Remember those disposable cameras at parties? There’s an app for that!

Your at a party, like a wedding reception, and there are those little colorful cardboard boxes that contain disposable cameras. You pick one up, snap a couple pictures of friends or family, and sit the camera back down. At the end, the people that put the party on take all the camera’s in to have the film developed and enjoy the many happenings around the room they didn’t see.

Hipstamatic, the makers of the retro film/lens camera app, is trying to give that experience through the iPhone without having to leave your iPhone on the table. The app, Hipstamatic Disposable, lets you share ‘rolls of film’ with other iPhone owners to snap their images with.

The Hipstamatic Disposable uses ‘cameras’ that are similar to their retro app. Each camera has it’s own stylized filtering so images taken with it have their own look. The free app comes with three cameras already built that you can use as long as you like. A limitation of these ‘built-in’ cameras are they shoot at 600×600. There is the ability through an in-app purchase to create other effect cameras and to move the resolution up to over 2000×2000.

Now things get a little controversial. Hipstamatic Disposable is getting a lot of attention, good and bad because the sharing experience requires you literally buy the digital roll of film. Upon purchasing the film through the app (sold by how many images can be taken on that roll of film), you share the roll out to friends and the Hipstamatic Disposable app on their iPhones so they can shoot images to add to the roll you purchased.

OK, back to the fun. The camera can be customized with ‘stickers’ that you use so you could have a camera look just for an event. Also, there is a slider next to the shutter button to adjust the amount of the effect that is applied to the image being taken. The viewfinder within the Hipstamatic Disposable camera app is similar to the Hipstamatic Camera app, it’s smaller than the whole screen and shows a slightly distorted image of what your final image area will contain. When a picture is snapped, no one can see it till the whole roll is shot, like the old plastic disposable cameras that required developing when done. Each image is actually being stored up on Hipstamatic’s cloud server. When the roll is used up, which is saying all the shots available in the roll of ‘film’ you purchased, the images are available to view. You can then share the roll out to others on the usual popular social networks.

Will I use it? Do I hate the idea of having to buy single use ‘film’ every time? Will it be a hit like their Hipstamatic Camera? All of these are best answered by the situation where an image needs to be snapped. My first thought is that I hate the idea of buying a single use image over and over again. But, I can imagine times when it would be fun for pulling a bunch of friends together via the app to share an event. I can see using Path for a similar type of experience too though. Not an app I will use daily, but it might show up at get togethers for a fun time so I will play with the ‘Disposable‘ app just to make sure I’m ready if someone hands me a roll of their film to shoot from my area of the party.

A Corkboard just appeared on my iPhone

Now that we have the ability for our iPhones and iPads to sync over nigh via Wifi to our desktop iTunes, we wake to find things different in the morning. If an app was on the iPad, it auto updates and is now a universal app, it will auto install onto your iPhone. Fun to find out about new application features that way but can surprise a person when a empty spot in the iPhone’s launch is suddenly filled.

As is the case with Corkulous from Appigo. They have updated the app recently to Universal so now all the cork board fun I was having on the iPad can be shared with my iPhone. Made extra simple as the updated included support to store/sync through DropBox and iCloud.

Appigo calles Corkulous a ‘idea board’. You can set up multiple boards, each of which can have Sticky Notes, Labels, Photos, Contacts, Task Lists, Index Cards, and Arrow Flags. All of which can be placed, edited and moved around as ideas are created and changed.

Two finger pinch/expand and drag/drop works to zoom into spots and move about the screen. Corkulous has a fun interface with it’s file cabinet of options to put on the board. Just tap the drawer, and drag to the board what you want to add. Cork boards don’t have to just be a way to save ideas, they are fun to use to make family photo/note boards too.

There is a lot of adjustments that can be made to the actual Corkulous note cards/sticky text too. Double tap a note item to change justification, font, background color and of course the actual text. Dragging the lower right corner allows the box to be resized as well.

Finally, comes sharing. For moving the Corkulous boards between my devices, I use DropBox. There are many options to share out to others too. Emailing a board can be done as a image or PDF, as well you can save a image copy to your iPhone’s photo library.

 

Evernote’s way to swap Business cards using your iPhone

The folks at Evernote aren’t happy with just helping us with all of our daily notes and the ability to share those across the ‘cloud’. Now, they have released ‘Helllo‘, an app for collecting and retrieving people’s contact information. With it’s own ‘Evernote’ twists.

I have been a long time, and very happy user of ForgetMeNot. An iPhone app that lets me tag people’s contact with something I noticed about them. Then, later, I can find the person with that token of info I remembered. “That VP I met in the NY office with black curly hair”… since that is how we talk about someone when we forget their name.

Evernote’s Hello doesn’t offer that… I was just setting a standard of ‘for pay’ app vs ‘free’ app. With Hello, you get a central place to have people’s contacts, viewed through a screen of their faces. So, it works particularly well when your around people that don’t mind having their picture on their iPhone.

Launching the app, it asks you to tell ‘Hello‘ about your Evernote acct so it can sync the collected contacts to your other devices. Then, you enter your own personal information.

The next time you meet someone you want to exchange ‘business’ cards with. You hand them your iPhone with Hello open and they enter their information. Hopefully, when they get to the screen to take their image, they do. But, if they choose not, they can just pass over it.

Every time you launch ‘Hello‘, it syncs to your Evernote account. A couple of extra features is that you can have the Geo location remembered and you can associate the app to your calendars so it can alert you what day you may be near a contact. All very interesting features… sure hope they add a way to tag a person so I can find them later as the ‘Lady with the big yellow hat’.

 

Flipboard for iPhone, news with a swipe

The news was everywhere yesterday, but I held off till I now see a issue I was having was fixed with a second update last night. Now… Flipboard is on the iPhone, it is about time!!

I am happy that they waited if they were taking their time to do the Flipboard interface right. While the news reader is similar to the very popular iPad version, it has a few differences that make it a true iPhone app.

Same are the boxes on the overview page, one for each of your feed streams. The box is a image from one of the latest stories in the feed. And, when I say feed, I mean a very long list of news and information sources can be used along with Facebook, Instagram, and you can enter your own favorites. Choose the red ribbon in the upper right corner to see the Flipboard’s included list or put in your own.

Flipping through the news feed overview is a swipe up or down. The iPad version, with it’s much larger available screen is side to side. When you see one that you check regularly or has a image that intrigues you, tap it to see the first story from the provider.

Then, swipe up/down to work from story to story. When you need more of the story to read or share the post with others, tap the lower edge of the screen to be given those options.

If you do own a iPad also, this update to make Flipboard a universal app offers to sync between your iOS devices. This means that you only have to choose your feeds list once and have it available on all the time.

Being a fan of Instagram, I should mention that if you add your Instagram account as one of the news feeds, you can ‘like’ a photo from within Flipboard when swiping through the photos.

 

 

Hipstamatic iPhone Camera updated with new lens, film and flash

Just in time for the holidays comes the Foodie SnapPak! (Example images added to the bottom of this post)

Sadly, I don’t have a turkey ready to show you the effect at this time of the morning, so there are no examples of the pack in action yet… but food shots are what we do at this time of the year so it’s timely.

The new ‘Foodie SnapPak‘ is the Loftus lens, DC film and Pop flash… bundled together for “tasty culinary masterpieces”. Like the previous packs, this is available for in-app purchase once you have the Hipstamatic app loaded onto your iPhone.

The developers of Hipstamatic have not made examples of each of the items in the Foodie Pack available yet either. Like previous packs, soon after their release you can go in and see a few shots taken so you know how your turkey, stuffing and ham sandwich photos will look when you use the pack. I will see how it works on pizza… true holiday leftovers.

A few shots I took with Hipstamatic on my iPhone 4s. I forgot about the lever around the edge of the lens to adjust the quality so these three shots are done in the Standard mode (600×600). Three levels are available.

Updated with images using the Hipstamatic Foodie SnapPak:

This image is using the included Loftus lens and DC film… note the border included with this pak.

This is the same items with the Hipstamatic Foodie SnapPak flash Tasty Pop turned on.

This is Luna… flash not on. I thought of her and the Foodie SnapPak since she was waiting for food!