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.

How Did We Live Before Cloud Computing?

I reformatted my laptop today. It's something I like to do from time to time. It gives me that new laptop feeling and allows me to reevaluate which applications are truly important and are worth my harddrive space.

Anyhow, usually, a reformat means reconfiguring a bunch of stuff. But, with cloud computing and synching, reformatting gets easier every time. (I don't restore much from backups. For me, the point is a clean start. I backup iTunes, my Web Receipts Folders, iPhoto and a few important documents.)

Today, I reinstalled NetNewsWire and it immediately synched itself to Newsgator and my feeds were right back in the state I like them. I enter my gmail settings in Mail.app, and my emails are all right on Google's imap server waiting for me. I synch iCal up to Google Calendar, and poof, my events are right back on my computer.

Thanks to subversion, all my source code is easily checked out to working directories. So, in a very short time indeed, I have a fresh clean laptop that has the most important stuff and none of the old debris.

It's a Wonder Steve Jobs Doesn't Throttle People

Steve Jobs: 'We don't have 3G because it would drain the battery too much.'
People: 'We don't care, we want 3G yesterday!'
Steve Jobs: 'Alright already, here's your 3G'
People: 'The battery life sucks!'

Steve Jobs: 'Applications will be web based only to ensure stability'
People: 'No! We want native apps, give us an SDK!'
Steve Jobs: 'Alright already, here's your SDK'
People: 'My apps keep crashing my phone! This thing sucks!'

Do you think Steve Jobs would ever just like to reach out and choke people and say, 'I told you so, you nit-wit!'?

Mac Users CAN Right Click!

A coworker told me today that she would never buy a mac because there is only one mouse button and she's too used to right clicking. Once I explained that she could hook up any mouse she wants and that right clicking works on macs too, she was amazed.

So, if you're avoiding macs thinking you'd lose your right mouse button, take heart. You, too, can switch.

A Bit Disappointed

I was hoping the iPhone update today would give me the ability to copy and paste. No dice. I was also hoping for multi-media SMS and for stereo blue-tooth capabilities. Again, no dice.

I do really like the update to Google Maps though. I also love being able to add web apps to my home page, and to rearrange the home page.

As to movie rentals in iTunes, feh. I can get a movie for the same price from Pay-Per-View, save it on my DVR, and then burn it to a DVD to have forever. None of that silly 24 hour nonsense. But, I MIGHT use it from time to time on my Apple TV to rent older movies. We'll have to see.

Leopard's Web Clippings

I am not a big widget user, but I just found a very practical use for Leopard's web clipping capabilities. I went to the web page that has information about snow-releated school closings in our area, and clipped the relevant part of the page to my desktop.

Now, in the morning, I can simply hit F12 on my computer, and see if the school has a delay or closure. And, at work, I can monitor the weather and see if the school is going to close early, and make any necessary arrangements. Because I work an hour south of where I live, the weather at work is often significantly milder than the weather at home. So, using the web to monitor the weather is the most practical way to stay aware of what the school is up to.