Hello forum goers. I'm happy to announce my first iPhone app: PhotoTalk. Photos are a great way to capture moments. But audio adds a whole other layer of memory on top of photographs. PhotoTalk is the premier “talking picture frame” app for the iPhone and iPod touch. PhotoTalk gives you the ability to record audio clips for any of your photos, and then recall the memories any time you want. Here's a video I made that shows the interface and how to use PhotoTalk: PhotoTalk does requires a microphone to record audio (obviously). So to record audio in PhotoTalk on an iPod touch, you must have a second generation device and an external microphone plugged in to your device. PhotoTalk will be available on the App Store soon at the price of $2.99. I think that's quite the deal since the cheapest I could find a real talking picture frame was around $15, and that was for a non-portable 5x3 that only held one photo and one 10 second audio clip. So for 1/5 of that price, you get 30 second audio clips and as many photos as you have space to store. Plus you can carry all of them around in your pocket instead of having to leave it on a desk or table at home. The official site (which is little more than the video displayed above at a larger size with an app store button) is http://www.metacreatureapps.com/phototalk/. I'd love to know what you all think about the app. For future updates, I'm hoping to incorporate a way to email the photo and audio clip so that you can get it off the device, but I've yet to figure out if such a thing is possible. Any other ideas or things you'd like to see in an application like this?
PhotoTalk is Available! (Mostly) I literally just got the email that PhotoTalk is through review and available for sale. PhotoTalk sells for $2.99 and can be downloaded here. It might not show up in all markets, but it should soon. Like I said, they literally just sent me the email a minute or two before writing this. To celebrate our launch, we're doing a buy-one-get-one-free deal on PhotoTalk. If you buy PhotoTalk and PM me an image (or link to an image) showing you using PhotoTalk, I'll send you a code that you can give to a friend so they can get a copy of PhotoTalk for free. We are only giving out 30 of these codes, so it's first come first serve. Use Flickr, Imageshack, or whatever it takes to get a screenshot up. Then send me a link and I'll send you a promo code that you can give away to anyone you want.
Update! I just submitted the 1.1 update for PhotoTalk a few minutes ago. Here's the bulleted list of what's getting added: - Audio length increased from 30 seconds to 60 seconds. Even more time to store your audio memories. - Audio compression improved. In 1.0, a 30 second audio clip took up 2.7MB of disk space. With the new compression, you can store a whole 60 second clip (double the time) in 1.3MB (half the space). - Slide show mode. Now you can have PhotoTalk automatically cycle through your photos with fun transitions. You can set the length of time to display each photo between 1 second and two minutes and choose whether or not to automatically play the audio clips when the photos change. Here's the embedded YouTube version of the video showing the slideshow mode. I have a higher quality version on my Vimeo here: http://vimeo.com/3171158. This should be available in about a week as long as Apple doesn't find some reason to reject it.
Hmmmm. Seems like a well-made app. I'd love to narrate certain pics from my POV (it'd be hilarious). But wouldn't most people go for the usually larger $15 frame than sacrifice the funtionality of their iPhone?
I can see a use for people like estate agents (also the sort of people who initially made good use of camera phones). If you can take photos of a house and add on some verbal notes to the photos it makes it relatively easy to put those notes together with the right pictures when you're doing a description of the property later.
Zwilnik got me thinking. Is it possible to send these "presentations" to other phones (or does the sdk not allow that)? That would add a whole new level of functionality to the app.
Some might. What this is getting them, though, is portability that most of those frames won't give them. Most talking picture frames for $15 are intended to sit on your desk. This lets you take them everywhere with you. It's a feature I'm considering for a future version, but I don't know what the majority of my users want. The idea behind this was more towards personal memories and things of that nature (things you generally don't email around or post online), but it definitely could be used in that way. I'd have to see if the work is worth it since I'd basically have to render it out to a QuickTime movie or something in order to preserve the audio and image. But then it will come out at 320x480 resolution. Is that the quality you'd want on your computer or online? I feel most people would just be underwhelmed when they find out that is the output resolution (which it would be because my app resizes images to save them to its directory for quicker loading). As far as going to another phone, I suppose that might be a more reasonable idea. Hook up a local Wi-fi connection and stream all the photos and audio over. But it'd basically just add them to the other phone since the app has no notion of "presentation" or "video". It just has a big list of photos and audio. But I appreciate the thoughts. I'm pretty happy with this app and I feel that there really isn't another "talking picture frame" type application for the iPhone, so hopefully there is a market out there for it and those people find the app. Then they can have the functionality they need and I can try to pay rent.
Just a quick note that PhotoTalk is on sale for $1.99 for today only, 33% off the normal $2.99 price. Update 1.1 (with the slideshows, extended recording time, and better audio compression) should be available in a few days and I'm working on update 1.2 which will include some new transitions and photos taken in PhotoTalk will be saved in your full photo library. I'm also working real hard on getting support for emailing the photos and audio as well, so that should make it for 1.2. So get the app today, at $1 off the normal price, and get all the future updates for free.
