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Posts tagged with "photos"

“Shrine of Apple” Wants To Photograph Every Apple Product Ever Made

Brought to my attention this morning by The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple, Shrine of Apple is a new website that launched last night with a very ambitious goal: to photograph every Apple product ever made. Not just the ones from 2007 up until today – all of them. From the About page:

Our mission is to showcase the entire spectrum of products that Apple have sold to the public since 1976 – every product Apple Inc has ever produced, in the highest quality and definition possible. Every desktop, every laptop, every notebook, monitor, iPod, iPad, iPhone, mouse, keyboard, modem, cable, port, adapter, docking station, memory expansion card….and that’s just their hardware. Operating systems, productivity suites and all the great software titles that Apple have published will make an appearance too!

The website launched with a relatively small collection of products, with many more queued up for the next weeks. Shrine of Apple’s database consists of detailed high-res photos of products complete with original packaging when available, manuals, and cables. The website’s categories include Desktops, Displays, iPads, iPhones, iPods, Laptops, Peripherals, PDAs, Servers and Software, with more to come. The current selection includes old gems like the Apple IIe Numeric Keypad, Lisa 7/7 Office software, and the Macintosh PowerBook 150.

With high-res photography, descriptions, related links and a true passion for Apple products, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Shrine of Apple becoming a de-facto standard for Apple fans looking up information on old computers and devices, provided by someone who really “knows” and cares about these products, not a faceless online database. Shrine of Apple is, in fact, the creation of Jonathan Zufi, “leading expert in the field of mobility and wireless devices by day – vivid Apple collector by night”.

Make sure to check out Shrine of Apple, and follow the website on Twitter for updates on new products and photos.

Luminance Is An Elegant Photo Editor for iOS

On the Mac, there’s no shortage of photo editors: from Aperture and Lightroom for those users who want more control over how their photos are processed and organized to more lightweight and user-friendly solutions like FX Photo Studio or The Iconfactory’s Flare, one can stay assured photos imported on a Mac will always find a proper companion app to be edited, sorted in collections, and shared online on Facebook or Flickr. On iOS, the situation is quite different: because the iPhone is a portable camera itself, there’s been a surge of apps like Instagram or Camera+, which allow users to shoot, edit, and upload photos using a single interface to do it all. Whereas the insanely successful Instagram has managed to gain millions of users because of its simple approach to lightweight photo editing and one-tap uploading, others apps like the aforementioned Camera+ or Camera Genius give users more options and functionalities such as advanced image filter adjustments, effects, and presets. And with iOS 5 on the horizon, it looks like developers of photo taking/editing apps for the iPhone and iPad will have even more tools and APIs to play with in order to natively integrate their software with new built-in image editing functions offered by iOS.

Being able to shoot a photo, quickly edit it and upload it in seconds from your iPhone is fine, but sometimes you want to sit down, check out all the photos you’ve taken, and take your time to process them, adjust them to your liking, and file them away onto a collection or social network of choice. That’s what desktop image editing tools are for – they give you the peace of mind to go through hundreds of photos without needing to quickly fire them off to your Instagram followers. You could argue that image editors are meant for a desktop computer (you sit down with your laptop, connect your camera, and start editing), but why avoid the fact that iPhones and iPads are powerful devices capable of doing just about anything nowadays? PhotoForge 2, an image editor I’ve reviewed before here on MacStories, proved that it’s possible to work with a full-featured image editing environment on iOS without feeling constrained by real screen estate and lack of mouse cursor.

Luminance, a new image editing app for the iPhone and iPad available at $0.99 on the App Store, provides a more streamlined alternative to PhotoForge and other image editors I’ve tried on iOS, offering an interesting set of effects, presets and basic versioning system that makes it easy to import photos from a device’s camera roll, and start editing in a focused space right away. Read more

Google’s Photovine App Now Open for All

Back in July we covered the release of Photovine for iPhone, an image sharing app developed by Google’s internal Slide team that, among other things, is also responsible for Disco, a group messaging app, and Pool Party. Powered by a slick design and attention to detail, the Photovine app that was released last month didn’t allow everyone to sign up and start sharing photos as the system was invite-only without an open sign-up. With an update pushed last night on the App Store, Photovine has revamped Facebook and Twitter integration from within the app and finally opened registrations without the need of a beta invite.

Unlike the popular photo sharing app and iPhone-based social network Instagram, Photovine doesn’t revolve around the simple concept of photos uploaded to a user stream and shared with followers. Rather, Photovine is based on “vines” – photos connected by a caption and contributed by you, your friends, and other people using Photovine. So, for example, say you’d like to share a photo about your newly acquired MacBook Air, you can start a vine called “My new MacBook” and your friends will be able to let the vine “grow” with new photos related to the caption, and the photo you originally posted. This is best explained by Photovine’s promo video, which we’ve embedded after the break.

Photos in a vine can obviously be liked and commented on, each user has its own dedicated page with a profile picture and followers/following/likes counts, and an Inbox tab in the bottom toolbar allows you to check on messages you’ve received from other users, or notifications such as new followers, comments, and likes. This is not too dissimilar from Instagram’s implementation of “activity”. Users can add new photos to an existing vine (or even “watch” a vine if they’re interested in it) or create a new one from scratch – Photovine comes with a beautiful custom camera interface that lets you snap your own photo, or pick one from the Camera roll. Indeed the whole app sports a gorgeous and clean design that makes it easy to jump through vines, user profiles, and comment on photos shared by others.

Photovine for iPhone is an interesting concept with a good-looking interface and additional social functionalities to forward photos to Twitter and Facebook, and find friends on those social networks as well. You can download Photovine for free on the App Store. Read more

LogMeIn Updates: Full Lion Support, Ignition Gets Better File Manager

LogMeIn, the powerful remote desktop sharing tool that offers a variety of other services for professionals and businesses, released a series of updates in the past week to enhance support for file management in Ignition, the iOS app we’ve reviewed here on MacStories, and bring full OS X Lion support to LogMeIn Free, Pro and Ignition desktop users. With a blog post this morning,  the company has announced a compatibility update that resolves the issues when trying to connect to a machine running Lion, rumored to be publicly released next week. I have tested the update (which can be installed by opening LogMeIn’s preferences, then About->Check for Updates) on my two Macs running OS X Lion GM and I successfully managed to log in (both via screen sharing and file manager) from my iPad, iPhone, and the web. Read more

The New Brain Behind Your Photos

One of the new features of iCloud that was announced at WWDC but was slightly overlooked by bloggers and iOS users is Photo Stream. Built into the native Photos app for iOS devices, iPhoto for Mac and the Pictures folder on Windows PCs, Photo Stream will allow you to automatically find on any device the photos you’ve taken on an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. With the addition of the Apple TV 2nd gen, Photo Stream will let you watch these photos on the bigger screen with your friends and family. How does it work? For those that missed the announcement, here’s a quick recap: because iCloud automatically stores, updates and pushes your content on all your registered devices (be them iPhones, iPads, or Macs and PCs running the iCloud control panel), Photo Stream acts as an extension of the mobile Camera Roll that, rather than just storing pictures locally, also pushes them to the cloud as soon as they’re taken, provided you’re on a WiFi connection. If you’re not on WiFi, Photo Stream will upload the photos from the Camera Roll to iCloud as soon a a new connection is established.

As explained by Steve Jobs on stage, and later demoed by Eddy Cue, the main purpose of Photo Stream is that of easing the process of importing photos shot on, say, an iPhone to an iPad or Mac for better viewing. With previous versions of iOS, users were forced to email pictures themselves and open the message on OS X to save the photos (facing at the same time a risk of quality loss due to email limitations); create an account on social services like Flickr or Facebook to upload photos from their mobile devices to avoid a desktop transfer process; even worse, users had to go home, find a USB cable, connect their iPhone to a computer, launch iPhoto or Image Capture and manually import the most recent photos. That’s a long and tedious process Apple wants to eliminate with a smart, automatic system that always puts the most recent photos on all your devices. In fact, Photo Stream can display the 1,000 most recent photos on iOS devices, whilst files are stored on iCloud for 30 days due to storage limitations on both ends (iOS and Apple’s server farms). On desktop computers, which come with more storage, Photo Stream stores all photos. Again, this new functionality works out of the box with any iOS 5 device configured with an iCloud account, and Photo Stream can be enabled in the Settings app. On the desktop’s side, right now Apple is requiring developers to download a special beta version of iPhoto and the iCloud control panel to test Photo Stream, but once iCloud publicly launches this fall everything will be baked in with no further configuration needed.
Read more

Carousel Instagram Client Gets Gestures, Search, Refined UI

Back in May I reviewed the first version of Carousel, a beautiful Instagram client for Mac that, thanks to the Chameleon framework built by The Iconfactory, brought Instagram’s photo streams and profiles to the desktop with a gorgeous iOS-like user interface. Whilst in the past month, with Lion nearing its final release and the WWDC, we’ve seen several examples of iOS apps making the big leap to the Mac, Carousel was one of the first apps to try the iPhone-inspired approach with a vertical layout, tabs, and popover menus. Together with Twitterrific, Carousel is a fine example of iOS interface schemes coexisting with more standard Mac applications.

Carousel 1.1, released today, adds a number of new features and refinements to make the Instagram experience on OS X even more beautiful and easy to use. First off, search: you can now search for specific @users or #keywords on Instagram, pin your searches as you would in Twitter for Mac, or click on tags and usernames in photo comments, which now are better styled to indicate the original author’s caption. Saved searches sit below the search bar, but to perform a search you’ll have to choose an element from a popover menu. The app has gained a new “likes” tab to see all the photos you’ve liked and a fetch separator to start where you left off in the stream, but more importantly gestures are now supported to easily open a photo in Quick Look (pinch and zoom) or check out a profile (swipe on the photo). It feels very natural and smooth using a Magic Trackpad.

Among the little fixes and refinements, the developers have updated the iOS-like toolbar to make sure the selector is draggable (try it, neat animation in there) and the comment form remains visible even if you click outside of Carousel’s main window.

Carousel 1.1 is a solid update for the most beautiful and intuitive Instagram client currently available on the Mac. You can buy Carousel at $4.99 on the Mac App Store.

Facebook Working on Instagram-like Photo Sharing App

TechCrunch has posted a screenshot of what they claim to be a new photo sharing app for iPhone developed by Facebook and soon to be released in the App Store. The new app, internally codenamed “Hovertown” or “WithPeople” according to the website, from a first look at the leaked documents looks like a mix of Instagram, Color, Path and With. With the exception of Instagram  (for those who don’t know, an iPhone app / social network that allows you to share photos in seconds with cool built-in effects and geo-tagging capabilities), all the other apps mentioned by MG Siegler are photo sharing solutions meant to capture what’s around you, with people that are with you, are share it with people you know. Basing on these alleged similarities and the screenshot itself, Facebook may be working on an iPhone app that leverages the social graph and location information to share places, people and moments in single shots or entire photo streams.

How do we know? We have obtained roughly 50 MB of images and documents outlining the entire thing.

To be honest, we’re still sorting through all of them. But again, the app looks amazing. We’ve heard that internally it is being called either “Hovertown” or “WithPeople”. And while it looks like a stand-alone app right now, there are also signs that it could be eventually integrated into Facebook’s main iPhone app — as well as the main site.

It’s unclear whether the new photo product may be integrated with the official Facebook iPhone app (which is heavily web-based as far as the interface goes) in a new photos tab or if Facebook is really planning on releasing it as a standalone application. The Facebook iPhone app is the most popular free app of all time, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Facebook growing its catalogue of official software for the iOS platform. Facebook has been criticized for not having a native iPad app, a choice that has allowed third-party developers to build their own paid and successful solutions for the tablet. Read more

“iPhone Hooks” Now Allow Apps To Send Photos to Instagram

After the launch of an official API a few months back that allowed developers to read content posted on Instagram and display photos in external iOS, Mac and web apps, the service saw a huge growth in popularity, registered users, and connected applications capable of visualizing Instagram’s streams outside of the (only) official iPhone app. We have seen a plethora of iOS and Mac apps coming out in the past weeks, giving users the possibility to browse Instagram through a “client” different from the app, providing new interactions and interface schemes otherwise impossible without the use of an API. What the API lacks though, is read access to let 3rd-party apps upload to Instagram.

As MG Siegler at TechCrunch reports, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom has no plans on opening a full-read API to let other control the social stream and upload photos not generated with Instagram’s filters and requirements, but they do have a plan to allow developers to easily send files to the Instagram app. This feature is called “iPhone Hooks” and it sounds a lot like iOS’ default “Open In” menu combined with clever URI schemes: provided an application can snap photos and save them to jpeg or png, Instagram can let this app hook into the posting process to transfer the file from app x to Instagram. Just like in the 100 Cameras in 1 iPhone app, users can snap a picture and “send it to Instagram” to apply filters and upload. With iPhone Hooks, any photo app in the future could be updated to support sending a photo to the filter interface, or simply open a specific user stream, tag and location feed. The possibility to pass along photos is of course the most intriguing option, as apps like Photogene, Camera+ or Camera Genius could take advantage of that to shoot photos, let users apply filters and edits, then send to Instagram. iPhone Hooks apparently don’t let developers apply any sort of watermark or ID to the photo (example: “shot with Camera+”) as the file is still processed by Instagram; however, users could still leave a comment to specify what app they used, and overall it’s a good thing for a 3rd-party dev to have an app that works with Instagram.

Co-founder Kevin Systrom compares this functionality to the copy and paste functionality baked into iOS. But again, this is for images, not text. “We wanted to make it easier for other iPhone apps (and iPhone web-apps) to hook into Instagram to open a particular item or post a photo through our app,” co-founder Mike Krieger says. Yes, you read that correctly, this can work with web-based apps too.

Currently, only 100 Cameras in 1 is using this functionality, but Instagram says they’re discussing implementation with other partners.

More details from the Instagram Developer page:

When triggered, Instagram will immediately present the user with our filter screen. The image is preloaded and sized appropriately for Instagram. Other than using the appropriate image format, described above, our only requirement is that the image is at least 612px tall and/or wide. For best results, Instagram prefers opening a JPEG that is 612px by 612px square. If the image is larger, it will be resized dynamically.

An important note: If either dimension of the image is less than 612 pixels, Instagram will present an alert to the user saying we were unable to open the file.

The new feature can be tested in the 100 Cameras in 1 iPhone app, and it’s likely more developers will support it in the next weeks. With iOS 5 rumored to get direct Twitter integration for photos, sharing pictures on our iPhones and iPads could soon become a very different process.

iOS 5 To Feature Direct Twitter Integration?

Following today’s news on iOS 5, Lion and iCloud announcements at the WWDC keynote on June 6, TechCrunch reports Twitter’s upcoming photo service, reported by various blogs yesterday and rumored to offer a similar service to Twitpic, yfrog and others, will be directly integrated into iOS 5. The new sharing option will reportedly allow users to instantly send a photo to Twitter like they can already do with videos and YouTube. Provided they have logged into Twitter from the Settings or a specific web view, iOS 5 will sport a new sharing menu to beam photos directly to Twitter, without using a third-party client.

We’ve heard from multiple sources that Twitter is likely to have a big-time partner for such a service: Apple. Specifically, we’re hearing that Apple’s new iOS 5 will come with an option to share images to Twitter baked into the OS. This would be similar to the way you can currently share videos on YouTube with one click in iOS. Obviously, a user would have to enable this feature by logging in with their Twitter credentials in iOS. There would then be a “Send to Twitter” option for pictures stored on your device.

Internal builds of iOS 4 from last year confirmed Apple was testing Facebook integration, but Twitter was never spotted in the hidden settings and code strings, at least not in the way TechCrunch claims iPhone and iPad owners will be able to share media from the Camera Roll. It’s likely that iOS 5 will bring the Facebook option back, integrate Twitter and perhaps even Flickr, but it’s too early to tell. Code strings found in the iOS 4.3 suggested Apple was working on two new features called MediaStream and Photo Stream, which, according to several reports, were targeted at letting users instantly share photos and videos with their friends using Apple’s new cloud system, now officially known as iCloud. Currently, Twitter has native apps for the Mac, iPhone and iPad available for free on the App Store.

A screenshot of an iOS 4 build featuring a Facebook preference panel in the Settings.app:

Update: Daring Fireball’s John Gruber hints at something bigger coming with Twitter integration in iOS 5:

So close to the bigger story, but yet so far. Imagine what else the system could provide if your Twitter account was a system-level service.