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.

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.

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!

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

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 1.5 is still in review.

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.

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.

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

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

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.