New iPhone Photo App: Awesomer

Description from the AppStore: Awesomer makes your photos more awesome. Choose a photo. With a tap, Awesomer will transform its colors and you can save it as a new photo to your album. Awesomer preserves the same sharpness and high resolution of the original photo, but just makes it more awesome.

AppStore Link: Awesomer - Price £0.59/$0.99

Editors comments: This is an unusual app that is extremely simple to use, although does have a few bugs, which I will cover in this brief review.

The App

Launch the app and you are presented with the apps splash screen/interface with 3 options across the bottom of the screen.

1. Load - use this to load a photo from the camera roll
2. Awesome! - when you've loaded a photo touch this to 'Awesomer' your photo.
3. Save - as the name suggested, tap to save your creation.

Once you've launched the app it is time to load a photo, and this is where the first major bug occurs. During my testing of this app, loading a photo caused the app to freeze or crash, happening several times, and I even had to resort to a hard reboot of the iPhone by pressing and holding the power and home buttons, following one of these crashes.

Having successfully loaded a photo you will see what I consider to be another bug, and that is the photo loads full size (the app does not rescale it to fit the screen). Whilst you can drag the photo around the screen, this only allows you to see a section of your photo, and not the whole picture. I am not sure if this was intentional, but having the photo rescaled to fit the screen would have been better, well in my opinion anyway.

Once the photo is loaded, simply tap the Awesome! button and the app does its magic. You have no control over the effect, the app does all that for you, so all that is left to do is save it, however here comes another bug. In my testing I found that although you get a confirmation message saying your photo has saved, you need to wait a couple of seconds before exiting the app, or your photo will be lost.

Above: The London Eye given the Awsomer effectYet more bugs!!

In addition to the bugs already mentioned this app also suffers from slow loading of photos from the camera roll, and it sometimes incorrectly loads landscape shots, so when they are saved they are saved as portrait.

So what do I think about Awesomer?

This is an unusual app that can produce some very interesting and unique results although it is sadly let down by too many bugs to get my recommendation, however if the developer irons out these bugs, then this could be one of those niche apps like Spica that catches peoples imagination.

Comments

[Marty Near DFW]

Thanks for the review, Glyn. I had my eye on this app, but have been busy and haven't had the time to "go shopping" this week. It looks like an interesting and unique effect. Hopefully, they'll get the bugs worked out.

I've noticed a rash of apps lately with that same orientation bug, where the app saves images 90° off when saving. I wonder if it's something in the new APIs or if it's just sloppy coding.

=M=
lifeinlofi.com

[Catmouth]

Yes I have experienced the save/ did not save bug. my camera roll says 1016 but when I enter its only 1003 available. Still only saves about a 1/3 of the time even with a reset and if I wait 5 or so secs to close the app. Amazingly terrible bug. It could be a fun app, after some work by the developer.