Filed under: First Look

The folks who first showed us video streaming live from an iPhone, Qik, now have an official (non-jailbreak) app available in the App Store.

Like Ustream Live Broadcaster, Qik Live [iTunes Link] is a free iPhone app that streams live video to a web page where friends, relatives, and the world at large can watch and hear what you're currently doing. Qik Live has a very streamlined interface that's simple to use. You'll need to sign up for a free Qik account before you start blasting your video to the world, but you can do that from within the app. The app runs on iPhone 2G, 3G, and 3GS devices on 3G or Wi-Fi networks.

Once you've launched the app and logged in, a pre-broadcast screen appears showing a live image. Settings are changed by tapping on a 320 x 240 landscape image to bring up a small menu. The menu options include muting/unmuting sound, turning chat on/off, setting a video to private, editing the title and description of a broadcast, choosing where to share the video, or sending the last stream to someone via email.

Switchers were elated earlier this year when TechSmith, developers of the fabulous Camtasia screen recorder application for Windows, finally shipped their flagship app for the Mac. Those switchers were probably also wishing that TechSmith would create a Mac version of their screen capture application, Snagit. Well, their wishes have been granted!

TechSmith has announced the public beta version of Snagit for Mac, and a first look at the application shows that it's a worthy screenshot snapper for the platform. The company has made the beta available for feedback on operation and features, so this is a perfect time to download the program and give it a try.

After installing the application and launching it, all that is visible is a small "tab" that pops out from the side of the Mac screen when you hover over it. The tab has a drop-down for choosing the capture mode and a red button for taking the screen shot. There are two capture modes -- all-in-one capture and window capture. Window capture mode displays all open windows Exposé-style, and you click on one of the windows to select it for capture. Once captured, it appears in a screen where you can annotate the screenshot in a number of ways, or add effects. At this time, there are no effects and the app shows that the feature is coming soon.

In case you haven't noticed, I'm a huge fan of iPhone photography apps. I've written about Best Camera, played with ColorSplash, and taken panoramic photos with Pano. When I noticed the $1.99US Lo-Mob [iTunes Link] while doing my weekly pass through the photo apps, I decided to buy it and give it a try.

Part of my fascination with iPhone photo apps is that the flexibility of the software combines with the camera that is always at your fingertips, and you can do things with your photos with a few taps that would have taken hours in a darkroom. Lo-Mob provides 33 different effects that give your iPhone pics the look of taking photos with old film, instant film, 35 mm film in a medium-format camera, and more. With many of the effects, changes with saturation, focus, and tint are mixed with artifacts (dust on the frame, for example), vignetting, and frames.

As soon as you either take a new photo or select an existing one in Lo-Mob, the app takes about 10 - 12 seconds to pre-process all of the images. The result is that when you go to choose your effect, you see exactly how it's going to look in a small thumbnail image located next to information about the effect. After you've selected your effect, you see a full size image that can then be saved in the original photo resolution and then shared with others through email, Facebook, or Twitter.

Now for some fun! We have three Lo-Mob promo codes to give away to three lucky TUAW readers. Here's the scoop:

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older.
• To enter leave a comment telling us what you would take a photo of and then "retro-ize" with Lo-Mob.
• The comment must be left before Wednesday, December 16, 2009, 11:59PM Eastern Standard Time.
• You may enter only once.
• Three winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prizes: Promo Code for one copy of Lo-Mob (Value: US$1.99)
• Click Here for complete Official Rules.

Check out the gallery below for an idea of some of the cool effects you can slap on those iPhone photos.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb), an Amazon.com company, has just released a free iPhone app [iTunes Link] that puts the power of the huge repository of movie facts, fables, and trivia into the palm of your hand.

I use IMDb regularly, so when I saw that the app had been released, I downloaded it immediately. Upon launching, the app will ask if you wish to let it use your location -- this is used to display show times and movies for local theaters. While IMDb doesn't exactly have a beautiful interface, it's perfect for navigating the huge amount of information that is available.

The first page of the app displays three major areas: Movies, TV, and People. There's also an Application area, which is used only to display information about the App. Movies is subdivided into Showtimes, Coming Soon, US Box Office Results, MOVIEmeter, and the Top 250 Movies. Tapping Coming Soon brings up details about upcoming movies releases, including trailers that can be viewed on the phone. I love the Top 250 Movies, which is a list of the movies rated highest by IMDb readers. It's a treasure trove of information about many of the classic movies of all time.

IMDb's TV section is split into US TV Tonight, which is a schedule of upcoming shows on the major networks, and US TV Recaps, which provides full text synopses of what has happened on top TV shows during the previous week. Under the People heading, there's both STARmeter, which shows a listing of the top 25 stars as measured by the number of times that they've been searched for on IMDb, and Born Today, which lists actors (living and dead) who were born on the current day.

If you love movies and TV, or searching trivia about roles, actors, and directors, then you probably already spend a lot of time with IMDb. The iPhone app is just the icing on the IMDb cake, and as a free app it should be on the home screen of every movie fan's iPhone. Check out the gallery for screenshots of IMDb in action.

Does this scenario sound familiar? You're out of town or away from your office, and you get a call from a client. They need for you to fill out and sign a contract, and then return it to them as quickly as possible. Right now, you'd probably pull out your laptop, pull up the email with the contract, print it out, fill out the information and signature by hand, and then find a fax machine to send the document off to the client; or, if your client is savvy enough, you could electronically sign a PDF version of the contract. What if you could do all of that from your iPhone?

Zosh [$2.99, iTunes Link] provides a way to do just that. It's an iPhone-based tool for marking up and signing PDF documents with text, dates, and signatures. The company says that Microsoft Word document support will be available soon.

Zosh works in concert with a secure file server to make the documents available to your iPhone. When you receive a document as an attachment to an email message, you just forward it from your Zosh account email address to a special zosh.com address. Zosh recognizes your email address and then stores the document folder; the contents of that folder are visible on your iPhone on a Documents screen. For training purposes, Zosh has created a "Getting Started with Zosh" PDF that you can read for step-by-step instructions and hands-on demonstrations.

To view the document, you simply tap on its name. When you find a place that you need to annotate with a date, text, or signature, you simply tap on the Insert button and you're given a choice of what to insert. If you choose date, a date picker with several different date formats appears. Selecting text brings up a text edit field into which you type the text you want to annotate the PDF with. To add a signature, an automatically scrolling window appears into which you write your name on the touchsc. I found that using a stylus like the Pogo Stylus helped me to create a more accurate signature than my finger.

Any of the annotations can be in a choice of four colors -- blue, black, gray, and red -- and can be moved around the page, rotated 360°, resized (bigger or smaller), or deleted. For text annotations, you can choose from a variety of fonts, although none of them really stood out as being unique. Of course, if you're annotating a contract or other legal document, I'm not sure you want to put text in some sort of oddball font.

Once you're done signing the document, you "transmit" it back to your email address or that of another recipient. There's no need to print the original, find a pen to sign the document, then scan and or fax the document before sending it on. Zosh does exactly what it sets out to do, breaking the cycle of wasteful printing and faxing, and it does it on the iPhone alone. While testing the app on a business trip, I had the opportunity to use Zosh to annotate and sign a couple of documents, and I found it to be a lifesaver.

While Zosh isn't for everybody, if you are the type of person who needs to receive, annotate, and sign documents, and then return them to another person, the app is worth much more than the $2.99 price tag.

Echofon (formerly TwitterFon) has been a favorite for many iPhone users for tweeting on the go. naan studio, the developers behind Echofon for iPhone and Firefox, have brought Echofon to the Mac with a newly-launched beta version.

Like Tweetie (which launched for iPhone and was later released for Mac) and other Twitter apps for Mac like Twitterrific and TweetDeck that started on the desktop, Echofon intends to provide tight integration with Twitter. Echofon is also aiming at integrating their new Mac offering with Echofon for iPhone.

Read on to see what Echofon for Mac offers...

There's certainly no shortage when it comes to iPhone apps that turn your device into a pocket-sized scanner. At various times, TUAW bloggers have reviewed or discussed Readdle ScannerPro [US$6.99 (currently on sale for US$4.99), iTunes Link], DocScanner [US$8.99, iTunes Link], and JotNot [US$4.99, iTunes Link]. Of course, there is also a flock of business card scanners, but what I'm discussing in this post are the apps that say that they'll replace that flatbed scanner on your desk with a device you already have in your pocket or purse.

MobiTech 3000 just released version 2.0 of the JotNot scanner app, and the update appears to be quite useful. I've owned the app for a while and have successfully used it to capture documents for posterity. The update provides a few additional features that I had been hoping for:

• Multipage support
• Automatic edge detection
• WebDAV/iDisk support
• Camera stabilization (requires OS 3.1)
• Automated backup of scans
• Reordering pages
• An extensive web-based help
• In app support

Of the new features, I am most happy about two of them; multipage support and camera stabilization. Multipage support means exactly what it implies; you can scan multiple page documents and have them saved into one PDF document. Previously, JotNot would create one PDF file for each and every document you scanned. That meant that combining PDFs required that you export the files to a Mac or PC, then use something like Adobe Acrobat Pro to merge the files.

Socialite, the Mac social networking application formerly known as "Eventbox," has been released out of beta.

The application is intended as a "one stop" for Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Flickr, Digg, and any site that supports RSS.

I've used Eventbox for some time now, as well as Socialite betas, and I was impressed enough to buy a license before RealMacSoftware purchased the application and changed the name. So far, I am impressed.

Twitter support includes multiple accounts, and it makes it very easy to send Direct Messages as well as @replies. Socialite also includes support for Twitter's new "Lists" and "Re-tweet" features. As far as I know, Socialite is currently the only native Mac Twitter client that supports lists. The application is the only way that I ever bother to keep up with Facebook, and it can do so without all the "cruft" (ads, for instance) in the browser interface for Facebook. Socialite is also a great way to keep up with your Flickr contacts.

Socialite sells for US$20.00, and a demo is available. If you previously purchased an Eventbox license, you will be contacted with instructions on getting a Socialite license within 24 hours. Without a license, Socialite is limited to three services, which will probably be plenty for some people.

Download the 1.0 and check it out for yourself!

Update: RealMacSoftware's website seems to be taking a dirt nap. You can download the 1.0 version directly from Amazon's S3 servers here. (MD5SUM = f06c92ce51b7f9a3db96d5e9051adbdb)

If there's one thing you've probably learned over the years from reading TUAW, it's that backups are important. Many of the bloggers here are obsessive about backups, doing Time Machine backups, SuperDuper! bootable backups, and using services like BackBlaze for offsite backups -- and that's all for one Mac!

With the importance of viable and easy-to-create backups for your Mac, it's not surprising that Belgium development firm Dare to be Creative has just announced a new backup utility, Parachute [US$39.00]. The application is Snow Leopard-ready, and can be used to back up your Mac's data to your primary hard disk (definitely not recommended by our team), external disks, FTP or SFTP servers, USB drives, network volumes, and even your iDisk.

Parachute has many features that are found on other backup utilities. For example, you can schedule backups to run hourly, daily, weekly, or manually. The application also does incremental backups after the initial full backup, so subsequent backups take much less time. There is one feature that does appear to be unique to Parachute, and that's the ability to create multiple backup tasks for different files and folders on your Mac, and use a variety of destinations for each task.

There's a 15-day full-functioning trial available for download here. While you are in your tryptophan-induced coma after tomorrow's Thanksgiving Day feast, you can set up some Parachute backups and rest assured that your data is safe.

Remember Zen Bound? It's a gorgeous and fun-to-play little puzzle game. So when I heard that SecretExit, the makers of Zen Bound, were about to release a new app, I was excited to get a sneak preview.

Stair Dismount is a very different game to Zen Bound. Although, as you can see in the above video, the audio and graphics quality are consistently high, it's not really fair to compare the two. According to SecretExit, Stair Dismount is more focused on "humor and social elements" rather than problem solving.

The game basically involves pushing someone down the stairs and seeing how many bones they break. Playing this made me feel like the world's worst sadist. Hard to get game playing satisfaction other than tormenting the poor dude.

With Stair Dismount, you can add the face of a Facebook friend and send screen shots of their broken body lying at the bottom of the staircase. Secret Exit dev Jani Kahrama notes, "It feels better with a friendly Facebook face on the guy :)."

Your enjoyment of this will vary by your personal take but for me, I don't think Stair Dismount will be staying on my iPod or be exposed to my kids. Stair Dismount is due to hit the App Store within the week.

About the video: At this time, TUAW can only create preview videos for applications compiled for 3.1 or earlier using a development (not distribution or ad hoc) build and review videos for distribution-compiled apps that are 3.1 or earlier.

TUAW is commonly provided with not-for-resale licenses or promo codes to permit product evaluations and reviews. For more details, see our policy page.

If an angry, perspiring Steve Ballmer took over control of my iPhone and said I could only have one third-party app on it, I know which app I'd keep. EA's Monopoly Here and Now: The World Edition [US$4.99, iTunes Link] has been my favorite game on the iPhone since it first appeared. Just how much am I addicted to this game? I've played 272 games against three other AI players. At about 45 minutes per game, that's almost nine days of my life that I've spent enjoying Monopoly on my iPhone.

There was always one thing that bothered me about The World Edition: that it wasn't the game I remembered as a child. It uses cities from all over the world, from Gdynia to Montreal, transportation modes from rail to space instead of the four classic railroads, and had some other rule changes that were different.

EA just made my day, since they recently released Monopoly [US$4.99, iTunes Link], and this one is the original classic game. It uses all those streets in or around Atlantic City, N.J. like Baltic Avenue and Park Place, has the four original railroads, and seems to follow the original rules more closely.

Like The World Edition, you play against real or computerized opponents. For real opponents, Monopoly now provides Bluetooth play against up to two other players, or Wi-Fi play against up to three other players. My wife and I found the Wi-Fi play of the World Edition to be a huge battery hog; we'll be trying out the Bluetooth option soon.

The original Monopoly board game was a perennial stocking stuffer when I was a kid, and now the classic Monopoly for iPhone and iPod touch is sure to make a great gift for someone you love.

Novelty and social applications are a big hit on the iPhone. A new one from the folks of Taptivate is sure to be a big hit when it is released in the near future. Voices for iPhone is touted as an "audio recorder with a twist" and even a "social voicemail" utility.

With Voices [iTunes Link], you're given tools to manipulate your own voice in many fun and odd ways. Whether you'd like to transform into Darth Vader or a chipmunk, you're good to go with Voices. Sporting a unique and very pretty user interface, the application boasts a lot of cool extras sure to show you how hard the developers have worked on it.

The app has a home screen-like selection window where you can choose the way in which you want your voice manipulated. A stack of your recordings can also be accessed with just a tap.

After initially seeing this app when it was in early beta, it has come a long way since then. The app is being published by Tap Tap Tap and is available for only 99 cents. Also, to celebrate the release, MacHeist is offering a special "Tweetblast" deal, giving away a free copy of Voice Candy for Mac to people who help spread the word on Twitter.

Here's some shots of Voices in action:

There's a lot of buzz about iPhone IM clients.Other applications have gotten a lot of coverage for allowing iPhones to chat from their AOL, Google, ICQ, Jabber or a host of other screen names.

WhatsApp [iTunes Link] is different, calling itself an "iPhone-to-iPhone chat application" that provides direct messaging between iPhones. The application features push notifications and provides functionality similar to SMS.

So why bother trying it? The app makes it easy to chat with other iPhones with no need for screen names, logging in and out or the added cost of text messaging and cellular charges. It's a lot like an iPhone version of Blackberry's popular messaging service. You'll also quickly and easily be able to point out which of your contacts have WhatsApp installed. Even if you're offline, your messages will be saved until you're back online.

Other cool features include the ability to "Broadcast" or send a message to multiple users, emailing of your chat history and sound and visual badges to show your unread message count. Users can also see when their friends are typing as well as the last time they checked their messages.

WhatsApp is free "for a limited time" so head on over to the App Store and grab it.

Here's a few shots of the app in action: