To start off, BowShot isn’t a game. Some of you might have come here thinking that BowShot is a game of timing and skill, but you would be wrong. You don’t shoot a little bow and arrow at balloons or fake ducks as the name might suggest. No, we are actually pronouncing bow, as in bow wow wow, not bow, as in projectile weaponry. Turns out though, this was a good move on Fj Ideas Co’s part because I’m not a big fan of those games.
BowShot is in fact a wonderful photography app that helps you take pictures of your dog. I’m assuming you could use it to take pictures of other animals as well, but I only tested it on my dog, Ava. The basic idea here is that it makes a strange sound, getting the attention of the dog and then snaps a picture. It works like a freakin charm. There is a slide bar in the settings that can adjust the time between sound and shutter. This feature helps if your dog has a very slow reaction time or an extremely short attention span. There are 40 crazy/annoying sounds to choose from and you can set five of those as favorites on the camera screen. Ava’s personal favorites seemed to be the “squeaky toy” and the “baby scream”. It even allows you to record your own crazy/annoying sound and use that to grab your poor dog’s attention.
*Excellent Idea Alert!* Fj Ideas Co. should add a timer in the BowShot options screen. This would allow you to set your iPhone/iPod down somewhere inconspicuous, set the sound and then walk away. It would not only scare the crap out of your dog, but your friends and family as well. Think of their faces! They would have to change the name of the app to “BooShot”! (sorry…)
A lot of polish went into this app. It has a pleasant interface, intuitive buttons and excellent help documentation. In the hands of a capable iPhone or iPod photographer, this could be the key to those perfect shots. Or at least, shots where the dog is looking at the camera.
Pro HDR [$1.99 -iTunes link] is a fantastic little app that brings “>high dynamic range photography to your iPhone. The way it works is simple; Pro HDR asks you to take a photo of a “dark” part of what you are taking a photograph of, then do the same for the “light” part. Next, the app takes the two images, aligns, straightens and blends them automatically to give you a final result; it is quite clever. You also have the ability to save the photo when done, email it and adjust the subject’s brightness, contrast, saturation and warmth.
If file size is important to you, you can change whether to save as full size or a lower resolution for your library or for email. Oh, and one more thing, you can take images from your library, you don’t need to take the pictures in real-time.
I was very pleased with the results of this $1.99 app and I am sure you will too. It is a lot easier than doing it yourself! To see some great examples of what this app can do, check out their gallery.
Please play nice and LEAVE A COMMENT telling everyone which code you took. If you get one, I’m sure the developer would also appreciate an App Store review!
Please play nice and LEAVE A COMMENT telling everyone which code you took. If you get one, I’m sure the developer would also appreciate an App Store review!
GhostWriter puts bloody Halloween text on your photos… in fact, I just reviewed this app a few days ago! It’s not perfect, but it can be fun since today is Halloween.
Scrawling evil messages across photos in blood is soooo messy! GhostWriter will do it for you, and after you take your photo it’ll even throw in some Ghoulish Miasma if you want it to.
Ghoulish Miasma is really just some weird-looking orange fog that you probably won’t want on very many of your pics (don’t worry, it’s optional), but the spooky fonts comes in two varieties, Angered Spirit and Blood Writ, and they ain’t bad. GhostWriter comes with six innocent default messages that you can select individually or at random, and if you want to really damn someone to hell you can type in your own custom message! Sweet.
The thing this app does that’s a little different is that, after you take a pic, the app will fade the text and Miasma in slowly while it plays a Halloween sound effect. This feature may not sound like much, but I guess it adds a little something to that moment of unbridled excitement when you first show the pic to whoever just said ‘Cheese’ for you. The animation and sound are strictly in-app, but the pic you just took can be saved or emailed with a quick tap.
If this app has one major shortcoming it’s the inability to apply the Ghost Writing to camera roll pics! You’d think this very basic feature would be included, yet “Take Picture” is the only option available. What this means is that you need to set your text (unless you’re cool with going random) before you take the pic. If you’re not satisfied with the bloody text that gets automatically applied to the pic you just took, then you gotta do the photo again and listen to everyone groan while you go into Settings to choose or type in the text you want.
Hopefully Cute Logic will remedy this with a future update, but until that happens all I can say is Buyer Beware! What GhostWriter currently does, it does well, but I think the omission of the apply-to-pics-already-taken feature is going to be a dealbreaker with a lot of Halloween partygoers and trick-or-treaters.
In case you missed my review of Postage ~ Postcards, it’s a really good greeting card app! This app includes Halloween cards, so it’s something you can start using right away.
