CLIP: Animoto’s iPhone app makes instant slideshows from your junky pictures

iPhone fart app pulls in nearly $10,000 a day

Apple’s App Store is currently experiencing a plague of fart applications. Last week, I detailed one day in which at least 14 new fart apps were accepted into the store. And now, just in a quick search, it looks like there are about 50 apps all dedicated to making fart noises on your iPhone or iPod touch. Classy, I know, but why are there so many?

Because apparently there’s big money in fart apps — nearly $10,000 a day for the most popular ones.

Developer InfoMedia (Joel Comm), which makes iFart Mobile [iTunes link], has been releasing download statistics for the app each day since it launched. The $0.99 app has been in the top 100 paid apps every day since its launch, and has seen great growth. In fact, yesterday it hit thenumber one overall position with over 13,000 downloads. MacRumors ran the numbers, factoring out the 30 percent cut Apple takes from each sale, and determined that, yesterday alone, iFart Mobile made its developers $9,198.

Certainly, a part of this onslaught of fart apps is that Apple, which had previously rejected all crude apps, changed its policy to let them in. But now that they glimpse the potential for big business in fart apps, expect even more to come.

Of course, not all fart apps are going to make it to the number one paid app position, but a number of them are selling well. Personally, I prefer Pull My Finger [iTunes link], but it’s hard to argue with iFart Mobile’s icon, which simply reads “Best Fart App!”

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Animoto’s iPhone app makes instant slideshows from your junky pictures

Everyone loves slideshows. You sit back and watch as the images before you help you reminisce about a past event. But why wait? Now you can make a slideshow minutes after taking photos thanks to Animoto’s new iPhone app.

You simply select between eight and 16 pictures, arrange the order you want them to show up in, pick a song and let Animoto encode a video pulling it all together. Once you’re done, you can watch the video on your iPhone (in Quicktime format), edit it or share it via email with anyone. By far the longest step in the process is the encoding, and that only takes a few minutes.

But it’s not perfect. First of all, a maximum of 16 photos is a bit low. That’s not going to cut it for say, a wedding. But then again anyone who is expecting a professional wedding slideshow made on the iPhone probably deserves some 16-shot, blurry (thanks to the iPhone’s 2 megapixel camera with no flash or autofocus) footage set to music by some band no one has ever heard of.

And that’s the second problem — despite one of the iPhone’s key features being that it holds your music, Animoto won’t let you use any of it in your slideshow. Instead, it has a collection of songs from artists I’ve never heard of. Some of the stuff isn’t bad, but for sentimental slideshows, isn’t it a requirement to at least have Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”?...