After choosing “Send as Postcard,” the card can be personalized with an optional message and avatar. Then, multiple recipients and addresses can be added, and after completing a short checkout process, the postcards are ready for printing and delivery. It’s as easy as that.

We hope you love this new feature as much as we do!

Happy Holidays!

We released Halftone version 1.7 today, and it’s now available in the App Store.

One of the common feature requests from our users has been the ability to edit an image before applying captions, stamps, etc. So, starting with this release, we’ve partnered with Aviary to include their image editing functionality within Halftone (check out this nice post about Halftone on their site). This includes cropping, rotation, special effect filters, brightness, contrast, saturation, individual RGB color levels, and sharpness.

This new image editing feature is turned On by default, but you can disable it by tapping the settings gear in the upper-left and turning “Image editing” to Off. This setting applies to any image that is brought into Halftone (even from other apps).

The holidays are fast approaching, so we added a new “Santa hat” stamp that you can see in the screenshot below. To accompany the new stamp, you can now choose from a few gradients (and white) to add a little more style to your title captions. We have a big update to captions coming before the end of the year, but this is a good start.

Last, Halftone can now retrieve the “date taken” for images that come from the camera or photo album (another common user request). To access this information, Halftone needs to read the metadata that is baked-in to each image. Because this metadata can also contain the latitude and longitude where the photo was taken, iOS requires that you grant permission.

Be sure to read our Halftone FAQ for other common questions along with some tips and tricks.

Otherwise, enjoy this new version of Halftone!

So, we were delighted to see this fantastic review of Halftone (running on an iPad) from Adorama TV. Mark Wallace does a great job covering all of the major features in under six minutes. If you’re looking for a bit more detail than we provide in our short overview video, you should definitely check this out.

Thank you, Mark and Adorama!

We like to have a little fun now and then, so we present to you our 2011 Halloween trick. As we said…don’t be afraid of the dark (wink wink).

Touch or click for a full-size version.

Apple’s new Twitter support has made it much more convenient to send tweets from within Halftone. If you have multiple Twitter accounts configured, a From: prompt is displayed that makes it easy to select which account you’d like to use. You can even add location information if you’d like. Nice job, Apple.

This update also adds support for sending images to and receiving images from other installed apps. We’ve enabled two different methods to accomplish this.

The first method uses PhotoAppLink, a seamless way to move images from one app to another without any loss of quality. If you don’t have any PhotoAppLink-compatible apps on your device, there’s a handy More Apps button that lists them. The list even includes a button to purchase them directly from the App Store. Very convenient.

The second method uses a technique called Document Interaction that’s been available in iOS for awhile. Without getting into the technical details, this basically means that Halftone can send images to other apps that support Document Interaction, and Halftone can receive images from them too. One of the most common photography apps to support this is the wonderful Instagram.

In Halftone, when you choose to send an image to Instagram (using the icon shown in the screenshot above), you’ll get a list of apps that can also open the same kind of file. In the screenshot, you can see that FX Photo Studio and Camera+ are also listed. Likewise, in apps like FX Photo Studio that can also send images to Instagram, Halftone will be listed. Document Interaction is another great way to share images between apps.

The last significant change was to the icon. To better support our international audience, we needed to remove the name of the app from the icon itself and design something more symbolic and universal. We worked with SoftFacade to develop our new icon. The icon evokes the dotted halftone nature of the app’s original inspiration, and the speech balloon alludes to the comic-book effects that can be added to the images. It’s also easier to see on a screen full of apps.

Finally, we added a couple of stamps (yes, many more are coming!), and we modified some behind-the-scenes functionality to make it easier for us to release some of our future features and updates.

We hope you like the update, and thank you for supporting us!

Thanks to all of our customers for your incredible feedback and support. Halftone continues to improved based on your suggestions.

Also, a special thank you to our 300,000+ users for their support and feedback. We couldn’t do it without you.

The biggest addition is the new stamp feature. Stamps make it easy to add styled, graphical elements to a halftone image. They can be rotated and resized, and some of them can also be recolored. Because we are committed to high output quality, we invented a way to bring vector-based illustrations into our rendering engine. This required a lot of extra work, but we think you’ll agree that it was worth the effort. Here’s a page of stamps that was generated by version 1.5. Click to see the full-sized image.

When we started to build the stamp feature, we implemented standard pinch/zoom gestures for rotation and scaling. While this worked great in the simulator, it failed miserably during initial tests on an actual device. Stamps are pretty small, and getting two fingers that close together was next to impossible.

Our next idea was to implement a standard paradigm that’s found in almost every graphics application: enter an editing mode, then drag “handles” to rotate and resize. This is a proven method that’s familiar to most people. One problem with this method is that it requires the addition of an editing mode. To us, the bigger problem is that the user is no longer directly interacting with the content; they’re interacting with user interface elements.

So, we sat back and asked ourselves how we’d interact with a paper version of our stamp feature. The answer was almost immediately obvious: touch near the center of the stamp to move it around and touch near an outside edge to rotate it. And while we couldn’t resize the paper prototype, it was easy to imagine that the same outside edge could be used to resize the digital version of our stamps. No special editing mode is necessary. After some initial testing, we decided that this method worked very well, and it’s the way you’ll interact with stamps in version 1.5. We’d love your feedback!

We also licensed two new fonts: Alter Ego, and Billy the Flying Robot. Each brings a slightly different character to Halftone, and based on user feedback, both of these new fonts include European character sets.

For the halftone geeks out there, we’ve added a new setting for dot gain, and we’ve updated the dot size setting to allow smaller sizes (you could only set larger sizes in prior versions). Dot gain allows you to control how much the digital dots “bleed.” Together, these two settings enable you to produce output that doesn’t depend on blending the original image.

Other improvements include a brand new image rendering engine. We ripped out the old version and completely replaced it with an engine that provides much more flexibility and power for future versions. There are already a few dormant features that we didn’t have time to completely test that we hope to enable later.

You can now choose between TwitPic and yfrog for Twitter image uploads. We also pulled out our file and sharpened the points on our “pucker” balloon shape. The mitered points were driving us crazy.

If all goes well, Apple should approve the update within the next week. We hope you enjoy version 1.5, and please continue to send us your suggestions and feedback.

Here’s a resized example from a photo that was taken in Seattle, Washington.

Let us know what you think!