Simply B&W Free on Black Friday

by Pu on November 24, 2011

Another interesting Black Friday offer for you to enjoy: Simply B&W will be free for the whole day tomorrow (November 25, 2011) in the App Store. The offer will be valid for one day only — after Friday the app will go back to its regular App Store price ($0.99/€0.79/£0.69).

Simply B&W Free

Simply B&W is a universal photography app for iDevices to convert color images into black and white. The app is minimally designed but it has everything iPhone, iPad and iPod photographers need to turn photos in quality black and white images without breaking a sweat. Some of the main features of Simply B&W are color filters, grain simulation, vignetting and the possibility to add basic borders to images.

You will find a previous review of the Simply B&W here.
Simply B&W - Mr. B. Ware

Miege November 25, 2011 at 8:59 pm

Max resolution is still 5 MP. :-/

Miege November 25, 2011 at 9:02 pm

OK, it was raised to 10 MP but limited to square format. :-/

Meher November 26, 2011 at 5:11 pm

The blog is v nice i liked it.

ILAR November 28, 2011 at 2:44 am

ALERT: Bleach Bypass is currently free for a very limited time.

Ian December 28, 2011 at 3:59 pm

I use this app fairly frequently, and I absolutely love it.

Squishybrain January 5, 2012 at 12:50 am

Anyone know why there have been no updates on the blog for so long?

RayCarver January 5, 2012 at 1:15 am

I think the blog has been abandoned by the author. I’m deleting from my favorites.

Squishybrain January 6, 2012 at 6:34 am

Yeah, that’s the conclusion I’m coming to. It’s a shame. The how-to tutorials were quite good. Without a ‘Farewell’ post, it’s hard to tell what happened to Pu.

Harry January 10, 2012 at 5:28 am

Hey there,
thanks for asking – I am one of the admins of the website. The blog is on hiatus right now, as unfortunately paying jobs are taking all our time.

Many things happened. First, Appotography, even at its most traffic, was making just a few dollars from the iTunes links – thousands of apps have been sold through us, but the cumulative income from all the referrals is so tiny it won’t pay a single month of hosting!

Then we had some serious, serious problems with Google. Apparently, somebody that had something against our website (or so we supposed, even though it seems absurd) replicated our content on stolen accounts on hacked servers (including university servers): so whenever we published an article, it was copied automatically in these spam copies of Appotography. We fought this as hard as we could, but it was very time consuming contacting all the hosts unknowingly running these websites – and as soon as a spam website went down, another one popped up. After the latest Google’s updates, this is a well known way to affect negatively the ranking of a website – our rankings on Google went down almost overnight for a period of many months, and this made it impossible for us to seek other ways to monetize the website (we did not want to get rich with Appotography, just pay our work on it).

The traffic is back to normal now, but unfortunately we currently do not have the resources to invest on resuming work in the immediate future. We love the website very much, but life needs real money. The “farewell” post was never there because we still do not want to give up, but do not know what to do.

Thanks a lot for caring everybody!

Miege January 10, 2012 at 9:11 am

As long as comments don’t need supervision, visitors can actually shout whatever they want about photography apps.

Harry January 10, 2012 at 5:46 pm

Hey Miege, you are correct.

We also had the forum setup for this purpose, but almost nobody wanted to use it when it was online.

Miege January 13, 2012 at 6:31 am

ProCamera $0.99 sale! But is it worth the buck? It depends on your needs–let’s find out in the battle of all-in-ones (AIOs). My brief take 😉 [obviously, I haven’t played much with ProCamera]

ProCamera’s unique pros:
+ able to lock focus/exposure
+ QR reader (not much interested)
+ Green Mode (nothing much but auto lock, if you’re thinking about a feature that conserves battery while recording–sadly it’s not)
+ image straightener
+ a more interesting (or varied) analog filters

ProCamera’s annoying cons:
– zoom not set to default/last state whenever mode is switched between photo/video. (bug maybe?)
– unable to delay video zoom post-processing

TopCamera’s unique top 6:
+ multiple resolution setups for photo, burst, slow shutter and video
+ slow shutter and HDR (not as fast as Bracket Mode/HDR Fusion)
+ in-app library and folder
+ various export feature including clipboard
+ instant/delayed video zoom post-processing
+ comprehensive photo editor with effect stacking (no image straightener but it has a better version of Clarity and with slider)

TopCamera’s annoying cons:
– when exporting multiple pictures, 1st picture is excluded (bug)
– gallery UI goes crazy sometimes when memory is low
– analog filters could be better

I bought TopCamera way back because it was $0.99 and is an AIO which apparently gets better and better. I’ve heard of ProCamera earlier before TopCamera appears but I wasn’t interested because it wasn’t much of a good AIO. Only now, it seems to match TopCamera’s features–at least. The main reason I bought it is to see if it can record video more than 1 hour but as it appears that it cannot delay video-zoom post-processing, it became unnecessary to test as it would be a waste of time.

So right now, TopCamera is best AIO in the App Store.

Hehe, freeloading on this site. 😉

Miege January 28, 2012 at 12:12 pm

App alert: Simply B&W free this weekend (1/28-29) in conjunction of its anniversary. 😉

Greer February 6, 2012 at 1:57 am

I’m sad to hear about all of the setbacks you guys have come across. Hopefully in the near future you guys will be up and running again soon.

Harry February 9, 2012 at 7:47 pm

Greer, thank you very much for the encouragement! The weird thing is that the website never had as much traffic as in these days, we need to find resources to get started again

To be brutally honest, the main issue is also the purchase of an iPhone 4S in Iceland, where it is crazy expensive – it is priced around $1140 (for the base 16GB model!!!), which we need to pay right away. In our plan, we had to start selling advertising spots on the website around mid-2011, but then the issues I listed above happened.

Miege February 18, 2012 at 3:30 am

Try outsourcing 😉

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