Announcing Exposure

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.