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Gorillacam, an app from Joby, is available for free at the App Store.
Without Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) headlining, Macworld 2010 was proclaimed a snoozefest before it even started. Now it's over and we're all left to sift through the various blog posts and news articles coming from reporters on the scene -- which are decidedly fewer in number and weaker in excitement than in previous years. One item that did catch my eye was about Joby's new accessories. Joby makes Gorillapods -- those clingy little portable camera tripods that you can pose in various ways to get a steady photo almost anywhere.
The product at Macworld was pretty simple, really -- just a new SKU built especially for holding an iPod touch. Ah-ha, but the iPod touch has no camera! A rumor is reborn!
And then it died again. It's just for watching videos on an iPod touch, or so Joby says. Really, there are no holes on the back, so I doubt Joby knows something we don't.
Of course, the company also makes an edition for the iPhone, which certainly does have a camera, and it's been using the App Store as a way to push sales of a physical product by promoting a free app, GorillaCam, which was recently updated.
New Features
Gorillacam is an alternative to your iPhone's built-in cam app, and it's just plain better than the original. It has some of the same settings you might find on a small, dedicated digital camera, rather than a phone cam: a self-timer, a time-lapse setting, and an anti-shaking feature. It also has a leveler -- a simulated bubble at the top of the screen to tell you whether the shot is framed perfectly horizontally.
Its grid function divides the screen into nine squares to better plan a shot, a Press Anywhere feature lets to snap a photo without having to find the button on the screen, and a burst function will snap 3 shots in rapid succession.
The new features in the latest edition of Gorillacam are digital zoom, touch to focus, and the antishake feature. The focus feature only works in the iPhone 3GS.
In the past, I've reviewed an app that was pretty much all about giving the iPhone's camera a zoom lens, and that one sold for a buck. With Gorillacam, 4x zoom is just one of several features, and the app's free. Go figure.
Zooming in and out is simple; just adjust the slider at the side of the screen (you can hide it by going into Settings). Remember, though, that this is digital zoom, so you're basically just cropping the image down rather than looking through a telescope.
The new antishake setting wasn't what I expected, but it works well enough. No, you still won't be able to get a non-blurry shot regardless of how clumsily you're waving your camera about. Instead, when you activate this feature, it uses the built-in accelerometer to tell how badly the camera's shaking, then it won't let you hit the snap button until you're suitably stable. Sensitivity is adjustable. The result: snappier pictures.
Other features
Outside of the recent improvements, one of the best features of Gorillacam is its self-timer feature. You can set it at anywhere from three to 90 seconds, and an optional (and very piercing) buzzer will count down for you.
The time lapse setting is a nice add-on, though it may only prove handy for a select subset of iPhone photographers. You can set it to take X shots with Y seconds in between snaps -- X can range from 3 to 120 (or no limit at all); Y can go from one second to two minutes. The app also has a setting for preventing the phone from going into sleep mode.
Gorillacam is for stillcam shooting only -- nothing about it will help your 3GS take better videos. Also, using my iPhone 3G, it felt like it took Gorillacam about two seconds longer than the built-in camera app to save any given photo. But that doesn't prevent you from going on a rapid-fire shooting spree; the app lets you take more photos even as the previous ones are being saved. I blasted off five shots in a row, and Gorillacam was able to take them just as quickly as the built-in app; I just got a message in viewfinder that read "Saving 5 photos -- Please don't exit Gorillacam." Fair enough.
Bottom Line
Gorillacam doesn't have all the features common to pocket digicams, and that's possibly because the developers did a really good job at focusing on making this into a marketing tool for Gorillapods. A lot of these features -- time lapse, countdown timer, bubble leveler -- are all there to make you think, "Hm, this would be even more useful if I had a little tripod." (Notable exception: the antishake feature).
And the app is not without an advertisement -- an ad for Gorillapads pops up right when you open it. But the program is up and ready to go just as quickly as the native phone app is, so no demerits there.
In the land of iPhone apps, a free application usually means it's a foot in the door to push something that's not free. This one's no different, but aside from an inoffensive opening ad, Gorillacam's schtick is all about what it actually does, not a bunch of visual noise it throws your way.
With Gorillacam, you get an application that's just as capable as the original cam app but with more features. I'm putting the old camera app on my junk screen and replacing it with Gorillacam.
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