ColorSplash - Put Some Style Into iPhone Photos

I love black and white films that have small, bright splashes of individual colors. There is something so compelling about islands of dazzling color in a sea of gray. ColorSplash ($1.99) is an iPhone app that allows you to create that effect in your photographs.

The app works by converting any image in your photo library (or one that you snap on the fly through the app) to black and white and then allowing you to selectively add color back to key areas. My first attempt was to edit a close-up picture of my youngest child. She has blue eyes that I thought would pop right out of the picture. Unfortunately, her eyes were just a wee bit too light to really pop.

My second try was a picture of the girls with Santa. As you can see, Santa's red suit jumps right out of the sea of gray. I think I would be happier with the shot if there was a tiny splash of red somewhere else in the photo, but all in all, it's a good picture considering it was done with a camera phone.

The user interface is easy to pick up. Zooming and moving around the picture works as you would expect. There are two buttons - one to convert to black and white - one to restore the color. Click the desired button, and then paint the area with your finger. Color appears or disappears as desired. It brings to mind the paint with water books from my childhood.

With the right photographs, this application can produce some stunning effects. I believe it was $2 well spent, and I look forward to playing with it some more.

Jungle Disk Ate My Bandwidth

I got the brilliant idea to install Jungle Disk this week because my external USB drive that has all my music and movies was making funny noises. I decided to upload all of my stuff to Amazon S3 and then keep incremental backups on it - just in case. Initially, I was thrilled with the whole process. Jungle Disk monitor promised to do backups of my external drive on a schedule. I started it up and waited for the looooong first upload of all my stuff to Amazon.

That's when I hit the first problem. Jungle Disk Monitor wouldn't let me pause the upload or minimize the monitoring window once I opened it. My primary computer is a laptop that I use at work and at home. There were times at work where I wanted to pause the backup and conserve bandwidth. No dice. So, I figured I would stop the backup application and it would resume where it had left off when I restarted. Not so much. Some times if I stopped it, it would resume properly. Other times, it started the whole 90 GB upload all over again. No good.

So, I decided to use Jungle Disk to create the network drive to S3 and then get Chronosync and let that handle the backups. Seemed like a good idea because I would get a more robust backup application that would let me have off-site backups on Amazon. But, soon after I installed it, the tech guys at work came to me and told me my laptop was eating up most of our Internet bandwith. The internet had been slow all week at work and we had been trying to figure out why. I opened up Activity Monitor, and sure enough, I was sending out almost 300kb a second. I stopped Chronosync. No change in my bandwidth usage. I cancelled all the Chronosync background processes. No change.

I ejected Jungle Disk. No change.

At this point, I'm thinking I had a trojan. I keep all of my data on external drives and I'm not shy about reformatting my hard drive. I wiped the drive and reinstalled Leopard. Activity monitor showed normal activity and all was well.

So, I reinstalled Jungle Disk. Reinstalled Chronosync. Started up my backup and was ready to be happy again. Jungle Disk lost its connection to Amazon at some point and Chronosync locked up. So, I stopped Chronosync. I had been periodically monitoring my network usage throughout the day and again noticed about 300KB per second going out. Arg. I had just paid $40 for Chronosync and was not happy. Again, I stopped the processes and ejected Jungle Disk. Still Activity Monitor showed my network traffic going nuts.

I got smart this time and downloaded a demo of Little Snitch. Installed it and restarted the computer. Jungle Disk started up and within a minute, my network traffic was up again.

So, finally, I uninstalled Jungle Disk from my computer. I will use a second USB drive to backup the one that I am concerned about and will forget the whole offsite Amazon S3 backup for now. What a shame.