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K•Swiss TubeSnap
version 1.0
Price: Free
Bottom Line: Good fisheye lens effect, but app places a promo stamp on every image and saves at low-res output
K•Swiss TubeSnap, created for K•Swiss, is a free photo app that applies a fish-eye lens effect to your images. It’s sponsored by K•Swiss Tubes, a line of shoes. Although it applies a nice effect, it succeeds better as a promo tool for K•Swiss than as a camera.
TubeSnap is not a camera, it’s a shoe ad. The ad, umm — app opens to three choices — Tube Camera, View Snaps and Browse Tubes. View Snaps is a link to the app’s public gallery of snaps taken with the app and Browse Tubes is an in-app catalog of shoes.
TubeSnap applies a pretty nice fisheye lens effect to images loaded from the camera roll or taken from within the app. It applies a good amount of distortion, but not too much. It frames the image nicely in a round lens-effect border. There’s a small logo at the top of the frame. Images save to a lightbox in the app and can be saved to you camera roll, emailed or shared to the TubeSnap public gallery.
TubeSnap saves images at a mere 480×480 pixels, which is small but barely passable for sharing on both Facebook and Flicker. I suspect that by design, these images are just supposed to be viewed on mobile phones. The app’s low resolution is not mentioned in the App Store description. There is no option to save at higher resolutions. It doesn’t save your original images if you use the in-app camera.
I realize that I’m bashing a free app, but K•Swiss TubeSnap doesn’t belong in the Photography section of the App Store. K•Swiss TubeSnap is the equivalent of a cheap, plastic, promotional toy handed to you by hawkers in the mall. Its purpose is to get you to stop for a second to look at a product. In that regard, TubeSnap succeeds. As a camera, it may find a community who appreciate it as a toy camera for the K•Swiss label. For sharing or any iPhoneography, this is a completely disposable app.
App Store link: K•Swiss TubeSnap
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