scurvypirates

This post was originally going to be a shoot-out between AutoStitch which has been in the App Store for awhile, and the newly released 360 Panorama App, which was published by Occipital, the same company that brought us Red Laser (which by the way, was recently purchased by eBay). Unfortunately there is nothing to compare. 360 Panorama is a joke. After spending $2.99, I feel like I made a contribution to Occipital’s AR (augmented reality) research and development fund, because this app is not a Photography app. AutoStitch, on the other hand, is thoughtfully-designed to be useful, and creates amazing results. For both tests below, I was using an iPhone 3GS with iOS 4.0.1.

How you use 360 Panorama
You launch the app, hold your phone in the air, tap the screen, then you slowly rotate where you are standing, while passers-by think out loud, what in the fuck is that guy doing? What may seem odd turns sarcastically funny when you look at the result, only the joke is on you. The resulting image is poor quality, with visible overlaps, jagged transitions, hardly something you want to share with anyone you know.

How you use AutoStitch
First of all, you don’t actually shoot through AutoStitch. So it’s not a camera app per se, it’s more of a post processing app. The first time you launch it, you get instructions that tell you to exit the app, and shoot a series of still shots through the native camera, making sure the images overlap in terms of point of view. Once you have created and saved a bunch of successive images to your camera roll, you go back and launch the app, choose the images you want to stitch together, and the app takes it from there. The results are amazing. There is a crop tool inside the app that auto-crops, or allows you to drag the corners for custom cropping, and it then saves a high resolution file to your camera roll.

The images below were shot during a recent weather event that created amazing light and a variety of colors and clouds during sunset. You tell me which image is the result of $2.99 well spent, and which one looks like R2D2 ate a bunch of mushrooms.

Sunset shot with iPhone 3GS and AutoStitch App

Click the image above for a larger version. This was composited by AutoStitch from 19 different still shots. As instructed, I made sure each image overlapped the previous, as I moved from left to right to capture about 180 degrees of this beautiful sunset. Then I launched the app, selected the sequence from my camera roll, and created the pano. I then uploaded straight to my Facebook Wall, and sat back for the oohing and aahing to begin. I even had a professional photographer friend ask what I shot this with. If you want to get AutoStitch, and you are convinced by this review, the good captain is an iTunes affiliate, so click here if you are convinced and want to pony up for AutoStitch.

WTF? Really? I expected so much more from 360 Panorama App

I don’t even know what to say about this. 360 Panorama supposedly uses live video input, and uses GPS pitch, roll, and yaw data and takes the image in realtime, but the results are not very impressive. I can’t recommend this app to anyone, and frankly, can’t believe it ever got approved as a paid app in the first place. Maybe it is a hint of things to come with some cool technology that Occipital is working on, but for a consumer, it’s a dead fish.

After years of watching my friend, colleague and mentor, @scottslc scrunch his face and gnarl up his hands over the tiny keyboard of his Blackberry device, I was pleased to hear last night, that due to a change in his organization’s IT policy (or some shit like that. I’m making this part up), he could finally get an iPhone. Gone are the days when I would send him a link, or a text with an image, or a video in an email, and I would hear “sorry, I don’t have an iPhone.”

So this list of my must-have iPhone apps is for you, Scott. Completely random. Some useful, some pure fun.

1. The official Facebook app. I think he already has this one. I can manage my own profile, upload photos, comment on wall posts of “friends” heckling me, and manage pages that I administer.

2. Cyclemeter. I’ve looked at a few GPS apps before. I like Cyclemeter because it is pretty accurate when I do bike rides and compare the data with friends who are using other bike-mounted cycle computers. It has Twitter and Facebook settings that you can customize. I like to have a newsfeed post sent to my Facebook wall after completing a ride. I automatically sends it when you press the “Done” button. I like how it shows all my data from a ride in a big numbers dashboard. And I love the Google maps view of my ride.

3. Snowbird. Still the best ski resort brand app out there. I once heard a Snowbird “Black Pass” holder say that he doesn’t even go to the website anymore for conditions and road closure info. It’s all right there in the app. If you live in Utah, and you ski, you need this app. Oh yeah, I helped design it along with my shipmates at Welikesmall. So there.

4. Hipstamatic. I’m a sucker for a really good photography app. I have a dozen or so, but this is my favorite. You can choose between different vintage instamatic-style lenses, film types, flashes, and the end product is a really cool artsy image that looks like it has been treated in Photoshop. My only gripe is it renders images in squares, which is great for Facebook and Twitter profile photos, but a little awkward for making prints. Wish they would fix that, but I still give it a must-have rating.

5. TiltShiftGen. Another photo app I really like. Allows you to shoot a photo, or choose an existing one from your library, and apply Tilt Shift special effects. If you know what this means, don’t even think about it, just get it.

6. Hazel Mail. You have to sign up through their website and buy some virtual credits, but once you do, you can send a print-on-demand postcard to anywhere in the world with an existing photo on your phone, as long as you have a wifi or 3G connection. I took a photo of my wife and daughter at the peak of Sundance ski resort, and sent it to my folks back east. They loved it. Send postcards to friends from the middle of nowhere on a motorcycle trip? There’s an app for that.

7. LinkedIn. Wonderfully simple navigation and UI. Use it all the time.

8. Ebay. It works.

9. Convertbot. My favorite units and measures type conversion thingie. Especially useful if you are riding bikes with a bunch of douchebags who keep talking about their body weight in kilos, speed in kph, and distance in kilometers. You can get your Euro on, and throw it right back at them.

10. Of course I have more than ten favorites, but this will at least keep Scott busy for awhile. What did I miss? What are your favorites?

My day job is working as a producer for a small but high-powered digital shop. We do a lot of contract work for larger agencies, and get to work on some pretty big name brands.  It’s a simple relationship: The clients have the budgets. The agencies have the clients. They are gatekeepers to the cheddar. Unfortunately, this relationship creates a lot of speculative thinking on our part that often results in us doing a lot of work, then scratching our heads thinking WTF? Do people actually get paid to think up this shit? Our good agency clients don’t waste our time and they think things through pretty well, but lately we have been getting a lot of inquiries to ballpark costs on brand iPhone apps. And soon that will extend to iPad apps, and iAds.

How Branded apps and Brand apps are different.

It’s simple. A Brand iPhone app is the result of a brand saying we need an iPhone app for our brand. It’s advertising. It’s a bunch of screen grabs of an iPhone with cute little screens, on page 24 of a pdf the agency is trying to sell to the client as a digital campaign. Page 1 through 23 is all banners. The problem for us as developers is this is just advertising the old way. Branded apps can be different. They can actually have value to the end user, but developed by a brand. If you like this app and use it, just remember it was the nice folks at Brand XX that made it available for you. Right now = way too many Brand apps. They are shallow and do nothing more than make an agency try to justify their digital thinking in terms of media impressions. Yeah we spent $50,000 to bring this to market, and we spent Godknows how much media and PR to promote it, and we got 5000 downloads.

The iAd platform may solve a lot of this. From what little we know about the capabilities of the platform that was announced by Steve Jobs to be rolling out with iPhone 4.0 software later this summer, you can effectively create an App within an App ad unit. My take is this: there will always be advertising polluting our daily lives. It’s a given. As developers, hopefully we’ll see less agencies coming to us with stupid app ideas. Instead they’ll focus on what they know: ads. Only this time, the developer will be in control.

We are ready for this new platform to emerge. Bring it on.