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As part of the promotional build up for J.J Abrams's latest blockbuster Super 8, a Super 8 camera emulator app has been released on the app store.

The film - coming out June 10th - focuses on the tale of a group of friends who witness a mysterious train crash in 1979 before noticing increasingly strange things occuring around their small town. The hype has been ever growing and it's not surprising considering Abrams' past successes with Fringe, Star Trek, Cloverfield and of course the phenomenally successful Lost.

The Super 8 app aims to tap into the 1970s feel to photography with users able to make their own vintage movies in the typical Super 8 style that kids of the 70s will fondly remember. Users can add different lenses with the choice of seven different effects ranging from black and white, chromatic to x-ray or infrared appearance. They can add one of three animated filters as well as the good old creepy thriller movie staple: the shake effect. Adding a scratch and dirt overlay is also possible providing a great aged feel to the experience. Once the video has been created, users can then arrange clips and scenes just how they want, as well as add their own credits if they so wish. It makes for a great amateur movie kind of feel.

Once the video has been finalisd, users can then view their movies from within the Super 8 projector room, or they can export it to their PC or email it to friends. There's even unlockables to acquire with users able to reveal missing frames from the Super 8 editing room film by playing their movies back a sufficient amount of times.

It all makes for a pretty cool interface that also happens to produce some great results.

Super 8 is a free app download available for iPhone 3Gs and upwards, 4th generation iPod touches and the iPad 2.

Calorie counting is sensible in theory, but precisely measuring every morsel is a hassle at best and at worst, impractical and ridiculous. I'm not claiming to be a nutritional or behavioral expert, but honestly, how many people do you know who faithfully record the contents of every meal? However, a new app seeks to solve this problem of inconvenience with an amusing solution to innate human laziness. Called Meal Snap, its concept is simple: take a picture of your food, and the app will report exactly what you've been eating.

Meal Snap lets you take pictures of the meals you eat, and then magically tells you what food was in your meal. Oh yeah, we give you a rough estimate of the calories you ate too. Food tracking has never been easier.

Makes you feel like the app is actually...intelligent. Of course, the "auto-magical" food detection isn't perfect, so perhaps our iPhones can't yet become self-aware and take over the world. However, Meal Snap is still very impressive in that it focuses on a key barrier to food-tracking—inconvenience—and eliminates it almost entirely. You'll probably have your phone on you whenever you eat, and snapping a quick photo is much more efficient than manually scribbling down a detailed list of your meal. (Plus, even if the "auto-magical" detection fails, you still know what you've eaten thanks to the photo!)

You can do more with Meal Snap than just get instant information. The app allows users to share photos using Twitter and Facebook, and you can browse through previous days' meals, viewing total calories per day and reviewing old pictures.

Meal Snap is certainly a very cool idea, and, if the app's estimates are accurate, a potentially very useful app as well. We love seeing apps that make innovative use of the ubiquity and capabilities of iOS devices, and Meal Snap definitely fits that category!

If you'd like to give Meal Snap a spin, it's available now in the App Store for $2.99.

Camera+, the popular (currently in the top 5 in the US App Store) and well-received camera app, rated 5 stars here on 148Apps, is not resting on its laurels when it comes to updates. TapTapTap has introduced a new filter called Clarity to the recently-released 2.2 Camera+ update. This filter, designed as a response to the HDR feature introduced by Apple in iOS 4, is designed to draw out colors and details from photos that may have otherwise been lost, through multiple behind the scenes adjustments. TapTapTap's site goes into how it works and provides some examples it can improve photos, but how does it work in the real world?

I decided to test out the new Clarity filter on some pictures I've taken with my iPod touch 4th Generation, including ones taken before the app was updated with the Clarity filter, so you can definitely use the filter on any picture you've taken or any you've imported into the app. These photos below are of Louie, the greatest dog in the world, and in these photos, he is wearing a dog Snuggie. On the left, you see the untouched photo - it is a poor lighting situation, and a lot of the details are lost. On the right is the photo after running the Clarity filter. As you can tell, a lot of the details that were lost in the original photo were lost - the colors that were too dark to stand out in the lighting are more visible now. A lot of the grain of the iPod touch camera is now more visible, but this is largely due to the mediocre camera, than the filter itself.

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So while this won't magically turn your mediocre photos into wonderful pictures, it can dramatically increase their quality to a point where they're actually decent photos now. While it's not a replacement for taking a great photo with proper lighting, sometimes the photos we take aren't in perfect situations - and this filter can definitely help out a bit with correcting those imperfections. As well, the 2.2 update has a variety of other bug fixes and improvements, listed on their blog post for the 2.2 update. These updates as well as the Clarity filter are now available as a free update to Camera+, currently on sale for $0.99.

A few months back, tap tap tap's wonderful Camera+ app was pulled from the App Store for sneaking in a feature that was disallowed from the app in a previous build. The feature, which was wonderful, gave users the option of turning the volume buttons on the iPhone into the camera shutter so you could completely free up the screen for the viewfinder. Apple, in their own technical lingo, replied with:

Your application cannot be added to the App Store because it uses iPhone volume buttons in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion. Changing the behavior of iPhone external hardware buttons is a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. Applications must adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as outlined in the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement section 3.3.7.

Unfortunately for us, the feature was then snuck back into the app in an Easter egg that was widely reported on various tech blogs which forced Apple to kill the app for good. Camera+ then slinked off into iOS app limbo and was forgotten by many. Sad times indeed.

Four months and a few staff member additions later though, Camera+ has been re-released with version 2.0 and has a whopping 50 new features (minus whole volume button camera shutter). Fans of Camera+ can expect more of the same great interface that made the original app so great, as well as many speed and interface improvements that may make cause some people to abandon the old Apple standby.

The app is currently 99 cents, but pick it up fast because tap tap tap may bump the price up when they decide that their relaunch celebration is over. If anything, get it now before it gets pulled again!

Also, be sure to check back after the break for the complete list of the apps improvements.

tap tap tap's Camera+ was allegedly pulled from the App Store by Apple this morning for sneaking in a hidden feature that Apple had previously denied.

The feature in question was tap tap tap's manipulation of the volume control buttons, letting them control the camera shutter rather than a button on the screen. In their own words, by using the volume controls instead of an on-screen button, "photos can be sharper because you can now hold your iPhone steadier with two hands instead of fumbling around for the shutter button on screen."

It makes sense, as it puts the volume buttons right where the shutter button would normally be on a camera, but Apple didn't like it. Apple, in their statement to tap tap tap regarding their reasoning for rejecting the feature, wrote that,

Your application cannot be added to the App Store because it uses iPhone volume buttons in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion. Changing the behavior of iPhone external hardware buttons is a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement. Applications must adhere to the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as outlined in the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement section 3.3.7.

Instead of letting the feature die though, tap tap tap threw in a hidden trick in their latest version. They released in a tweet that "by visiting the URL camplus://enablevolumesnap in Mobile Safari, one could make the volume buttons on the side of the iPhone instead act as a camera shutter button".

The tweet was pulled soon after, but tap tap tap had to have known that the feature would be widely publicized and eventually found by Apple. They said themselves in their blog post regarding the initial feature rejection that, "When Apple finds out about these incidents, they tend to crack down pretty hard on them, sometimes going so far as completely banning the developers from the App Store. So this is definitely not the smart way to go."

Now what are the chances that tap tap tap, in order to spur sales for an app that was admittedly slumping in sales, planted the Twitter post, knew that big sites would pick up on the story, and then pulled the app themselves?

Regardless, the app is not in the App Store anymore, and it is unclear if Apple will do/ has done anything about the situation. There have also oddly been no comments from tap tap tap on their blog or elsewhere about the app being pulled, which, considering the apps popularity, would be expected if they were going to try to force Apple's hand through public support. Media stunt or not, it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

[Source: MobileCrunch, Gizmodo, tap tap tap]