Glow Doodle is a quirky drawing app that lets you draw with light, and you can try out if you've got a webcam. If you've ever taken a photograph of something moving and seen the streak effect, you'll get how it works. Open up the app, and get some kind of light source, like a cellphone, and move it around in the air. It will leave a trail, and you'll have a light drawing.

The controls for Glow Doodle are pretty simple: click to clear, s to save, and space to upload to the online collection of glowdoodles. Experiment with different objects to see what kind of results you get. The reflection from my glasses worked pretty well, and I imagine a shiny watch face would be pretty good, too. I didn't have a laser pointer on hand - I know, I'm such a bad geek - but I'd like to try different light colors and see how those work.

John Watson, the man behind the many fun photo-related web applications at BigHugeLabs was feeling a little down last week, and in response he produced yet another web app. But this one is a little different; while his other web apps often provide inspiration as a by-product of other actions, Watson's latest site, dubbed Ideas, is intended as a source of inspiration as a primary focus.

When you visit Ideas, you are presented with a large search box, beside which sits a button that simply states, "inspire me!" Type in a word, and the site will present you with a series of sets of information that is somehow related to the word entered. If you're feeling bereft of ideas for even a word to enter, a few examples are provided such as love, beauty, sorrow, yes, red, winter, home, africa, kiss.

Depending on the word you enter, Ideas may or may not be able to find examples of the following types:

• Famous quote
• Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr
• Color swatches from COLOURlovers.com
• Songs from Last.fm
• Related words from BigHugeLabs.com
• Videos from YouTube.com
• Listings from Etsy.com
• Bookmarks from Delicious.com
• Article from Wikipedia.com

What a great way for creative people that are looking for a little boost in the inspiration department to start with a specific word and serendipitously follow a trail to something that may well inspire them.

Twitter being the public communication platform that it is, where anybody is free to follow anybody else, leaves room for some interesting ways to use the information that people are passing around. For example, Twitcaps is a site that aggregates the links to photos that people post, and puts them together into a grid for easy browsing. You can view the pictures sorted by Newest Images or Most Popular.

Newest Images tends to be more interesting if you're looking to see a cross-section of what people are randomly posting links to, whereas Most Popular tends to be pictures of celebrities, since presumably these are more likely to be reposted by their fans.

When viewing the grid, you can mouse over any image to see the content of the tweet where it originated, and clicking on an image pops up a larger view. For the truly voyeuristic, there is an option to auto-refresh the page.

Of course, probably the most interesting function in Twitcaps is the ability to search for specific words, hashtags or users. The results may not always be what you're expecting, but it can be fun to see what comes up when you put a particular search term in.

Though I haven't come across any offensive material, keep in mind that the images displayed in Twitcap are random pictures being linked to by random people. Hey, it's the internet - browser beware.

Pixelpipe defies definition a bit, but basically it's a mo-blogging / mobile micro-blogging tool that satisfies nearly every sharing feature I've ever wanted from my mobile since the first time I picked up a smartphone.

When I mention Pixelpipe to people they usually say, "Oh, like Ping.fm." Yes, yes, Ping.fm lets you update a ton of services but, Ping doesn't do video or audio -- although they've been threatening to do video for a while. On the other hand, while Pixelpipe does text, audio, photo and video, until recently there wasn't a convenient way to get your video to Pixelpipe while on the move.

Friday Pixelpipe launched a new version for Android phones, taking advantage of the newly released video recording features in Android 1.5. When I read the anouncement, I realized -- as much as I've pimped out Pixelpipe on my own Twitter feed -- I've never actually posted about it on Download Squad. For shame!

With clients for Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone and Android, you can send quick updates, longer blog posts, just-snapped photos, just-taken video, and audio snippets to over 75 different social services. All your favorites are there (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, 12seconds, etc.. ) along with some services you might not have used -- If you can name all the logos on the PixelPipe list, you're doing better than I am.

Added to that, Pixelpipe will do traditional, non-social sharing like uploading to any ftp server, email any address or post to just about any blog.

Pixelpipe clients for all platforms are available for free at PixelPipe's site, and the updated Android client is available via the Android Marketplace from your phone.

Using Psykopaint is as easy as uploading a photo and messing with some of the effects sliders on the side to adjust your brush. Don't worry that there's no way to pick colors, your brush will automatically grab them from your photo. There are sliders for both minimum and maximum, which makes your brush unpredictable and the result more organic. If you set a wide range for brush size, for example, each stroke could end up being a completely different width.

To see what some very serious Psykopainters have come up with, check out the site's gallery. There's some strange, beautiful, and spooky artwork there.

Psykopaint is currently free, but a premium desktop version is in the works.

Professional art critics endlessly debate the merits of various photographs -- heck, that's the entire premise of a photography contest! -- but what if a computer could reliably do the same thing? Researchers at Penn State put together a photo ranking algorithm that you can now test for yourself on the web. It's called Acquine, and it's based on data from large numbers of human ratings that determined what people find aesthetically pleasing in a photo.

For best results, give Acquine a high-resolution color photo, at least 600x600 pixels. It will give the photo an unbiased rating between 0 and 100. There's a library of the photos people have already uploaded, and you check them out in rank order to see if the algorithm gives the same results you would have. It's definitely an interesting exercise, and a thought-provoking comment on the challenges of replicating human aesthetic judgments through software.

With all the hoopla over Apple's approval process for iPhone apps, it's nice to see them make a sensible decision about a feature they could have nitpicked. Cooliris, a slick image-viewing app we've covered before, recently added an option to adjust SafeSearch settings for Google images. That means you can view NSFW image search results on your iPhone in one of the best-looking gallery interfaces around.

This is a big win all around. Although Cooliris is great for galleries on social sites like Facebook, being able to display Google Images results is one of its best features. Now users who don't want to see NSFW images still don't have to, but now users who want to see them have that option. Other features in the latest version of the Cooliris iPhone app include bookmarking sites and RSS feeds, and sharing via Twitter.

[via Webware]

I really like the idea of Hitachi's Gazopa, especially now that it's been released as an iPhone application. I just wish it worked a little better, that's all.

Here's what's supposed to happen. First, you choose a source image - you can choose to take a new photo, pick from photos you have saved, or even sketch something quickly right on your screen.

Gazopa then scours the net to find similar images for you, and that's where it fell short for me.

I'll be the first to admit that my attempt to draw Homer Simpson's head was a bit ham-handed, but the shape and color would certainly have given it away to any human. Gazopa, however, matched it up with pictures of Leatherman tools and sterling silver pendants, neither of which even had any yellow in them.

I won't place all the blame on Gazopa for failing on this attempt. The iPhone/iPod isn't the most fantastic drawing tool in the world, and an accurate original is probably pretty important to an image-matching service.

I tried again using an image of Columbus Blue Jackets forward Rick Nash, and again Gazopa didn't turn up any solid matches.

One more try with a more iconic image yielded better results. Using the Detroit Red Wings emblem as my source, Gazopa scored a ton of direct hits. Success at last!

Once the technology can work as well with more complex images, Gazopa will definitely be a handy tool. For now, it's still got some hurdles to overcome.

If you're in need of some fresh iPhone suggestions this Easter weekend, here's a few awesome apps that have caught our eye or been recently updated. If I've missed your favourite iPhone app, be sure to share it in the comments!

1. Flight Control [$1 - iTunes Link]
Flight Control is a ridiculously-simple, yet super stylish game that tasks you with ensuring that a variety of aeroplanes land on their designated runways. Priced at $1 (at least for now) Flight Control is as addictive as it is slick, and it's got a permanent place on my homescreen.

2. Darkslide [Free with Ads, $3.99 without - iTunes Link]
I've spoken before about Darkslide, but if you're a Flickr fan and recently uploaded videos the the service, you'll love the recent update to Darkslide that lets you playback videos on your phone - great for showing friends and family a video that would have previously required a laptop to playback.

3. Trapster [Free - iTunes Link]
If you're travelling to see family this weekend, Trapster may come in handy. Trapster is a social network that allows users to share the location of speed traps, and their free iPhone app allows you to keep tabs on trap locations around the world on the go: super handy for avoiding an Easter weekend ticket.

4. Ego [$1.99 - iTunes Link]
If you're on the road and want to keep tabs on personal stats such as website visitors (or Twitter followers for the vain amongst you) Ego is for you. Beautifully designed, and with more services being added all the time, Ego is a user interface and web-stat junkies dream.

5. Bump [Free - iTunes Link]
There's a tonne of business-card exchange applications on the App Store. However the consensus in my unscientific tests (conducted, in the name of Download Squad, in the pub with some friends) is that Bump is perhaps the 'funnest'. You and a friend simply launch the application on your iPhones, select the contact details you're happy to share, and then 'bump' the two phones together. Through the magic of location data and timestamps, your vCard is sent, and your contact's vCard is added to your Address Book.

If you shoot high-res photos, and you're looking for a way to show them off that doesn't take up as much space as the full-size image, but doesn't hide all the details like a thumbnail, you might want to give Closr a look. Closr lets you upload a photo, and transforms it into a widget that viewers can zoom in and out of. That way, they can either see a thumbnail, or zoom way in and drag to look at different parts of your image.

The widgets also have some other useful functions, like a full-screen button, and another button that resets the photo to its starting size. There's minimal branding and excess junk attached to them, too, so they're not going to make your site look terrible when you embed them. If you have the particular problem of finding a way to display your large photos, Closr might be the solution.

LiteFlick is a fast way to see the most interesting Flickr photos of the day, and display Flickr search results in a nice-looking layout that makes it easy to find what you're looking for. It uses a jQuery lightbox plugin so you don't have to load a Flickr page to see a larger version and a caption of each photo.

Flickr's search results are great, and very detailed, but all the information they give you makes it tough to browse through pages of results looking for something you'll know when you see it. That's what makes LiteFlick's 10 x 8 grid of photos so useful. You can scan through 80 photos in seconds, and easily get more details when you want them. The crucial feature LiteFlick is missing is a Creative-Commons-only search, which would make finding photos for blog posts a whole lot faster.

There are many ways to share your content online with family and friends. From Flickr to Facebook to MySpace, YouTube and Twitter, there's no shortage of ways, or platforms, to express yourself via words, pictures and videos. Several months ago I was introduced to another of these type of sites called Posterous.

At Posterous, much like these other sites, you can post words, pictures and videos via email from whatever device you happen to be using -- be it iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry or desktop computer. At first, I was a bit skeptical about how Posterous would distinguish itself from the other sites and platforms I use regularly.

However, once I started using Posterous and had my own page, I was quickly impressed with its simplicity, its design and its usability. Soon it became my site of choice for posting images on the go from my iPhone and may very well replace Flickr as my photo site of choice in the near future.

Recently, I talked with Sachin Agarwal, one of Posterous' co-founders, to get all the latest info on the site, how it came to be and where its going.

CHRIS ULLRICH: First off, let's talk a bit about your background. Where did you grow up, go to school, work and develop the skills to do something like Posterous?

SACHIN AGARWAL: Garry and I both went to Stanford and majored in Computer Science. When I graduated, I worked at Apple on Final Cut Pro for 6 years which was all the way up to starting Posterous. I was building the real-time playback engine and effects architecture.

That didn't have a direct impact on the formation of Posterous, except that we're definitely Apple people at heart, and we want to be the Apple of blogging. We want to make the simplest, most beautiful site out there, and make it accessible to the masses.

CU: When did you first have the idea for Posterous, how is it put together and when did it first go live?

Sequential started life as an image browser, and it's still a nice way to view batches of images, but it's also turned into the best Mac comics reader out there. I've tried other apps like Jomic and Comical, and found that they don't measure up to sequential in terms of speed, stability, and Mac-like feel. For whatever reason, large .cbr and .cbz files tend to crash most Mac readers. Not Sequential, though. It handled a 400-page collection of files without even a beachball.

On top of being fast and crash-free, Sequential is also just plain pretty. It displays EXIF data for photos in nice, Leopard-style bezels, and has all the resizing options you could want for either photos or comics pages. Navigating entire folders is no problem, and there are even next folder / previous folder controls. There's also a slideshow mode, which might not be that useful for reading the latest manga, but comes in handy for batches of photos. Bottom line: if you read comics digitally, Sequential is well worth the download.