A couple of months ago I wrote about how photos taken with the iPhone 3G can be much improved with camera applications such as CameraBag and ShakeItPhoto. These apps can add much character to an otherwise washed out and often bland offering.

Several weeks ago, the developer behind CameraBag for iPhone announced CameraBag Desktop, for Mac OS X. At the time of the release, there was no trial before buying which was a little disappointing, but because I had enjoyed the speedy way to enhance a photo on the iPhone I decided to jump right on in and plump up the $19 asking price. This was done mostly with the intention of checking it out so I could write an honest review here and let you, my dear readers, know whether it was worth parting with your money.

The application is extremely easy to use. Drag a photo onto the app window and you have all of your filters along the bottom as you can see. There’s plenty to choose from: Helga, Lolo, Mono, 1962, 1974, Instant, Magazine, Cinema and Colorcross – a filter that is not yet in the iPhone app. Aside from applying one filter, you also have a multi-filter option.

Let’s have a look at some before and after photos. First up is a photo I took today of my Nintendo DS…

And here is that same photo, with the Colorcross filter applied, along with a medium border…

In just one click, it has made a boring photo look really quite interesting. Here’s another of a sign post I took last year…

And here with the Colorcross filter, once again…

And finally this photo of the Millennium Bridge in Newcastle upon Tyne…

And now with the Instant filter applied…

CameraBag Desktop is a great way to make your photos look interesting in one click without spending time in your usual photo editor. I can’t say I will be using CameraBag Desktop as often as I will Pixelmator for photo editing, but when a photo calls for more than just a little contrast and vignette then it will be very useful.

I’m going to give CameraBag Desktop a rating of 3 stars. It would have received more had the 15-day trial been available when released, to avoid blindly buying.

Rating:

You can download a 15-day trial of CameraBag Desktop, here. Saving is disabled and images contain a watermark in the trial version.

For a year or two I have been using Gmail’s Notifier app on my Mac to keep a check on new mail. It sat in my menu bar and would give me a Growl notification when new mail was awaiting me. Now I’ve found another menu bar app that does the same thing, but oh so nicer.

Notify is a beautiful free app that sits in your menu bar and auto-checks your mail accounts as often every 1 minute or up to 15 minutes. Notify also has Growl Integration and will handle up to four Gmail accounts, unlike many others out there.

This has completely replaced Google’s official Gmail notifier for me. Elegant and beautiful, Notify feels right at home on the Mac.

If there’s one feature of the Mac where my friends and family are concerned that is a huge hit, it’s Photo Booth using my built-in iSight. Even those who are the most camera shy can’t wait to sit down infront of the webcam and have their faces distorted. I’m always amazed at how well received it is.

I came across Fun Booth 2 some weeks ago which, rather than distorting your face like the built-in Photo Booth effects, gives you a whole heap of props to throw on to your head and face. The most interesting part of this is the advanced face detection so rather than placing a pair of sunglasses onto the screen and you having to adjust your position to make them look like they’re sitting on your nose, the software does that for you and if you move around, the glasses will stay where they should on your face which makes it ideal for video chatting – and for the kids who won’t stay still!

As you can see from the interface above, it’s very much like Photo Booth. The Inspector window contains all the props such as eyewear, facial hair, headwear, masks and objects. You can choose to wear one prop at a time, or combine props so you could be wearing glasses, a beard and a hat all at the same time.

When you have taken silly photos of yourself you can browse through them through the built-in Photo and Video Library which is beautifully designed and send them via e-mail, right within the application itself, aswell as send to iPhoto, Flickr or via FTP.

If you record video of yourself wearing the props then you can upload that directly to YouTube, once again right within the app.

You can even use the props in realtime when video chatting in iChat.

As yet my friends and family haven’t had the opportunity to enjoy Fun Booth 2, otherwise you’d be seeing them in the screenshots instead of the yellow guy – and believe me, face detection works much better on a human face. But, I know they are going to love it as the Fun Booth iPhone/iPod touch app was very well received when I downloaded it 7 days ago. Like it’s big OS X brother, the iPhone app has face detection and gets it spot on. From within the app you can then e-mail your photos, assign to a contact or upload it to Twitter and Flickr.

Fun Booth 2 for Mac OS X costs $19.99 but a free trial before you buy is available.

Fun Booth for iPhone/iPod touch costs $0.99/59p – iTunes link.

Passing on an interesting retweet today (see, they do happen occasionally) for free video to iPhone conversion software. The offer is valid between August 10th and September 10th 2009.

Wondershare Video to iPhone Converter for Mac is an ideal tool that can convert various video formats including MPEG1, MPEG2, MP4, 3GP, FLV, AVI, WMV, AVCHD (MKV, TS, MTS, M2TS, TP, TRP, MOD, TOD), etc. to iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPhone OS 3.0 on Mac. The output files also can be played on iPod and Apple TV.

You can grab this giveaway, here.

I’ve been looking around for a canvas art print for my home office to brighten the place up, but everything felt so manufactured and common. I wanted something a little bit unique, something that wouldn’t be hanging on everyone else’s wall.

That’s when I decided to look at myself. What was stopping me from grabbing a blank canvas, some paints and my creativity? I’m quite handy in the art department when I put my mind to it The tools for the job cost me around £20. That’s for a canvas, a big box of acrylic paints and pack of 15 paintbrushes. I got down to it this afternoon and this is the result.

For my first time painting on canvas with acrylics I’ve got to say I’m pretty pleased with this. I shall be finding a suitable wall to hang it tomorrow. Now that I’ve mastered the technique, I rather have the taste for creating some more of my own artwork and it won’t all be Apple though I’m sure. But, I do think a favourite iPhone app logo on a black background would look quite striking. But which one? Stay tuned.

At the end of February I wrote about ordering the Finder icon pillow from Throwboy and the positive (and friendly) experience when doing so. Two weeks into my home renovations, my beautiful pillow arrived. It was a bittersweet occasion. There it was infront of me but because I was elbow deep in dust and debris I couldn’t open it from it’s plastic wrap for fear of it getting harmed.

It wasn’t until 10 days later that I could finally remove it from it’s plastic bag and give it a jolly good squeeze. It was worth the wait. These things are *so* well made.

I know many people have commented on both Flickr and Twitter in the past few days when sharing photos and have asked me where this wonderful pillow comes from, how big it is, how soft it is, etc…! So, here is a little FAQ just for you:

Where can I order one? Throwboy.com
How much was it? $29 (+ $8 shipping to UK)
How big is it? The Finder icon pillow is 11 inches by 9 inches.
Is it really soft and cuddly? Yes, 100% fleece with polyester fiber filling. Very squishy and huggable!
Was it easy to order? Yes, very simple order procedure and very friendly service from Throwboy.
Would you recommend them? Absolutely, infact I’m thinking of ordering another pillow but can’t decide which one to go for!
How long did it take to arrive? I ordered on February 24th and got notification of shipping on 3rd April – it arrived at my door on 8th April.

I know from some comments I’ve received on other sites that people are a little put off by the 3-6 weeks estimated for shipping due to the fact that they’re handmade. My response would be don’t be. The sooner you order, the sooner you will have it in your hands. It’s well worth the wait – the time absolutely flew by for me and just think how great it will look alongside your Mac set-up or on your sofa/chair/bed. It’s the ultimate Mac Geek Accessory

Yesterday Tweetie for Mac was released. It was the application many of us Twitterers-on-a-Mac fanatics have been ancitipating following the sneak-peek video posted on their site a few days ago. It didn’t disappoint and within 5 minutes of downloading and testing, I had purchased it for $14.95.

My requirements for a desktop Twitter client have always been pretty simple: the ability to quickly see @ replies and Direct Messages and search the public timeline within the app, the way one can in Tweetie for iPhone. I regularly miss @ replies in Twitterrific unless I scroll through the list of tweets. With Tweetie I’ll never miss an @ again thanks to the blue indicator shown in the left hand menu bar of the client window.

Of course, Tweetie for Mac comes with many more features. Things I never thought I’d need but of course now that I have them I’m wondering how I managed without them, such as the viewing of images without having to crank up Safari or leave the app itself, view my contacts credentials and see whether they are following me back, all by simply double clicking their icon…

I can even stop following that person within Tweetie, not that I’d ever want to stop following the lovely @chrisdejabet, mind you

There’s not much about Tweetie for Mac that needs improvement, in my eyes, apart from a refresh button without having to go to the menu bar > Twitter > Refresh. I’d also like to see what the current refresh rate is. I’m thinking 3 minutes but it’s a bit hard to tell and there’s no way of changing the default.

Tweetie for Mac is $14.95 for a 2 week introductory period, until May 4th. After that you’ll pay $19.95. You can, of course, download and use the app completely free, as long as you don’t mind ads. The great thing about purchasing Tweetie is the license which allows you to use the app for all your Twitter accounts on as many computers as you (personally) own. How awesome is that?

You can view all of the features on the Tweetie for Mac site. If you have any questions about the app before you buy then feel free to drop me a line in the comments section.

I am very excited to hear that Tweetie, the best twitter client for the iPhone bar none, is coming to a Mac desktop near you. I have struggled to find a desktop client that I feel truly comfortable with other than Twitterrific. I can’t abide TweetDeck, Twhirl, EventBox or the other twitter clients which also incorporate feeds from Flickr/Facebook/RSS. Twitterrific is a very barebones app compared to the other clients around, but I do like the Mac only exclusivity and the fact that it isn’t a horrid AIR app.

I am hopeful that I can finally banish Twitterrific to the archives when Tweetie for Mac hits the tubes and I expect it will be every bit as elegant as the iPhone app.

If you have quite a few Apps on your Mac then you’ll know how tedious it can be to open every one of them manually from time to time to see if there are any new updates. Or, worse still, if you’re anything like me you’ll come to open an app for the first time in a couple of months and be prompted to download the newest version just at the moment you want to use it quickly. You’ll ask it to remind you later – which of course you forget all about until the next time you want to use it in a hurry!

I have had a free application called AppFresh installed on my Mac for around a year or so which takes the pain out of manually checking every app by looking for all updates in your applications, dashboard widgets, preference panes and plugins in one go. It does this by checking osx.iusethis.com for new versions. Now all you need to do is remember to run AppFresh occasionally to see what’s available for download. It will even check for Apple’s system updates so you won’t have to run the Software Update separately.

Once downloaded and opened, AppFresh will run through your apps/pref panes/widgets and will show you the status of everything in it’s sidebar. You can choose to download updates individually or select them all. It will safely download updates to your Downloads folder (or folder of your choice via Preferences) so you can install them. This is generally a case of grabbing hold of the application and dragging it to the Applications folder like you would with any app installation. It will install the updates if considered safe, although this is not selected by default in the application so once again you will need to enter the AppFresh Preferences.

On my last AppFresh update, it showed 41 items as unknown. Many of these were apps that were bundled with my printer and digital camera which don’t have any updater built into them.

So, now all *I* need to do is remember to run AppFresh every once and again to keep my apps all up to date. Now, that won’t be too hard, will it?

Probably one of the things I was least excited about in the iLife ‘09 suite was iMovie. I sold my HD camcorder last year which was becoming a dust collector, but mostly it was due to my dissatisfaction with the over-sensitive microphone. So, with no videos to edit I wasn’t too interested in what was new to iMovie.

Late last night I opened it up to have a look around to see the new features. The UI is pretty much the same as ‘08. I think there are a few cosmetic differences mostly on buttons and also the new Project Library pane which is hidden until you click it’s button and it slides out.

When you create a new project you are given the opportunity to have a theme. You can choose from None, Photo Album, Bulletin Board, Comic Book, Scrapbook and Filmstrip. I created a very quick demo video using the Comic Book theme.

Apart from adding a few titles to videos I created last year, I haven’t spent any extensive time in iMovie ‘08 but found that it was quite a basic program. One of the first things I noticed in iMovie ‘09 were the newly added animated titles, aswell as Maps and Backgrounds. These are a lot of fun. I put together a very quick transitions demo video after 2am this morning to show just some of the new features added. The globe blows me away and will be great for holiday/travel videos!

I’m now considering buying a Kodak Zi6 HD Camcorder in the months ahead just to give me a good excuse to waste more time in iMovie ‘09. If you enjoy shooting video then I think you’ll enjoy the improvements in this. A few people have asked me to compare ‘09 to ‘06 and all I can say is I don’t know as I never knew ‘06. I downloaded it free from the Apple site last year, but it never wanted to work for me.

Despite my disappointment over the Flickr integration in iPhoto ‘09 yesterday, I have to say that iMovie ‘09 has restored my faith in the iLife ‘09 suite and if anyone asks I’d say yes, it’s well worth the upgrade.