App Preview: Image Worker Beta 23

In the near future it will no longer be necessary to go through the extra steps of moving pictures off your device and onto the computer just to make some simple edits, nor require a good data connection. An app currently in beta shows some promise of being a robust image editing app that runs locally on webOS, which has not been possible in the pre-PDK era.

With Image Worker, it will be possible to crop, rotate, and resize images. There will also be a red eye remover, both blur and sharpen filters, and some color filters for black and white, and sepia. There is an auto level color adjustment feature that presumably is supposed to act like the similarly named feature in Photoshop. Finally, there is an ‘Edge’ setting that works like the find edges filter in Photoshop. This is currently possible with Photo Effects Plus, but in that app all the edits are done on a remote server and not actually done in a webOS app. This of course requires a good data connection to work.

Read on for more - including why this app isn't quite ready for primetime... yet.

This app needs a lot of work before it is ready for prime time. The UI is barebones, there is little design that went into it. The splash screen does say that is coming though.

In my few tests of auto level feature, the result was either hardly noticeable or actually made the picture look worse. The blur, sharpen, and edge filters all were either poorly or non-functional. Furthermore, every image you edit has the words ‘evaluation version’ emblazoned across your picture so in its current state, so this app is definitely just a preview of what is to come. 

Aside from this and poor or nonexistent performance of the filters, the app runs very, very slowly. It may well be the slowest app you will ever see run on your Palm device. It takes so long at times that you would wonder if it was working were it not for the useful ‘wait’ message that comes on screen. Let's hope that's a limitation of the app being in beta and not a sign that webOS PDK apps can't handle the work of editing photos.

Clearly it is not a usable app the way it is now but it shows some potential for the future. With a lot more work, this could end up being the first complete and useful image editor running on device for webOS. For now, stick with Photo Effects Plus, which can do many of these same features but requires a data connection.