News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
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| Product | Flickery 1.1 |
| Rating |
 
|
| Company | EternalStorms |
| Price as rated | $US19 ($A25) |
| OS compatibility | 10.5 (Leopard) |
| Processor compatibility | Universal |
If users of the popular photo-sharing service Flickr have one complaint, it’s that the image uploader on the Flickr Web site is horribly inconvenient to use. Flickery offers a desktop-app alternative with a great Mac-like interface and a good balance between features for novice and pro users.
Once you’ve entered your Flickr account info, the left-hand side of Flickery’s iPhoto-like interface shows a list of the various areas of your Flickr account. Clicking on an item in the list—Photos, Favorites, Photosets, Flickr Groups, etc.—displays that item’s photos in the preview area on the right. You can also view Saved Searches and the photo streams of your Flickr Friends and Contacts.
Uploading your photos to Flickr with Flickery is simple. Select Upload on the left and then drag your photo(s) into the preview area. You can give each image a title, description, and keyword tags, as well as set the Flickr visibility, safety level and more. You also have the ability to do some minor editing of your images, including cropping, rotating, and adding image effects, as well as adjusting exposure, white & black point, saturation, and brightness. Once your edits are complete, you simply click on the upload button to post them on Flickr.
Once the files are successfully uploaded, you can still edit basic photo info such as the title, description, and tags from within Flickery and apply them to the uploaded imges. You can view comments from the Flickr community, and add your own, right in Flickery with a click on the Info button. You can also share your images via e-mail or Twitter, and there’s a full-screen option for viewing your photos or any collection of photos from Flickr Contacts or Groups you belong to.
I particularly enjoy the Search function of Flickery, which allows you to search all of Flickr by text description, tags, Flickr user, Type, Safety Level, and Creative Commons License. The results of your search are displayed in the preview area, where you can enlarge the thumbnails for a better view.
After a couple months of use, I’ve come across only two drawbacks, one functional and one cosmetic. First, adding an image to an existing Photoset is cumbersome. You have to first upload the image, then select it in the Photos view, then click on the Add to Set (or Group) button. This brings up yet another dialog box where you must scroll through a Cover Flow-like list of Sets (or create a new set). The process would be much easier if you could simply choose a Photoset in the initial upload screen. My second complaint is with the ugly, wrinkled-paper background of the photo comments window, which is unnecessary and makes it difficult to read the text.
Those issues aside, I really like Flickery. It’s a great application for both novice and serious Flickr users, it looks fantastic, and it’s very simple to use.
ArcSoft MediaImpression 1.2 aims high. It wants to be your one-stop shop for managing all of your digital media—photos, videos, even music—within a single interface. You can import, browse, search, and organise your media files, as you’d expect. But MediaImpression goes further, providing features for editing photos and creating and sharing slideshows and movies.
Lee Sherman | Oct 2, 2008
Pass the $2000 and your options in dSLRs improve dramatically. Canon’s EOS 50D is an excellent example. Described as an ‘enthusiast camera’, the 50D could easily stand in as a pro’s backup to the company’s flagship — and the one we all hunger for! — EOS 5D.
Barrie Smith | Nov 25, 2008
I’ve looked forward to Pirates of the Caribbean MMORPG, though with trepid enthusiasm. Games with movie tie-ins (this game is part of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise) have a reputation of being bad, and as far as MMORPGs go, you have to provide stunning graphics, a compelling story, and streamlined and innovative combat to compete with World of Warcraft and other games. Unfortunately, I’m unable to lay many accolades upon the abysmal Pirates of the Caribbean—but it’s rare you get a game that is as deep as it is poorly realised.
Aayush Arya | Dec 22, 2008
Let’s make one thing clear up front: iWork.com (in its current pre-release form) is not a collaborative online productivity tool like Google Docs or Zoho. You can use iWork.com to share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from iWork ’09. But the people with whom you share those documents can only view, download, and comment on them; they can’t actually edit them.
Dan Miller | Jan 13, 2009
App Store developers will now be able to reach customers in 13 new countries, according to an announcement on the iPhone Developer Program news page.
