New Cartoon ‘Mike is dead!’ from iPad Cartoon Studio

New Cartoon ‘Growth’ from iPhone Cartoon Studio. Look at that! I can post directly to my wordpress blog from here now.

Firstly my full time job of the last 12 years is still keeping me busy, managing my small software team producing Windows and Windows Mobile software for the retail market. 12 years of working with barcode scanners. Still, I have been pushing the sales team towards these babies, because it would be immensely more fun writing software for a well designed platform, as opposed to Windows Mobile.

I know this because most of my after-hours time lately has been spent deep within XCode cooking up Cartoon Studio for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. We are currently in version 1.0 feature freeze and are a brewing up something that is hopefully full of spit, polish and shiney. Speaking of spit and polish, I have a post about just that over at HawksBed Studios. HawksBed studios is the company founded by myself and my good friend Bort (of Twitter and FARK fame). We make a good team since I can implement things, but have no ideas, while he can’t implement anything but is full of ideas. The first (of many) ideas is Cartoon Studio and we think that so far we’re on track for something exciting. Check us out and if you’re interested in joining our wider (but still private) beta release let us know.

Meanwhile, back in March, an old friend was resurrected: PCW Entertainment. When I first discovered them in 2001 they had a big impact on me. Sure, Professional Wrestling is not a legitimate competitive sport, it is theatre. But it is physical theatre and very much so. As I trained to be a referee, learning how to take bumps and flip around I found a great respect for all of these athletes and new found ability within myself that I could do anything I wanted to, if I wanted it badly enough (even become a local tag team champion being thrown off the top of the ringpost through a table and loving it; me, a geek who avoided all exercise at all costs). So when PCW announced their return I gladly got in touch and asked “what can I do?”. They’re a good bunch of people and if you’re like me and avoid the politics, never a drama. I was back doing commentary with the excellent Christopher Bayliss in March and had a great time. The next show is coming up on the 15th May – if you’re in Melbourne Australia, enjoy WWE or TNA and have never seen local independent pro wrestling – you’re missing out.

Finally, coming back to geeky stuff, I thought a small analysis of the sales figures for Photo Rotate over the last year would be interesting. Obviously such a small utility app was not going to let me retire, in-fact I would have been happy to have recovered the cost of the iPhone developer program. But as you can see it’s been some OK pocket money. What’s more interesting is that even with tiny daily sales, where the ‘sales spikes’ occur are pretty clear:

Click to make larger

Nothing surprising, but interesting. And on that note I need to stop writing and get back to doing what I’ve been doing most lately, putting spit and polish on Cartoon Studio.

Version 1.6 contains the following changes from 1.5:
* Fixed a positioning offset bug in the Crop function.
* The crop area is now always clearly highlighted in a transparent blue for proper framing.

This application lets you rotate photos. Sometimes, when holding your iPhone at a strange angle and taking a photo, the orientation of the photo is incorrect. This app lets you correct the rotation of the photo, so you can view it correctly, or upload it to a site such as facebook the correct way up.

The powerful Crop function allows arbitrary rotation, scaling and positioning with single and multi-touch gestures.

1. Select the photo from your camera roll or photo library

2. Rotate, mirror or crop the photo until it looks the way you want it to.

3. Save the rotated photo. This will save to the “Camera Roll” (for iPhone) or “Saved Photos” (for iPod Touch) as a new photo.

Photo Rotate supports the following operations:
*Rotate 90 degrees Clockwise
*Rotate 90 degrees Anticlockwise
*Rotate 180 degrees
*Mirror horizontally
*Mirror vertically
*Crop by manually positioning and rotating with finger gestures

In the meantime I have been working on Photo Rotate 1.7 focusing on memory usage and low memory handling, which at this rate might be submitted before 1.6 even gets cleared. We’ll see how it goes.

* This adds a powerful “Crop” button – this lets you do arbitrary rotation, scaling and positioning using single and two finger gestures.
* Full OS 3.0 Support (but not required, works with OS 2.2.1).

In other Photo Rotate news, there’s a bit of competition in the simple iphone photo rotating category now, hence me making Photo Rotate the easiest and most powerful while still focusing on rotation.

To see how good Photo Rotate is, take a look at this review over at Tim Obrien Photos.

Rotate or Mirror your photos: only AU$1.19 (US$0.99).

• Rotate 90 degrees Clockwise
• Rotate 90 degrees Anticlockwise
• Rotate 180 degrees
• Mirror horizontally
• Mirror vertically

Photo Rotate 1.2 is now available on the App Store. This update contains the following changes:

• Added “Mirror” function 
• When running on an iPodTouch it tells you that it saved to the “Saved Photos” folder instead of the “Camera Roll” 

1. Select the photo from your camera roll or photo library

2. Rotate the photo until its the correct way up

3. Save the rotated photo to the camera roll.