Awesomer gets some more awesomeness

Back in October I announced the release of an interesting little app called Awesomer, well yesterday this app got it's first major update, adding a whole bunch of new effects.

Awesomer effects are:

• Awesomer
• Black and White
• Blue-Red False Color
• Cosmic Microwave
• Hypsometric
• Infrared
• Negative
• Night Vision
• Ultraviolet

Above: The original photo with no Awsomer awesomenessAbove: The 9 different Awesomer effectsWhen this app was first released, it was very buggy, and so when I saw this new update, I had hopped for all the bugs to have been ironed out, but sadly this is not the case, as all the same bugs are still there and some new ones have now been introduced.  As my screen-cast below shows, the app is still very very slow when doing anything, and on my iPhone 2G and 3G the app crashed after each edit.  In addition to these bugs, the app still loads the photo at full res and does not auto resize or allow you to resize to view the whole image, and if you look across the top of the screen you will notice the apps menu is partly cut off, which the developer should have spotted and corrected before release.

What this app needs is a major rework, a new interface and more importantly all the bugs to be fixed!!

Despite all this, this app can produce some unique and unusual effects, and if you can put up with the bugs, then it is worth trying, although the price tag of £1.19/$1.99 for a buggy app may put many off.

AppStore Link: Awesomer - Price £1.19/$1.99

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.