Jeff Phillips

I download a lot of photography apps for my iPhone. In fact, I have three full folders of photo apps, and several more overflowing on my home screens. And those are just the ones I sync-there are lots more in my iTunes that I no longer use.

So what makes Tinrocket's Percolator hold a special place of honor on my photo-app-saturated phone? After all, it doesn't make the camera take better pictures, make shooting images faster, or provide better photo-editing capabilities. All this special effects app does is… add circles to your photos. Yep, circles. Lots of 'em: Little ones, big ones, different colored ones. But it's all in a really cool retro interface with an appealing coffee motif. Plus, Percolator is a universal app that works great on the iPad. The iPad camera isn't that good, but it is perfect for using this app, where you are likely to alter the original image beyond recognition anyway.

There must be a thousand ways you can send pictures from your iPhone to your friends and family, so I am always looking for new ways to do so. Hey, snapping a picture and uploading to Facebook is, well, so amateur.

Sharing time: You can add up to four photos on a themed, personalized Photogram.Photogram, from Timelines is my latest toy that drives those in my Facebook feed nuts. "How does he do that?", they ask. Magic, I say. Magic and iPhones. Lots of iPhones.

Having fun with pictures has become one of the regular uses for the iPhone and the latest iPod touch. Photodream from Hint App is unlikely to add to your fun, though.

You can take a picture from within the $2 app or choose an image from your photo library. You can then dress up your image, choosing effects from several categories--sunglasses, necklaces, hair and, tattoos. The recent 4.1 update added new content to the app.

Among family and friends, The Photographer is the person who's often called upon to shoot pictures in virtually every situation imaginable. Some of these circumstances may be unfamiliar, but The Photographer is expected to handle them like a pro anyway.

If this situation sounds familiar to you, let me introduce my new friend, PhotoCaddy. The $4 iPhone and iPod touch app from Aspyre Solutions is like having a professional photographer at your side giving you advice before you shoot.

Stick It from Tap Factory allows easy creation of really great-looking notes, which you can use as wallpaper on your iPhone. Of course, it's not interactive in any way, so you can't tap the note from your lock screen to see your notes app or anything. That would be groundbreaking; this app is simply useful.

Making a note is simple, as you just need to tap the plus sign at the top of the app to create one. But then notes are simple things--it's the customization where Stick It really shines. With a flurry of backgrounds, styles and colors, you can spend all day personalizing your notes and never get anything done. Thankfully, you can also set an alarm for your notes, perhaps to tell you to get back to work.

Capturing a really great, sweeping landscape in one shot has always been difficult with still photography--hard to do with a really good camera, nearly impossible with an iPhone.

Enter Boinx Software's You Gotta See This with a unique new approach to capturing the big picture. The app uses the iPhone 4's built-in gyroscope to create a panoramic view of your scene.

If you have been using apps like Notecards to study on your iPhone and you're ready to take your study habits to the next level, Mental Case Flashcards by MacCoreMac Software could be the Batman to your Robin.

Study cards are grouped into "cases," similar to stacks--just tap one to get started. Several samples are included, and they're great to try out before getting serious and putting hundreds of notes into action. The app offers a very clean interface; you can move from the front to the back of your cards with either a tap or swipe. When looking at cards including graphics, such as anatomy or art history, Mental Case allows you to go full screen, zoom and pan images, and get a good look at image details.

With the massive selection of apps available to enhance the iPhone camera, it's hard to find those that do something really valuable. Count TrueHDR among the photography apps you need for your iPhone 3GS.

This app from Pictional takes full advantage of the iPhone 3GS's built-in selective focus feature to merge two images into one. Real HDR enthusiasts may argue that this isn't exactly a real HDR image, but it certainly expands the limited capability of the iPhone camera. Although the maximum resolution for images produced with the app is only 960x960, the final results can be impressive.

At a recent holiday party with a bunch of relatives, our primary natural tendency was to share information with one another for the express purpose of keeping in touch. The next most popular priority? Passing around the last family photos of kids and dogs and grandkids.

A few years ago, these exchanges would have involved lots of little scraps of paper, old unsharpened pencils and some photo albums. This year, all it took was a room full of iPhones and two words, "Let's Bump!"

There's no shortage of flashcard apps in the App Store--even the broadest of searches turns up dozens of possibilities. Notecard, from Digital Assertion, offers a lean solution for carrying around your study cards with an easy-to-use desktop companion app for getting your study materials to your device.

There are no sample stacks included, so you'll have to make some to get the app going. Creating your own cards is straightforward, as long as you are proficient at typing on the iPhone. Enter your question on the front, flip the card, and input the answer on the back. Simple, but tedious if you happen to be entering hundreds of questions for the SATs or something.

I often don't need to say anything more than a good Twittelator post can't handle, especially when the iPhone is my weapon of choice. But for more than 140 characters, I look to publish to one of my blogs. So I decided to test two blogging apps, CLT Studio'sBlogPress and VirtueSoft.com's BlogWriter, in a no-holds-barred iPhone blogging tools shoot out.

Round One: Free versions

Getting the most out of the limited iPhone camera is one of the hurdles facing iPhone owners, and the sheer volume of camera apps in the App Store can be overwhelming. Snapture, from Snapture Labs, should be one of the first apps you download to get your iPhone camera up and shooting like a pro.

For starters, Snapture makes the entire screen of the phone the shutter button. This is handy in a lot of situations, such as taking that sharp self portrait while parasailing. This feature cannot be turned off, though, so there is the chance of an embarrassing accidental snap.