Macgasm

Remember Circle, that nice looking app that lets you know when your friends are near by while you’re out on the town? While it’s taken some heat for its lack of utility over the last couple of months, there’s no denying that the application looks great.

The company has released a nifty little sneak peak of what it took to get the app designed and looking like it does today. If you’re interested in what it takes to develop a quality looking application, you’re gonna want to check the video out, as well as the design page over at discovercircle.com. It’s worth a look.

Facebook has finally rolled out their very own camera application for the iPhone. The app, a direct competitor to Instagram (which Facebook now also owns) takes photos on your phone, posts the unaltered, hipster free versions into your camera roll locally, and then uploads the image to your Facebook account.

Camera, ships with 15 hipster filters for aspiring iPhoneographers, lets you tag your friends in photos directly from the phone, as well as quickly crop and rotate your pictures before shipping the images off to the Facebook servers.

I hate to say it, but this is the kind of thing Apple needed to do with the native iPhone camera application. Photostream is great and all, but manually emailing and iMessaging images to friends and family is getting old really quickly.

The install process for getting Facebook’s Camera application is a little bit strange. Currently you have to head to their site, click the install button, and have the company text message you a download link. It may only be temporary until the app propagates around the various App Stores, but I can’t help but wonder if its an attempt at harvesting phone numbers.

It’s also kind of strange that the app is named Camera, exactly like the iPhone’s native camera application.  How that got by Apple’s review team is beyond us…

Today Bump has announced that it will begin letting its customers Bump photos directly from a mobile handset (iPhone, Android) to a computer. You can now head to their website http://bu.mp, select the photos you want to send in the Bump application on your iPhone, and then tap the spacebar with your phone, or finger.

From The Bump Blog:

It’s pretty snazzy, and it looks like it’s going to be a great way to share your photos with friends and family without having to send an iMessage or email. It’s pretty damn cool. Just make sure you don’t deny the bu.mp website access to your currently location in Safari. The app won’t work without access to your location. Learnt that one the hard way.

The writing is on the wall, we’ve said it before, buying, and renting, games from a store is quickly becoming the next casualty of the Internet. Blockbuster died, and it’s likely only a matter of time until GameFly dies too as companies stop publishing physical discs and move towards digital only downloads. GameFly has a plan though, “its plans to begin publishing mobile games for the iOS and Android platforms, as well as launching the independent GameFly GameStore for Android later this fall.”

From the sounds of it, and there’s very little detail to go on here, it sounds like GameFly wants to be Steam for Android. Which is nice, but it’s the publishing for iOS thing that has piqued our interests the most. Is GameFly planning on becoming the next Chillingo? It certainly sounds like that’s the plan according to GameFly’s SCP of Business Development and Content Sean Spector. While the company is planning on becoming a publisher for iOS, the announcement seems to focus most heavily on Android. “We plan to be a leading player in mobile games by launching our retail GameStore for Android and helping to fund mobile developers of all sizes to publish, promote and sell their smartphone and tablet games.”

We plan on being a lot of things, but the real question is whether or not GameFly can make it actually happen. Their business may certainly hinge on the success of this move. It may not be this year, or next, but GameFly is going to have a very difficult time renting video games if game publishers stop shipping game discs with their titles and rely on digital downloads exclusively.

The Malkovich gets his very own Siri advertisements. They’re pretty hilarious in a Malkovich kind of way. And no, the title isn’t a typo.

Check out the videos

You know things have gone bad for Zynga when the only way they can recoup the cost of the $183 million dollars they spent on DrawSomething a couple of weeks ago is to ad even more advertisements to AdSomething to the game.

In addition to the normal in-app advertisements that DrawSomething forces users to draw as part of the game to get their money, the company will now also be rolling out even more advertisements. In the future you’ll find yourself looking at banner ads, video trailers, and puzzle words for DreamWorks’ Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted. The Wall Street Journal has pegged the value of that advertisment partnership somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000.

Maybe the plan was to introduce these ad models all along, but it’s hard not to think that Zynga is rushing to make coin while it can before gamers leave the game behind entirely. At its height, 14.5 million people were playing OMGPop’s DrawSomething, and it’s now rumored to be seeing only half of that number on a daily basis (7.6 million).

That $183 million dollars is starting to look a little ridiculous, isn’t it Zynga? Hats off to OMGPop for getting top dollar though, that was quite the coup.

Our iOS Games Workshop deal is just about to end. If you’re looking to get into developing iOS games but your coding skills are only mediocre, this could be just the thing for you. With the iOS Games Workshop, you’ll learn how to build iOS games without ever having to touch a single line of code. And the workshop is available for only $59. That’s 67% off the regular price of $179. But hurry, because this deal is about to end. If you’re ready to join the ranks of the best iOS games, don’t pass this opportunity up. Head on over to our deals page before it’s too late.

Traditional means of communicating on mobile devices and computers have often followed very distinctive paths historically. Until recently, the mobile phone was based around text messages and voice chats; however, on the computer it’s been video chats and instant messaging for quite some time now. Now that we have personal computers as our telephones, why hasn’t anyone come along and merged all of these communication methods into an easy to use application, one mobile communications app to rule them all?

I’ve been saying for over a year now that Messages and FaceTime needed to be integrated, then technologies like iMessage/SMS need to find their way into iChat as well. We don’t need one application for each communication medium. What we need is one communication medium that wraps all of the other mediums into one all powerful communicating application. We’re almost there, with iMessages heading to OS X, and FaceTime getting integrated into the Contacts app in iOS. It’s time we merge these beasts entirely, once and for all.

John Herman over at Buzzfeed has put together an interesting concept that places text messages, FaceTime and file transfers directly into one application. Alongside the FaceTime video is a button for the telephone, access to contacts, and a history of previous SMS/iMessages messages sent between contacts. It certainly makes sense.

Shut up and take my money already. I’d pay for that app.

If Apple’s serious about bringing iOS back to the Mac, and a little more OS X to iOS, they’d be smart to reevaluate how we communicate in 2012 and then rebuild the tools we have to make those kinds of connections with friends and family a whole lot better. One app to rule them all, one app to find them.