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.

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.