Flickr Find: iPhone cubism

This little glitch has never happened to my iPhone, though I wish it had — there’s a glitch in the iPhone’s camera that will occasionally cause it to slice up pictures like this, and our friend Veronica Belmont created a whole pool of the glitchy photos called iPhone cubism. Of course, if you want a picture of your little girl, it’s more frustrating than anything else, but in an artistic sense, some of the pictures are really benefited by the random slicing. As if the iPhone didn’t do enough, now it’s throwing some art into the mix.

Of course, it’s a bug, not a feature. Since several people are reporting this as a problem after 2.0 was released, we’re guessing it’s a software issue, perhaps a problem with syncing the little light sensor chip in the iPhone’s camera. If you have some great pictures of this stuff, throw them into the pool on Flickr, and hopefully for the less artistic (and less bug-patient) among us, Apple will get this fixed soon. Thanks, Jason! [Read]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Favorite iPhone apps: Robert’s take

Now that Steve, Victor, and Mike have all made their opinions clear, I get to tell you what apps I use most on my iPod touch.

My first favorite is Exposure, an app that lets you browse Flickr photos. Personally, my favorite thing to do in a boring phone meeting is to browse Flickr’s “Featured” category, and find new wallpaper for my iPod. Which leads me to my only feature request: it doesn’t let you save images to the local “Saved Photos” album. (What you can do, however, is open the image in Safari, and save it from there.) Exposure does much more than this, too — browsing photos taken nearby, or searching for photos by keyword. Exposure is a great image browser all around, and it’s free, but ad-supported. A premium version (sans ads) is $9.99.

The second is time:calc. It may seem a little strange, but I’ve always wanted a calculator that figures time instead of decimal numbers. As a freelancer, some of my contracts are retainer-based, so I have to calculate how much time I have left for a particular task after work has been done. time:calc does this effortlessly: just enter hours, minutes and seconds, and use mathematical operators as you would a normal calculator. For video editing, it also includes support for time code in a wide variety of frame rates. time:calc is $1.99, and well worth it.
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Popularity: 7% [?]

iPhone kicking butt on flickrAnalysis / Opinion, iPhone

Despite the complaints about the measly 2-megapixel camera built into the iPhone, it appears that ease-of-use trumps resolution. The iPhone remains the leader in camera phone usage on Flickr.

Flickr monthly statistics indicate that not only has the iPhone retained its lead (which it gained after knocking the Nokia N95 from the top spot) over other phones, but the lead has begun to widen. Why? It might be due to faster photo uploading from the iPhone 3G, the capability to geotag your iPhone photos, or just the fact that the iPhone photo app is easy to launch and use.

If you’re not a flickr user, where do you keep your iPhone pictures? Leave a comment below! [flickr]

Popularity: 5% [?]

Flickr Find: the Fluid icons pool

The team down the road from me at Carsonified have been doing it, and you can do it too.

Fluid is a fantastic free app that turns any web site into a self-contained application on your Mac. If you want to keep your webmail outside your normal web browser, Fluid is what you need.

Thing is, all the apps it creates need icons, just as any app in your Applications folder does. By default, Fluid grabs the .ico files it finds on web sites and uses them as icons, but they don’t scale well. Where can you find decent alternatives?

The answer is the Fluid icons pool on Flickr, where a busy community of Fluid users have been busy making a selection of beautiful icons that work perfectly with any Fluid SSBs (Site-Specific Browsers) you’ve created. The icons in the pool might look weird to start with, but that’s because the PNG originals have been converted to JPG format by Flickr’s brain. To make use of an icon you like, make sure you view and download the full-size original, which will be the PNG file you need.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Two views on iPhone OS and the App Store

Most of you will have heard of Fraser Speirs. He’s the developer behind FlickrExport and now Exposure for iPhone.

This week he’s made two consecutive and interesting posts that show what it’s been like to be a software developer during the first few days of the Store’s operation.

In one post, he complains about the review process imposed on not just every app, but every update to every app that gets submitted to the Store. Things are not being reviewed fast enough, he says: “If Apple can’t guarantee a maximum 24 hour review process, they should drop it.”

In the second, Fraser reveals that Exposure has been downloaded an average of 3,200 times per day since the Store opened. It already has more users than FlickrExport for Aperture, a much older and better-established product.

“These are crazy numbers,” he says. His point is simple: the iPhone as a platform is going to be huge. In fact, it’s going to be “Apple’s mainstream platform for 2012 and beyond.” Now there’s a prediction.

Popularity: 5% [?]