Camera Fun Lite

I’ve been receiving a few search hits at PreApptastic.com, and a few of them kept looking for some type of photo editing application for webOS. Unfortunately with the limitations of the SDK, you wont be finding photoshop coming to your handset anytime soon.

Camera Fun tries to fill this gap, allowing a user to take a photo and manipulate it by dragging graphic sprites on top of it. Now there are two versions of the app, Camera Fun and Camera Fun Lite. Both applications are pretty much identical, but with the paid version providing additional graphics to use.

The developer has a blog site created, but contacting the developer wasn’t as easy as I expected. After searching the site for the email address, I ended up looking for the developer’s forum topic at PreCentral.net and send him/her a private message. This is a bit disconcerting, especially if I’m a paying customer, I would like to have easy communication for support. Even after I sent a private message, it took a while for the reply message to appear at my regular email address. I sent another message and haven’t heard from the developer since.

The Camera Fun Lite application is free to download with some limitations in the App Catalog, and the regular Camera Fun application is currently on sale (“ half off until Valentines”) at 99 cents, making the full application $2.00 normal price.

Camera Fun Lite is an easy application to use. Simply start the app, and choose a photo saved on your handset or take a new one. Once the photo has been selected, you have a few tools available to you, as well as the limited library of graphics. The tabs at the bottom represent a category and are labeled with icons: hat, glasses, mustaches, miscellaneous and trash/erase. To get the graphic onto your photo, tap on a category and tap on the graphic you want to use. The graphic will automatically be placed in the middle of the screen, allowing you to drag it into its new position. The graphic can also be resized and rotated by tapping the one of the three icons at the top left corner. The first icon allows you to resize, the second to rotate and the third to move around. The size and rotate tool provides a slider to easily change its properties. Unfortunately, these settings need some fine-tuning, for the graphic will arbitrarily jump to a new location when moving the tool’s slider. For example, there was one moment when trying to rotate or resize the graphic,  it jumped behind the tool icons. Now with its new location behind the toolset, I’m unable to select it and move it somewhere else. If there are going to be future updates to this application, not only do I recommend fixing this part of the app, but I recommend creating some type of halo or visual notification, showing what item you have currently selected.

While moving the graphic around the photo, you have the last tool that will display arrows across the bottom of the screen. This will allow movement in four directions, one pixel at a time. This makes it easier to achieve what you need, without having to rely on the app’s poor accuracy to keep the graphic from trailing away from your finger.

One feature that’s lacking is saving your image. Unfortunately the SDK doesn’t allow developers to save an edited photo on your webOS device, therefore you would have to initiate the screen capture by pressing the orange + sym+Pkeys simultaneously. Luckily when tapping on this icon, you are presented with a note about the missing tool, and the photo will go full screen to allow a full image capture. This will be saved to your Photo gallery under the Screen Capture folder. Once the capture is complete, simply tap the screen to go back to the editor.

I would also like to see the option to add your own graphics. It’s pretty easy to find an image you want online, crop it out and export it as a gif or png, then save it into a default folder on your phone.

The application is fun for what it is, and makes a nice tool to fool around with your friends and families pictures and share it with them. $2.00 is a bit much for this application, and needs iron out the kinks under the hood. The app deserves a 6 out of 10, even with its capabilities; it’s a bit on the expensive side, as well as the lack of communication, makes it difficult to justify the price. f you’re really longing for an application to goof around on your photos, then you can purchase this app in the App Catalog. Otherwise I recommend dealing with the free-lite application that is also available through the App Catalog.