Girl Group (Hail, AutoStitch!)

The more I use AutoStitch, the more it impresses me. Check out this photo. There’s absolutely nothing odd about it whatsoever. I was at my local comix shop, I had a halfway decent camera with an ultrawide-angle lens, and I took a picture.
 
Aha…but it’s all a lie. I was waiting for a friend, I was bored, and so I snapped three or four shots from about a foot away with my crummy iPhone camera. Not even the nifty iPhone 3G S…I mean the heroically-disappointing camera on the iPhone 3G. But a few seconds later, I launched AutoStitch, selected the photos in the camera roll, and seconds later I had a seamlessly-stitched, cropped image ready for posting.
 
AutoStitch is in that class of iPhone apps where I want to urge Apple to just write CloudBurst a check and incorporate the feature right into the Camera app. It’s just too bloody useful. The classic problem for any camera is “what do you do when you can’t back up far enough to get everybody and the whole scene in the frame at once?” And one of the best uses for a phone with 16 gigabytes of memory is to create an accidental ongoing timeline of your life. I can look through my camera roll and replay all of the significant and insignificant events and sights of my past two years on this planet. With AutoStitch, it’s easy to document a full field of view. WIthout it, you can take a snapshot of a single element of interest but you can’t capture the sense of the entire place, of standing in this spot and taking it all in.
 
I just wish it had an “email full resolution image” feature. The iPhone’s camera roll downsamples all images to 800×600 when you tap the “Email Photo” button. Natcherly there’s a workaround (don’t use the built-in feature; copy the photo and paste it into a new email yourself) and you can get the full-rez image when you sync the phone to your desktop. But the power of cameraphoning comes from the impulse to take a photo and share it immediately…and extra steps are wasted effort.
 
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=318944927&mt=8

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