angry polar bear, when I discovered that this game incorporates online play, a weird yet compelling scoring system and even several sly cheats.

Sound & Music

BeatMaker ($19.99)
It may seem somewhat pricey, but it’s astoundingly good value considering how feature-packed this iPhone-based sequencer is. Anyone familiar with desktop music-making (from Garage Band to Logic) will know how a sequencer works and be familiar with sampling, effects units and maybe even recording sound too. BeatMaker does all that, and then a little more, on your iPhone or iPod touch. For both amateurs and pros, this is a fantastic creative tool to carry in your pocket.

FourTrack ($9.99)
And where some may feel that BeatMaker is geared towards electronic music producers, FourTrack will appeal to  acoustic musicians (especially guitarists and singers). This is a four track recorder, iPhone and touch compatible, with panning, punch in and out, levels, multiple song storage and even easy sync to desktop. As a composer and producer, this is my ultimate essential tool whenever I stray from my Macbook Pro.

Words & Sentences

Stanza (free)
Having dipped in and out of e-books for several years now, I’d never really enjoyed reading in digital form until Stanza. The app is connected to several online libraries containing tons of free reading material. Most importantly, this means I have access to several (free) Doctor Who books and this is an unexpected yet entirely welcome benefit to having an iPhone with Stanza installed.

Palringo (free)
There are several iPhone IM apps out there that cost a few bucks — including IM+, MobileLinked IM, BeeJive IM and MobileChat — but, while I have standards, I’m also cheap. Not wanting to shell out for an IM app means I chose Palringo: it’s got all the features I need for those moments when I (very rarely) simply must chat with someone on my iPhone.

Back in ’09

That’s it for the 2008. I’ll be back next year with the first weekly roundup of 2009. Here’s hoping we see more polished, useful and entertaining apps and fewer shoddy, flatulence-based cash-ins.

Before you run off to celebrate the future’s impending arrival at the present, drop by the comments and let me know what apps are your must-haves from 2008.

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