A month or so ago, I picked up a much talked about iPhone app called Hipstamatic, which promised all sorts of new “toy camera” effects for my best camera (aka, the one that’s always with me). I loaded it quickly, dinked around for about 15 seconds at most, didn’t see what it did that was any different from CameraBag and forgot all about it. Thankfully, I picked it back up again this weekend and am quite happy I did.

As to the question of what it does differently than CameraBag or any of the other dozen or so photo filter apps, the answer is really one of approach. CameraBag, TiltShiftGen, Mill Colour, etc all let you digitally process your photos right on your phone , some with pre-formatted effects, and the end results are fantastic 1. I love these apps and they certainly have their place. Hipstamatic is different, though, because it really does try to emulate the experience of using a toy camera, like a Holga or Diana or any of the other models you’d find on Lomography. The app is as much about limitations as it is about creativity, starting with not letting you import pictures from your photo library 2 – you have to take everything through the virtual viewfinder.

Dig around a bit and you’ll discover that you can swap virtual lenses, film types and add flashes for extra effect. It won’t take more than a few swipes to discover that you can buy packages of new lenses, flashes and films from within the app itself for a buck a pop – a fully loaded Hipstamatic with every Hipstapack will run you a grand total of six dollars; I would’ve happily paid triple that. Photojojo did the math and figured that there are 336 lens, film and flash combinations, though I’m sure you’ll find a few favorites.

My only real turn off once I got to know it was the name, until I discovered the back story of the Hipstamatic. Bill Barol wrote a great bit for BoingBoing a while back that tells the whole story, it’s incredible and touching and will only endear you to the little app all the more.

A word of caution: the app seemed to drain my battery even faster than usual and keeping it loaded up all the time while on a morning photo safari crashed my iPhone 3GS, twice. Best to quit out occasionally to keep from having to reboot your phone.

Alright, enough jabbering, here’s my weekend through the lens of my Hipstamatic.

The folks who make Hipstamatic also built an app called SwankoLab that is all about post-processing your photos, with a twist, of course. The approach is decidedly low-fi, you mix chemicals in a virtual darkroom to create effects on photos from your library. Of course, you can process your Hipstamatic photos in Swankolab for endless fun. ↩︎

This is actually the chief complaint against the Hipstamatic app, that you can’t give your existing photos those cool effects ex post facto. Read the first few reviews (like all user comments on the web, this requires a bit of masochism) for a phenomenal display of missing the point. Personally, I’m thankful that the folks at Synthetic Corp have stuck to their original idea and not kowtowed to the App Store hoi polloi. ↩︎

I wonder if I can get this before Chirp…

Flash CS5 will export to HTML5 Canvas

With all the furor over no Flash on the iPhone, this one seems to have been missed, which is a shame since it looks awesome. This should help solve for plenty of what Flash gets used for, particularly simpler uses like infographics.

It looks like there’s a new format that ends with .fxg that a javascript include knows how to parse and animate. I imagine that banner ads, particularly for mobile devices, will adopt this quickly.

seoulbrother:

Folks, I’m no mathematician, I’m more of an ass man, but I looked at some numbers.

The rest is some tl;dr 1 hokum about “computers” and their so-called “impact” on the “environment” blah blah.

seriously, you should read it because not only does Albert break down the numbers, he does it with that incisive wit that we all know and love him for. ↩︎

hystericalparoxysm:

[via @douls]

LZ: who knew that ice t cared what aimee mann said
me: wow
me: although, some more commas would be nice
me: that makes it sound like she was worrying about his “acting bitch”
me: i am like, “who is ice t’s acting bitch?”
LZ: hahaha!
me: it’s richard belzer, i bet.
LZ: that would be amazing

Sounds like somebody. Got a little … T’d off YEAAAAAAH!

Also, Ice T is a shitty actor. And despicable human being for calling Aimee Mann a bitch when his faux gangster ass is the epitome of sellout.

NY Times has data about words their readers look up

That annoying “double click to define a word” thing? Apparently, people use it and the Times tracks who looks up what.

…last I checked, Sarah Palin’s not much of an expert on nuclear issues. If the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff are comfortable with it, I’m probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin.

—

President Obama responding to Palin’s childish and utterly meaningless criticism of the president’s nuclear disarmament plan.

To be fair, Sarah Palin has seen a nuclear warhead before.

John Gruber broke the news 1 today that Apple made a subtle but significant change to their developer agreement, which forbids so-called “cross-compiling” apps for the iPhone OS that runs on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The basic theory behind cross-compiling is that you could write an app in a language like C# or Actionscript and publish it as a native iPhone application that, at least on some level, worked like an app built in the Apple sanctioned XCode. This is now considered a violation of the SDK agreement and an almost certain way to have your app rejected from the App Store.

I must admit, on an academic level, I’ve been intrigued, if not necessarily impressed, by these attempts to backdoor the App Store. Foremost, it’s a non-trivial task to write a compiler that takes code meant for one platform and have it work on another. That projects like Adobe’s Flash Packager for iPhone or Novell’s Monotouch work at all is impressive. I’ve also been curious to see how the non-technical battles would play out between corporations and it’s now obvious that Apple is taking a scorched earth approach.

Beyond just geeky personal intrigue, though, I’ve got a fair amount of professional interest in this topic as someone who:

• Works for a media company 2
• Has a background in multimedia web development, including Flash
• Manages a team of talented developers with an great deal of Actionscript (2 and 3) experience
• Works with other smart developers who code in C# and .NET

Given all of that, you may be surprised to know that I’ve never liked any of the various cross compiling projects I’ve come across and I’ve seen just about every one of them. Projects that promise to compile JavaScript into iPhone apps, C# into iPad apps or convert your favorite Flash game into your new favorite iPod touch game. They all look terrible, are generally not performant and rely on a little too much hope and magic for my tastes.

The most promising of any of these appears to be Monotouch, from the unfairly bright and insanely talented Miguel de Icaza and his band of hackers, but they route around the biggest problem – ugly, non-native interfaces – by implementing native Cocoa interface elements. Which means you’d need to rewrite the interface code for non-iPhone OS platforms.

As much as I admire a clever hack, these cross compiling schemes have always struck me as, well, Doing It Wrong. I even tend to shy away from platforms like AIR and Java on my desktop because the reality of “write once run anywhere” has never lived up to the hype. Performance on mobile devices is vastly more important than it is on desktops that have power and cycles and memory to spare. The mobile interface metaphors are still being figured out underneath the aluminum and glass, consistency and expectation are vital to these still larval platforms.

Despite that, there’s still an undeniable attraction to being able to quickly recompile a Flash app to target the iPhone or get a full team of C# developers up to speed on iPad development in a day. Ultimately, though, I’m much more interested in a superior final product than a quick hack.

John not only broke the story but also wrote a smart follow-up about Apple’s motivation for the changes ↩︎

“Which media company did you say you worked for?” “A major one." ↩︎

FINGS WOT ARRIVED IN MY POST BOX TODAY

That’s right, the new Valpak!!!

And Sniffy’s book, which I will read as soon as it’s available for download.

Canned “Future-of-News” Speech

Doreen is so smart and spot on here:

My advice: Continue to find inspiration in the quieter, authentic voices around you — they are everywhere. That may mean listening more closely to your gut about who and what to tune out. It’s good practice for journalists anyway. Here on Tumblr, it hasn’t failed me yet.