Add to that control over your iTunes on Mac Internet Radio Stations and Movie & TV Show rentals and there really is no reason to get off the couch over the break.

Thankfully this version also appears to fix the iPad bug that occurred when a password protected movie was started by the physical remote and you tried to enter the password using the Remote.app on your iPad.

There’s a list as long as your arm of changes and it’s looking like a solid update, not to mention fixing a few bugs that were annoying to say the least. (Note the infamous VolumeSnap feature is gone.)

UPDATE: tap tap tap have also just launched a competition to promote version 2 and the return to the app store.

The most notably change is the cleaned up and simplified UI - including removal of the (to me) annoying SLR interface. Overall I’ve put these changes in the plus column.

The other change I appreciate is the increased size of the menu - but that could be because I’m getting old and crotchety.

Improvements

Overall Camera+ feels smoother and more responsive on my 3GS and I imagine the same will apply when I try it out on the iPhone 4 later today. Part of this comes from a quicker startup but the UI improvements seem to help with the work flow as well.

The operation of the stabilizer function appears to be improved too, apart from firing faster, the low light results seem better, if this fern is anything to go by.

Open on Flickr

Another improvement is the the Grit border is now available in “Light” and “Dark” versions, the light version is used on the image below. That image also uses the newly added “Depth of Field” effect.

Open on Flickr

Additions

There are a range of new effects in addition to the previously mentioned “Depth of Field”, including a new in-app purchase option for a set of filters called the “I ♥ Analog” pack. At $0.99 it’s not a big expense and so far the few tests I’ve done seem to work well.

The new effects include Cyanotype, Tailfins and Depth of Field, the in-app purchased “I ♥ Analog” effects pack brings 9 more effects of varying types. These are:

• Diana
• Silver Gelatin
• Helios
• Contessa
• Nostalgia
• Expired
• XPRO C-41
• Pinhole
• Chromogenic

Other interesting additions are a timer shooting mode as well as a burst shooting mode. The timer mode can have it’s delay adjusted by tapping on the screen. As the screenshot shows their is a slight orientation issue.

As a part of the UI overhaul the menu is now accessible through a pop-over panel in both the camera and lightbox modes.

When taking a photo you can tap to focus and use a second finger to select an exposure as before, once this is done you can lock the white balance using the little padlock icon that appears when setting the exposure. While I like the ability to lock your white balance it would be nice if it survived a trip to the lightbox or restarting the app.

Overall

This is a very solid update to what used to be the best camera application on the iPhone, support for iPhone 4 not withstanding, there is a lot of usable power in Camera+ v2 which could make it once again the best camera app on the iPhone. For users that haven’t been able to get it for the last few months it’s well worth adding to your photography app kit, for the rest of us - if you like your VolumeSnap then you may not want to upgrade. For me though, all the new features and iPhone 4 specific support make VolumeSnap a small sacrifice.

For now Camera+ and I will spend the next few days understanding the new features and UI. There’s lots of little things in there to find.

So iTunes is a particular pain for me - as it doesn’t let me change the rating of a song from the keyboard - at least not fresh out of the box.

We’re going to change that.

First up we need to think about what keyboard shortcuts you want to assign to each of the commands in the ratings menu (shown to the right). You don’t wan’t to conflict with any shortcuts that already exist in the application and you want them to be easy to remember and finally you don’t want some difficult to execute combination.

From looking at iTunes, I can see that video size uses ⌘0 - ⌘3 but for me that’s not an issue as I tend to watch iTunes video on a TV or iPhone not my Mac. (If it really worries you, you can use ⇧⌘0 - ⇧⌘5 to change the rating - where ⇧ is the Shift key.)

For this exercise I’m going to use the following keyboard shortcuts -

• ⌘0 - for “None”
• ⌘1 - for “★”
• ⌘2 - for “★★”
• ⌘3 - for “★★★”
• ⌘4 - for “★★★★”
• ⌘5 - for “★★★★★”

I’ll also setup a keyboard shortcut for increasing and decreasing the current rating of a song, for that I’ll use:

• ⌘↑ - for “Increase by 1”
• ⌘↓ - for “Decrease by 1”

At this point the observant will have noted that there is no menu item to increase/decrease rating - we’ll fix this with a few very simple AppleScripts.

Most people tend to forget (or just don’t realise) that Mac OS X allows you to set “Keyboard Shortcuts” for any menu item through the Keyboard System Preferences panel. All you need are the application name (iTunes), the menu item names (shown above) and what shortcut you want to assign to each menu item.

Step 2

Find and open the Keyboard preferences and lets get straight into it.

Step 2

Under the Keyboard tab, make sure the “Show Keyboard & Character Viewer in menu bar” preference is ticked, like the screenshot below.

Step 3

Once you’ve done that you’ll want to click on the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab and then in the source list you will need to click on the last entry “Application Shortcuts”

Step 4

Click the “+” button to add a new keyboard shortcut. This will bring up a panel that allows you to select the application, enter a menu title and specify the keyboard shortcut you want to assign. First step select iTunes from the application list - if you don’t the Shortcut will be applied to all applications.

The first iTunes shortcut we’ll set up is for “None” and we’ll use the easy to remember shortcut ⌘0

Type “None” into the menu title field, making sure it’s exactly the same as the entry in your iTunes menu, then advance to the keyboard shortcut field and set the shortcut by typing ⌘0 on your keyboard.

Finally click the Add button, and you’ve done the first shortcut.

Step 5

This process seems easy doesn’t it, and it is, as long as you can type the correct menu name into the interface. Setting shortcuts for rating 1 to 5 stars is not so easy, for starters most of us don’t have a ★ key on our keyboards. This is where the Character Viewer comes in very handy, in your menu bar, on the right-hand side you will find the Character menu (it looks like a little box with an * inside it. Click on that to reveal the menu, like this one:

Select the Character Viewer to get a window that floats above everything and looks like this:

If your Character Viewer doesn’t look like this you may have to select “Roman” from the View menu in the top left corner of the Characters window. Once you’ve got the “Roman” view select the ★ Stars/Asterisks entry in the source list on the left (as shown in the screenshot). The very first star you see should be the “BLACK STAR” and it should be already selected.

Step 6

Now to create the shortcuts for ratings 1 to 5. It’s really quite simple, as with Step 4 we click the “+” button to add a new keyboard shortcut. If you’ve done each step correctly so far iTunes will still be the selected application, so all we have to do is enter the name and set the key combination.

With your Character Viewer window still open click in the text box for the menu title and then double click on the ★ glyph. This will insert the glyph into the menu title. Next set the keyboard shortcut field to ⌘1 as shown in the screenshot. Then click the Add button.

Steps 7 - 10

Repeat Step 6 increasing the number of ★ glyphs and setting the appropriate shortcut keys, until you’ve created the shortcut for a 5 ★ rating, as shown below.

Step 11

The final two keyboard shortcuts require a bit of AppleScript, - don’t panic it’s easy. As mentioned previously iTunes doesn’t have menu items to increase or decrease a rating, rather you directly set the value you want.

We’re going to create two simple scripts and make them appear in the iTunes script menu (it’s the one to the left of the Help menu that looks like a scroll.)

The scripts that I’m using below are pretty simple, first up they get the current selection from iTunes. In iTunes the current selection is not necessarily the currently playing/paused track.

If the selection isn’t empty, we store the selected tracks in sel and then work through each item in the selection. Depending on the script we either add or subtract 20 from the rating value. Why 20? Well iTunes actually uses a 0 to 100 range for ratings and each star is 20 points on the scale. (For bonus fun see what happens with increments of 10). NB. this script works on the selection, so if you have multiple items selected it will adjust all of them.

Open Script Editor and paste in this:

Script #1

tell application "iTunes"
    if selection is not {} then
        set sel to selection
        repeat with tTrack in sel
            set orig_Rating to the rating of tTrack
            set tName to the name of tTrack
            set new_Rating to orig_Rating - 20
            if new_Rating < 0 then
                set new_Rating to 0
            end if
            set rating of tTrack to new_Rating
        end repeat
    end if
end tell

Save the script into

/Users/yourname/Library/iTunes/Scripts/

Script #2

tell application "iTunes"
    if selection is not {} then
        set sel to selection
        repeat with tTrack in sel
            set orig_Rating to the rating of tTrack
            set tName to the name of tTrack
            set new_Rating to orig_Rating + 20
            if new_Rating > 100 then
                set new_Rating to 100
            end if
            set rating of tTrack to new_Rating
        end repeat
    end if
end tell

Repeat those steps for Script #2 saving it as “Rating Increase by 1” into the same folder. Once you’ve done that if you check your Script menu in iTunes it will look something like this:

Of course, you will be missing the keyboard shortcuts.

Step 12

Go back to the Keyboard Shortcut preferences tab and add two more entries that should look like this:

If you need to refer back to Step 4.

That’s it you’re done.

Open iTunes and enjoy the keyboard goodness.