A blog about software is never complete without some screenshots. And, in “Web 2.0″ style, I need some effects in my screenshots. You know, shadows, watermarks, rounded corners, reflections, that kind of stuff.
Since i’m kinda lazy, I want to have my computer do as much for me as it can. But that was obviously the main reason why we all bought a computer, or any piece of technology: because they make life easier (unless you use Microsoft products of course *sarcastic grin*). Well, I heard about this Phatch program, and because it was free (as in beer, it is free as in speech as well, but that’s not the main point I decided to try it), I gave it a twist.
The program is written in Python. Uh-oh. Python+Mac = trouble with packaging. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that when it’s difficult to package something (even more difficult since not everybody owns a Mac), you’ll probably see yourself without precompiled package. And, like I said above, I’m of the lazy kind. Well, after reading all the dependancies (and the dependancies’ depandancies, and so on), and having half my Downloads directory stuffed with .tar.gz files (and a .dmg, FYI), I decided to start compiling… Well, after I tried to install the first program, the installer crashed with an unclear error. You know them: Error. An error has occured. Thank you, Captain Obvious!
Well, I still have this miserable, unknown operating system that only some die-hard nerds use. I’ve installed it in VirtualBox, so I don’t need to shut down my glorious Mac OS X (that, and that my glorious Mac OS X screwed up my partition table). I believe it’s called Ubuntu or something( 
). Well, booted that one, and oh miracle, a precompiled package was available!
Well, so I installed the package and tried it. While it wouldn’t be bad to have some more features, and that there is not a lot of help available (the names of the options aren’t very intiutive), and a preview-option would be nice, it’s still a very good program — better than doing all this stuff by hand (i.e. with The Gimp).
Below are a few screenshots of the program, token from the site itself (did I tell you I’m kinda lazy?)
Screenshots
Example
Rating
Ease-of-use: 9
Translations: 8
Supported platforms: 6
Intuitive: 8
Overall: 8. Recommended
Website
Direct download link:
0.1.4, Ubuntu Hardy:http://launchpadlibrarian.net/15095968/phatch_0.1.4.bzr538-0ubuntu1%7E8.04%7Eppa1_all.deb
0.1.5, source code: http://sd-2469.dedibox.fr/photobatch/download/package/phatch-0.1.5.tar.gz
