Watermark your iPhoto pictures with Impression

Blue Crowbar Software is a small Belgian Mac development firm that is quickly making a name for itself for its innovative iPhoto and Aperture plugins. We've previously covered iPhoto2Twitter here on TUAW, and now Blue Crowbar has announced a new iPhoto plugin for adding watermarks to pictures in your iPhoto library.

Watermarks are those faint, transparent designs that websites often use to mark exclusive photos when breaking a big story. For example, many of the great fake iTablet "photos" that we've received during the past few weeks have been emblazoned with a watermark for one Mac site or another. Impression (€9.90 -- about US$14.10) works in iPhoto to put watermarks onto your iPhoto pictures. If you're worried that a watermark might ruin a perfectly good picture, don't be. Impression makes a copy of the picture, then creates a watermarked version which is also saved into your iPhoto library.

Like iPhoto2Twitter, Impression works through the File > Export command. Once installed, Impression has its own pane on the Export settings panel. Select a photo or group of photos, Choose File > Export, click on the Impression button, and then use the buttons in the heads-up display. Those buttons allow you to select a PSD, PNG, or RTF file containing your watermark, rotate the watermark, or change the margins, transparency, and location of the watermark.

You can try out Impression for free by downloading it from the Blue Crowbar website (click starts download).

Convertbot

Last October, we posted about another iPhone app -- Weightbot -- written by Mark Jardine and Paul Haddad at Tapbots. Now the company has shipped their second app, an iPhone conversion calculator called Convertbot (iTunes link).

Like Weightbot, Convertbot is a classy-looking and extremely functional iPhone app. Every detail of the user interface shows obvious thought, resulting in an app that is easy to use and look at. As with Weightbot, Convertbot also features sound effects that provide an extra level of fun.

What can you convert with Convertbot? Temperature, time, volume, work, angles, area, currency, length, mass, power, pressure and speed. How do you do it? There's a rotating selector wheel on the Convertbot screen to choose the type of conversion (temperature, for example), and a button to select the units (degrees Fahrenheit, for instance). To enter the known unit, you tap the converter display to bring up a keypad for tapping in numbers. As you tap in the numbers, Convertbot is busily converting the units.

If you're an aspiring developer and want to see a well-designed app, or if you're an iPhone or iPod touch owner who just likes cool apps, check out this US$0.99 app. There are tons of conversion apps in the App Store, but Convertbot is just too nice to pass up.

Health Cubby for iPhone / iPod touch

App Cubby announced that a new iPhone app, Health Cubby (click opens iTunes) arrived in the App Store today. Health Cubby (US$4.99) is a personal fitness tracking app with a difference -- it adds a social networking element for working with friends and family members to keep motivated to exercise more and eat less.

The social features connect you with up to 7 other people, share your progress in achieving fitness goals, and even send motivational messages. To do that, you set up a private account with App Cubby for data syncing and sending messages.

Health Cubby has a great online user manual complete with screenshots. Instead of tracking meals with points or calories, the app has you enter a 1 to 5 rating. Rating a meal a 1 means you put the all-you-can-eat buffet out of business, while a 5 is a low-calorie, healthy meal. You also set goals for strength, cardio and...vices! While the first two involve exercise, the third item makes you set goals to reduce the number of times you indulge in a vice. My goal is to reduce my beer drinking to one a day (yeah, right...).

I've put Health Cubby on my iPhone right next to Weight Watchers Mobile. It'll be interesting to see which app I use most often. Check the gallery below for screenshots of Health Cubby in action.

A Lethal app for your iPhone

OK, the headline is a bit misleading. This app won't kill you; in fact, it's designed to inform you about dangerous situations in your vicinity.

Lethal (click opens iTunes) from Elany Arts takes a location from either the iPhone's built-in location services or a list of 300 cities or parks throughout the USA, then provides you with a "lethal index" number. This number ranges between 0 and 400, with 400 being an extremely dangerous location.

The ranking comes from a composite of four scores based on lethal wildlife, crime, disease, and disaster probabilities in each area. The About screen for Lethal notes that the app is designed for informational and entertainment purposes only, so you should use common sense to guide your use of Lethal.

When I let Lethal determine the index for my home, I was surprised to see that it was 207 out of 400, or "somewhat dangerous". The wildlife index was rather high based on black bears and mountain lions in the area. Yes, we do see them on rare occasions in the area, but I'd be much more concerned about a neighbor taking a potshot at me than getting chewed on by a mountain lion.

Still, Lethal is fun (many comments are obviously tongue-in-cheek) and educational. Whether it's worth the US$1.99 introductory price is up to you. Check out the gallery below for screenshots of Lethal in action.

NetNewsWire [ iPhone ]

Probably the single most used application on my Mac is NetNewsWire, and so I've been really looking forward to on the iPhone optimized version. It has now appeared and on first glance it appears that developer Brent Simmons has built yet another class leading RSS reader.

Like the desktop version NetNewsWire for iPhone (iTunes link) syncs with the Newsgator servers for your subscription list, clippings, and read/unread status. And like the desktop version it's free. However, if you're like me you're not going to want your entire feed list on your iPhone. Fortunately, there is a way to use a desktop browser interface on Newsgator.com to select only a subset of your feeds to appear on your iPhone. Brent explains how to set this up at his site.