An Engineer

Wow, it’s been nearly three months since the last update to Phanfare Photon for the iPhone and iPod touch and hence this version has so much good stuff that there is not just one major feature. Here are the highlights:

• Video is now synchronized to the iPhone over the air and will play offline in airplane mode.
• Properly supports the new Phanfare Site features, including sending sharing invites to Phanfare sites and publishing an album to your Phanfare site.
• Supports changing album properties under iPhone OS 3.0.
• Fixed the bug that prevented associating with a facebook account from Photon.
• Better support for album sections. You can see and edit album section descriptions.
• Support for shooting and uploading video from iPhone 3G S phones. Note that we are still not converting iPhone video properly on the service but are working to address that.
• Supports assigning albums to Subsites for Pro users.
• Follows the convention of other Phanfare apps (Mac,PC and Web) in showing an album as private (ghostbusters icon) if the album is not published to your Phanfare site.
• Deprecates the Phanfare social networking features. New albums are created with friend & family visibility turned off. Friends and Family features are off the main tab bar and appear in the “more” area.
• Numerous small bug fixes. For example, deleting the last image in album does not crash the app.

You will also notice that our extensions the camera view are gone. They were touch-anywhere-to-shoot, image-stabilization-assist and self-timer. These features were disallowed by Apple when they released the 3.0 version of the iPhone OS. The good news is that we believe that we can put these features back in using a future version of the iPhone OS.

Our data shows that more than 90% of photos taken using Photon don’t use the camera within the app. Most people prefer to take photos and videos using the built-in camera app on the phone, saving them to the roll. Then they import the photos and videos to Phanfare Photon.

The built-in camera still has a much shorter shot-to-shot time than the camera within Photon. This is due to limitations of the iPhone SDK. We recommend that all users shoot with the built-in camera. We would pull our camera control out but we are leaving it in since we believe we will be able to provide the camera extensions in a future release. Let us know how you feel about having it in.