I know some of you Photo Effects Plus users may be wondering why Photo Effects Pro wasn’t an upgrade to Plus. This is a logical question and was the original plan last year when Photo Effects and Photo Effects Plus were released. The plan was to upgrade them to Hybrid apps (that don’t require a web service) when webOS 2.x was to be released last Fall.  Fall came and went and eventually HP/Palm made the decision not to release webOS 2.x to all “legacy” phones.  This cut off a viable upgrade path for the older Photo Effects apps.  To upgrade them to hybrid apps now would require setting a minimum OS version to 2.1 in the App Catalog.  This means that all Plus users on 1.4.x (and 2.0) would be cut off from upgrading or re-installing an app they paid for.   So in the end Photo Effects Pro was born as a new app, requiring webOS 2.1 or higher to install.  It’s not the perfect solution (and now I have to keep my web service running for the indefinite future) but it’s the way it is.

Now that the effects are applied directly on the phone in Photo Effects Pro I have more power to run effects that didn’t work on a shared web service.  (The longer it takes to apply an effect, the slower the web service gets.)  Keep your eye out for some new effects and features in future upgrades.  (And for you users of Photo Effects Plus, if I run across an effect that will fit well in the web service model I will upgrade Plus as well.)