If you’ve ever wanted to add captions, thought bubbles, or add some funky effects to your iPhone pictures, you’re not alone. The folks at Plasq have created Comic Touch, an iPhone application that resembles their popular desktop app Comic Life.

There are two main aspects to Comic Touch – annotating and effects. In typical comic fashion, it is simple to annotate pictures with speech bubbles and caption boxes. In fact, there is a total four different styles of speech bubbles. All the text fields have the same customizable features – text, size, and color scheme. There are five different built-in text sizes and two color schemes. Unfortunately, there is no way to pick the custom colors.

Effects, the second big facet of Comic Touch, is by far my favorite. This tab allows you to smudge pictures, and add bulges or dents. You can also apply a stretch, or light tunnel to your photos. Comic Touch takes advantage of the iPhone’s multitouch gestures to allow for enlarging or diminishing an effect using the pinch gesture.

Getting your edited pictures out of Comic Touch is a snap. You can either email them, save them to the built in Photos app, or upload them to a Photo sharing site that takes advantage of email uploading.

Comic Touch may not be the most productive iPhone app, but it’s definitely a fun way to spice up some photos. It is available for $2.99 with a free “lite” version for sale in the app store.

Here’s a look at the Apple-realted headlines for the week of March 22 – 28 of 2009:

• Apple Unleashes new iLife and iWork Updates
• Apple to Sell Contract-free iPhones
• WWDC Dates for 2009 Announced
• Get a subsidized Macbook in the UK with Orange?
• Variable iTunes Pricing to Begin April 7th?
• Apple Has Atrocious AppStore Refund Policies?
• Apple Releases a New Graphics Fix for the 17-inch MacBook Pro
• Snow Leopard to Sport New Marble Interface?
• Apple discontinues Bluetooth Headset
• China to Soon Get the iPhone?
• 17-Inch iMac Still Available for Institutions
• More Next-Gen iPhone Hardware Rumors?
• Genuis for Movies & TV Shows Now Activated
• Funny Apple Patent
• Will We See Skype for the iPhone?

This Week’s iBAM Posts:

• MacHeist 3
• Planting Your Code With Coda
• iPhone App Spotlight: iStat

Many Mac users will find a use for at least one of the applications offered in the Mac Heist bundle, because they have a little bit of everything for a great price. $39.00 US. This is a very small price to pay for $600.00 + dollars worth of applications.

One of the great examples is Picturesque. Picturesque is a great application that does simple editing of pictures, without any advanced knowledge, such as that required to run Photoshop, while still enhancing your photographs at a near professional level.

Another offering is Wiretap Studio. WireTap Studio is a fantastic application if you would like to create a podcast. With wiretap it is possible to capture a skype call in order to do interviews without needing a massive setup. I could go on and on about all of the apps offered, but I think you need to see them for yourself. Simply go to and check out all the applications you get for $39.00. Just remember that there is a time limit, as of this writing there are only 12 days left, as an additional incentive, 25% of the price goes to charity. Now you can’t beat that, you get some great software at a great price, while contributing to charity.

Did I mention that all the applications are FULL versions, not trial or shareware. I can’t stress what a good deal this is, so hurry over to macheist.com and get yours, but remember only 12 days left.

As someone who works with web design and code on a semi-regular basis, I’m on the hunt for the best tools to produce the finest webpages. After using many different applications, I’ve found my favorite coding environment in Coda. The creators of Transmit, Panic Software, have created a stellar piece web-development software.

Taking from their popular and successful FTP application, Panic incorporated the basics of Transmit into the sidebar of Coda. The sidebar has two tabs – ‘Local’ and ‘Remote’, for connecting and finding files easily on either the server or your machine. Also similar to Transmit, Coda can store and connect to ‘Favorites’, or ‘Sites’ as they’re called in Coda.

‘Sites’ represents one of the five views in Coda, the others are ‘Edit’, ‘Preview’, ‘CSS’, ‘Terminal’, and ‘Books’. The ‘Edit’ view is what you’d assume it to be – a code and text editor. Within this view it is possible to edit in an abundance of computing languages, such as HTML, CSS, Objective-J, Perl, Ruby, XML, Javascript, ActionScript, and many others. The editor can also display line numbers, share and edit documents using Bonjour, insert a variety of built-in and user-created clips, and display coding hints.

The second view in Coda is ‘Preview’, for previewing documents while editing. ‘CSS’, the third view is a full-featured CSS editor. Unfortunately, colors have to be entered using Mac OS X’s universal color selection panel, and the ability to enter hex codes is missing. For connecting to servers, Coda includes a built-in ‘Terminal’ panel. The sixth and final view within Coda is ‘Books’, which are four reference books for the HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP computing languages.

Coda includes many other useful features, including the ability to have multiple panes open in a single window, the capability to quickly open files, and search. Recently, Panic has opened up Coda to developers for the creation of plugins.

For a single application, Coda is able to pack many powerful features into a slick and elegant workspace. It’s definitely worth a shot for anybody who deals with coding on a regular basis. You can see more and download a free trial from Panic’s website. The full license costs $99, or $85 if you already have a copy of Transmit.

The iPhone is a full-featured computer in your pocket, and like all other computers the iPhone has a processor, memory, storage, and network connections. iStat Pro, a popular Mac OS X dashboard widget, has been ported to the iPhone to monitor and display information regarding the interworkings of your phone.

At the most basic level, iStat can display memory allotment, disk space, IP addresses, uptime & load information, and your iphone’s Unique Identifier & MAC address. The application also includes the options to ‘Free Memory’ and to email your MAC address, Unique Identifier, or both. iStat really opens up the information you can get out of your iPhone and has made me look at the device as a computer, and not as a phone.

Using the free iStat Server software, the iPhone application can view and access computer statistics remotely. For more advanced users, iStat provides ping and traceroute functionality.

iStat is a new breed of iPhone application, and excels as a superb system monitoring tool. If you’re into the geeky information you can retain about your iPhone, iStat is worth a download. It is available for $1.99 in the iPhone App Store.