The App Store is live, and you can go get Exposure right now.

• Exposure (Free)
• Exposure Premium ($9.99)

The Exposure page has been updated with non-redacted screenshots.

It’s been a while since I’ve written much, because it’s a while since I’ve really done anything that I can talk about publicly. All of that’s coming to an end on Friday with the release of iPhone 3G, the App Store and my latest application: Exposure.

What is Exposure? Well, put simply, it’s “Two Billion Photos. In Your Pocket”. It’s Flickr, wrapped in a native iPhone SDK application, no jailbreaking required. Exposure has a ton of cool features, but its overall aim is to give you access to all of Flickr.

You can look at your photostream, sets, tags and contacts’ recent activity. You can check out the latest activity on your photos and see what’s current in Explore. You can go into a detail view on any photo, read the comments and write your own. If you find something cool, you can post a link to Twitter, mail a link or add it to your favourites. Fave’ing photos is a great way to mark things to look at later when you get back to your Mac.

My favourite feature, though, is called Near Me. Exposure uses the Core Location API on iPhone to figure out where you are and then figure out the interesting photos on Flickr that are near your location. This has several uses:

Firstly, if you’re in a new place and you want to find somewhere interesting nearby to photograph, there’s a good chance that interesting places have geotagged pictures on Flickr. Secondly, imagine you’re visiting the Vatican and you want to avoid taking that picture of the staircase, you can fire up Near Me and see how everyone else has already done it. Use it to avoid cliché or gain inspiration about what’s in front of you.

Availability

Exposure will work on all iPhones, both original and 3G, and the iPod touch. It will be in the App Store when it launches on Friday, available in two flavours to suit your taste:

The first version, called simply “Exposure”, is completely free to download and use. Your free use of Exposure is paid for by advertising (via The Deck) that will show up inline. I’ve tried to keep it unobtrusive: the adverts show up at the top of any list of Flickr photos, but scroll with the content, so they’re not permanently fixed on your screen.

If you don’t like adverts, you can purchase “Exposure Premium” for $9.99. Both versions are otherwise completely identical.

Support

In anticipation of Friday, I’ve set up a support forum and a pre-launch discussion thread at Get Satisfaction. If you have any questions, raise them over there and I’ll try and answer them as best I can.

FlickrExport 3.0.0b23 has been released to finally tidy up the problems users were seeing with incorrect “date taken” fields on photos uploaded to Flickr. You can download it through FlickrExport 3’s software update feature, or at the FlickrExport Beta page.

New Support Arrangements Starting May 1st

The formal starting date for support via Get Satisfaction is May 1st. The page is already up and running so, if you have a problem between now and May 1, you might want to raise it there instead of by email.

If you’re using the 3.0 beta series, I just released 3.0.0b22 with the following fix:

• Fixes a bug introduced in b21 that caused the "date taken" field to be set to a strange value like "January 1, 0003".

Download it through b21’s software update, or at connectedflow.com/flickrexport/beta

Sorry for the inconvenience this bug has caused.

My bug tracking software, FogBugz, has failed me for the last time. I’m putting some new support arrangements in place for Connected Flow which I hope will improve the situation.

The Problem, Part 1

FogBugz is the software that reads email sent to support-at-connectedflow.com, assigns a case number and sends you an auto-reply to acknowledge your message. It then sends me a ticket, and I respond to you.

Occasionally (too occasionally), FogBugz decides to stop importing email altogether until I (a) notice and (b) go and click on a link in its admin interface. This stinks, since it’s never easy to know the difference between a quiet period of support email and FogBugz being broken again.

The really embarrassing thing is that I see the latest beta has some issues that are affecting people, and I only heard about that today. Sorry, everyone.

The Problem, Part 2

The second problem that has become an increasingly large one over recent months, as the number of FlickrExport users has continually increased, is the general amount of support email. One person only scales so far. I find that the biggest time-suck is answering the same question repeatedly, rather than the quite rare case of someone having a completely unique problem.

The Solution

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while, but this has pushed me over the edge. All support is now going to go through the Connected Flow page at Get Satisfaction. Don’t worry - I’ll still be doing the support but the idea here is for me to answer any particular question once, and then subsequent people with that question can get the answer from the website.

I realised I was at the point where I was using FogBugz as little more than the world’s worst email client. From now on, I’ll keep tickets and customer support better separated, so that a better job can be done on each.

Private Matters

If you have a business or sales-related enquiry that you don’t want to have on the public internet, you can write to info-at-connectedflow.com. That address gets right through to my iPhone, so please use responsibly.

The Transition

Once I’ve cleared up the backlog from FogBugz’ most recent breakdown, I’ll start to decommission the Connected Flow FogBugz this week.

I’ll be moving the existing tickets into a new system and the support-at-connectedflow.com email address will start to auto-respond and redirect you to the Get Satisfaction page. Also, connectedflow.com/contact will be modified to point you there too.

Other Places

There’s also the FlickrExport Users group on Flickr and I’m also active in the Aperture group there. Please don’t use my personal FlickrMail for support requests (because it gets filtered off somewhere that is rarely looked at!).

A quick note to say that I’ve posted FlickrExport 3.0.0b21 to the Beta Page.

Changes:

• Fixes an exception in Aperture when the keyword to be added to exported images was the empty string.
• FlickrExport now uses ~/Library/Caches/ to cache images before upload rather than ~/Library/Application Support/FlickrExport/ so that Time Machine will not attempt to back up images cached for upload.
• Many robustness improvements were made to the NMEA log file parser.

The final release is getting close. It’s currently held up more by business issues than technical issues - things like VAT registration - still working on all of that.

Just to let you know of a little update for both versions of FlickrExport.

This release fixes a potential crashing bug when going through proxy servers such as Privoxy.

You can download it from the front page of connectedflow.com.

Finally it’s here. I’ve uploaded the first public beta version of FlickrExport 3. Please visit the beta page and watch a brief screencast of the major new features in FlickrExport 3.

To summarise, these are:

• Routing photos to multiple groups.
• The ability to store a collection of group additions and recall them for later use (e.g. “Send to all my Black and White groups”)
• A new photoset creation UI which lets you set the photoset order and key photo independently of the order in which you upload photos.
• Integration with GPS track logs to geotag images on Flickr.
• Geolocation presets: store latitude/longitude presets and recall them for later use.
• Upload engine rewritten to be more robust against interruptions.

Upgrade Policy

FlickrExport 3 will be a paid upgrade. Pricing will be announced when the final release of 3.0 is made available.

Upgrades will be free for anyone who purchased FlickrExport 2 for iPhoto or FlickrExport 1 for Aperture in 2008.

On Version Numbering

Prior to this release, FlickrExport was at version 2.x for iPhoto and 1.x for Aperture. With the release FlickrExport 3, both products will move to version 3.0.0 and develop from there. Aperture users, please don’t be confused that I’m skipping over version 2.x!

Flickr Group and Thanks

Thanks to all those who have helped me polish the beta in private testing over the last few months. We’ve been using a private Flickr group to discuss the beta and everyone is now welcome to join us there for the duration of the public beta.

Apple released Aperture 2.0.1 this week. You can install it via Software Update or by downloading it from the Apple support site. Here’s what’s new for FlickrExport:

Export Progress Bug is Fixed

Aperture 2.0.0 would not show any progress indicator for export plugins. This is fixed in Aperture 2.0.1. The information that FlickrExport used to present in the progress sheet is now shown in the Activity window (Window > Show Activity).

File Naming Conflict Bug is Not Fixed

The problem with conflicting file names documented in the Knowledge Base is still present in Aperture 2.0.1 (and will now even show the warning dialog multiple times). The documented workaround for this is still necessary if you see the error.

Keyboard Shortcut for FlickrExport

Aperture 2 added the ability to customise any keyboard shortcut in the application. Aperture 2.0.1 now makes this possible for export plugins as well, which means you can now assign a keyboard shortcut to FlickrExport. I personally like Command-Shift-E, but you have the freedom of the keyboard to choose your own.

FlickrExport 1.0.8 for Aperture has been released. This version provides a workaround to a bug in Aperture 2 which could cause exports to be aborted if any of the exported file names conflicted.

Connected Flow Knowledge Base

I’ve installed WikkaWiki on the site to serve as a place to keep more specific documentation about particular things, and this bug is the first page. The Knowledge Base is at connectedflow.com/kb and the Aperture 2 File Name Conflict Bug is the first big content page.

I have also written up a document which clarifies the expected and unexpected ways in which Aperture 2 fails to show proper progress information for FlickrExport: Aperture 2 Shows No Export Progress.

Download

• FlickrExport 1.0.8 for Aperture