The Breakroom

The Iconfactory and ARTIS Software are pleased to announce the immediate release of Flare 1.0 for the Mac. What is Flare? Simply put Flare is a fast, easy, and beautiful darkroom for your desktop.

With Flare, you can apply photographic effects to your photos, then save them to your Mac, upload them to Flickr, or send them in an email. Flare comes with over twenty high-quality presets to easily apply a wide range of different effects. But that’s only the beginning because Flare also gives users the power to edit existing presets or build all new ones completely from scratch.

Create presets using close to one hundred visual effects including dozens of textures, frames, lightleaks, borders and more. Once you’ve created the ultimate look for your photographs, save and share your preset creations with other Flare users quickly and easily.

We encourage you to learn more at the Flare home page, but in the meantime, here are some of the notable highlights of Flare for the Mac:

• Fine tune effects in real time via live preview

• High quality 12 Megapixel Textures, Borders and Frames

• Temporarily save edits as Snapshots for later use

• Drag and drop images from iPhoto, Aperture, Photoshop & Lightroom

• Export photos in JPEG, PNG and TIFF formats

• Share creations on Flickr or by e-mail

• Unlimited Undos

• Helpful online user guide and video tutorials

Flare for the Mac is available now from Apple’s new Mac App Store via their one-click ordering system. To celebrate the launch of Flare, we’re offering a special half off sales price this week of just $9.99. Once the launch sale is over Flare will return to it’s normal price of $19.99. Ordering from the Mac App Store is quick, easy and means there are no registration codes to keep track of.

Before purchasing you can also download a trial version of Flare that lets you experience all the powerful features of the application but limits the size of photos that can be exported.

We invite you to visit FlareApp.com to learn more about the application, download additional presets, browse the online users guide and more. Then head on over to the Mac App Store and pick up the all new digital desktop darkroom that is Flare for the Mac. Your photo is just the beginning!

So much happens around these parts it’s difficult to keep track of it all. But since 2010 is about to fade into history, it’s time once again to highlight what we were up to these last 12 months. This year saw exciting developments at the Iconfactory, and as is par for the course, most of them centered around what Apple had up its collective sleeve.

Since its release back in 2007, Twitterrific has steadily grown in popularity from the original Mac version to the iPhone and iPod touch in 2008 and this year, to Apple’s revolutionary new iPad. The iPad’s introduction back in April put a temporary kink in our plans to rev Twitterrific for Mac, but it turned out for the best. The iPad forced us to rethink our design approach and start fresh. We released Twitterrific for iPad in April, then an all-new universal version 3.0 in June that was designed to be both elegant and super easy to use. Users took to the new version in spades and in December Macworld gave Twitterrific their App Gems Award for Twitter Client of the Year. When we think about just how far Ollie has flown, we couldn’t be more proud.

Other exciting software developments in 2010 included a universal version of Pickin’ Time, the porting of our game Frenzic to the Android and Nintendo DSi platforms, and the release of Take Five for the iPhone. Take Five is a handy utility that automatically un-pauses your music for you after a set amount of time. Finally, in October we were proud to launch our fourth entertainment title, Astronut, for the iPhone and iPod touch. This year, thousands of players have enjoyed blasting off on a cosmic adventure as Jacques the Astronut and we’ve been humbled by the tweets and reviews from players and critics alike.

With all the efforts devoted to software this year, our freeware releases were a bit lighter, but not by much. We still managed to pump out 19 freeware icon sets containing over 250 free icons for your Mac and PC desktops. Add to that some 10+ cool desktop pictures and oodles of Quickpix and there were plenty of freebies to download in 2010. Noteworthy freeware sets from this year included Trek Tech, Clash of the Titans, Smoothicons 15, ATV Drives, Steampunk Storage and Carcassonne Meeple and People.

The year ahead looks to be an exciting and surprising one. We’ll have the long-awaited 4.0 update to Twitterrific for Mac plus an all-new Mac application we’re developing in conjunction with Wolfgang Ante of ARTIS Software, the author behind xScope. We’ll also add to the mix new iPhone and iPad software plus scores of new freeware releases to keep you downloading and happy.

As we do every year at this time, we take a moment to say thank you to all of you who have supported our efforts. Your willingness to visit the Iconfactory, tweet to your friends, download our creations and purchase our software is what keeps us going and makes our work our greatest pleasure. Quite frankly we couldn’t do what we do without you, nor would we want to. We hope to see you return again and again in 2011 and wish you and yours a happy holiday season!