This blog has been sorely neglected, and there’s simply no excuse except that Connected Flow got sucked into the Twitter vortex. A log of back-and-forth has happened on the various Twitter accounts but somehow this blog always got forgotten. Very sorry!

Anyway. Here, as they say, is the news, most recent first:

Viewfinder for iPad

Viewfinder for iPad arrived in the App Store a couple of weeks ago. It’s the Viewfinder you know from Mac OS X, redesigned to work beautifully on the iPad. You can search with all the Creative Commons license options that you know from the Mac OS X version. Once you’ve found the photos you need, download them from Flickr right into the Photos app on your iPad, ready for use in apps like Keynote and Pages.

Fiewfinder for iPad is also a great way to find new home and lock screen photos for your iPad.

Viewfinder for iPad is $9.99 on the App Store now.

Viewfinder for Mac OS X

Before there was Viewfinder for iPad, there was Viewfinder for Mac OS X. Simply put, it’s “easy photo search and download” for your Mac. You can narrow your search to photos that have Creative Commons licenses and then download and use them in Keynote or as a Desktop Picture with one click. Best of all, you can copy Creative Commons-compatible attribution text for any photo.

Find out more and buy Viewfinder for Mac OS X at connectedflow.com/viewfinder.

Twitter and Facebook

Connected Flow is now maintaining a presence on both Twitter and Facebook where it’s easy and fast to interact or get answers to questions you might have.

There are specific accounts for all the Connected Flow products: @flickrexport, @viewfinderapp, @changesapp and @darkslideapp as well as the general @connectedflow account.

If you absolutely need a question answered, please use the Contact Page at connectedflow.com – there’s always someone reading those messages.

As Snow Leopard is rumoured to be imminently upon us, here’s a compatibility update:

FlickrExport 3.0.2 will be out shortly to address a crash under Snow Leopard.

FlickrExport 2.x and FlickrExport Lite for Aperture are no longer supported under Snow Leopard. If you’re upgrading to Snow Leopard, you’ll need to upgrade to FlickrExport 3. Remember that, if you bought FlickrExport 2 on or after January 1st 2008 you are eligible for a free upgrade to FlickrExport 3. Just use the upgrade check form on the Store Page.

If you bought FlickrExport 2 before 1/1/08, you can get a 50% discount by using your existing FlickrExport serial number as a coupon code in the Kagi checkout process. Send email to info-at-connectedflow.com if you have any problems with your serial number being recognised for upgrade.

There’s a discussion thread at Get Satisfaction.

This year, FlickrExport will be five years old. There are some old things in there and, as we look to the imminent release of Snow Leopard, it’s time to clean up some things.

There’s a great term in programming: technical debt (and its friend technical inflation). This refers to the situation you sometimes get into where the way you did things in the past starts to cost you time and effort in the future.

FlickrExport carries some technical debt and I’ve decided it’s time to pay that down. In the Mac world, technical debt usually arises from trying to support old versions of Mac OS X for too long, but there are other factors too.

Here’s what’s going to happen:

All Versions

• FlickrExport for Aperture and iPhoto currently support both Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. Later this year, there will be a free-of-charge FlickrExport 3.5 update that drops support for Mac OS X 10.4.
• When it arrives, and this is likely to be 12-18 months away, FlickrExport 4 will be a paid upgrade and will probably only support Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Intel-based Macs (the latter because Snow Leopard is itself Intel-only). This is subject to change if, for some unlikely reason, the data shows that nobody is running Snow Leopard.

FlickrExport for Aperture

• There are currently no plans to drop support for Aperture 1.5 unless something in a future version of Aperture makes that necessary or desirable.

FlickrExport for iPhoto

• On iPhoto, the situation is more complex. FlickrExport currently works back to iPhoto 4.x. We’re currently on iPhoto 8. That’s quite a gap to bridge, and is starting to present a very heavy testing burden. Under versions of iPhoto prior to 7.0, FlickrExport is using an undocumented programming interface. Under 7.0 and later versions, Apple documented the plugin format and that’s what FlickrExport uses.
• The current plan is that FlickrExport 4.0 will drop support for all versions of iPhoto earlier than 7.x.

Let me put that in a table for you:

I’ve opened a thread at Get Satisfaction to discuss this.

I’m delighted to announce that Connected Flow has acquired the popular and powerful file/folder comparison application Changes from Skorpiostech.

You can read the Press Release on connectedflow.com.

Acquiring Changes brings a new diversity to Connected Flow’s product line, but FlickrExport and Darkslide aren’t going away. On the contrary, I think that having a new and different application in the line-up will benefit the entire line of products.

Here’s to the future!

If you want more Connected Flow information, there are a few Twitter accounts you might want to follow:

• @connectedflow, for general company information.
• @darkslideapp
• @flickrexport
• And, if you want to hear the minutiae of one developer’s daily life: @fraserspeirs.

It’s been a very, very long time in coming. Large chunks of 2008 were eaten by Darkslide and the iPhone SDK, but it’s finally done.

FlickrExport 3 is available from connectedflow.com. There are several new features in this release, but the main ones include:

• Create a photoset with your uploaded images and set the photoset image order separately from the upload order.
• Add your photos to multiple groups after uploading, with presets to select groups-of-groups with one click.
• GPS track log integration – download your GPS tracks and connect them with photos as you upload them (supports GPX and NMEA).
• Geolocation presets – store a location and recall it with one click.
• Exclude Aperture keywords from being used for Flickr tags.
• Rewritten upload engine for greater efficiency.

Upgrades

Upgrades are free if you purchased FlickrExport 2 for iPhoto or FlickrExport 1 for Aperture on or after January 1st, 2008. Visit the Store to check your eligibility.

If you are not eligible for a free upgrade, please use your previous serial number as a coupon code to receive a 50% discount on upgrades.

Darkslide (Exposure) Premium 1.5 is now available in the App Store at a special price until the end of January: $3.99.

Darkslide 1.5 is still in review.

An update to Exposure has just been submitted to the App Store. Many fun changes in this version, not least of which is that it includes a whole other application!

What do I mean? Well, when the iPhone SDK came out, I had the vision for two Flickr applications: Exposure Darkslide and FlickrExport Touch. One a ‘viewing’ app and one a simple and clean ‘upload’ app. Copious user feedback suggested to me that this wasn’t the right way to go. So, in the time since Exposure 1.1 shipped in October, I’ve been working to merge my prototype of FlickrExport Touch into Darkslide.

The result is Darkslide 1.5, which gains a new tab: “Upload”. Behind that tab, though, is really something I once thought should have been a whole other application.

The other big feature in Darkslide 1.5 is the ability to search Flickr Places from within the app. Enter the name of a place and Darkslide will ask Flickr about all the known places with that name, then let you see pictures.

Oh, and the name? Well, another company with a photography product called Exposure which works on an entirely different platform thought that users might get “confused”. Such is life in a small company.

Exposure 1.1 and Exposure Premium 1.1 are now available in the App Store.

The release notes are posted over at Get Satisfaction, but the main highlight is a new thumbnail view, a dramatically faster thumbnail loader and caching of thumbnails on the device.

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.