Stories by: Harry McCracken

FlauntR online photo editor is a veritable eye-candy store crammed with effects, fonts, clip art, borders, and other tools.

If an award existed for "Web Image Editor Most Likely to Be Mistaken for Photoshop," Splashup (formerly known as Fauxto) would win in a cakewalk.

Buried in the Picture2Life beta we tried are occasional, tantalising hints of a pleasing online photo-editing app.

Fotoflexer, which bills itself as "The world's most advanced online image editor," does indeed pack an amazing array of capabilities -- including a few that no other Web-based Photoshop alternative dares to attempt.

If you expected startling news to come out of Monday's keynote for Apple's World-Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) -- headlined, of course, by Steve Jobs -- you went away unstartled and disappointed.

Jobs is explaining that it's been hard, historically, for developers to distribute their phone apps. Apple is fixing that with the Apps Store, which will be on all iPhones with the new software release.

Apple answered a lot of questions about iPhone apps today. But its announcement also left me wondering about a bunch of things.

Steve Jobs is, among many other things, the great denier. Second mouse buttons, floppy drives, 56-kbps modems--for decades, he's been perfectly willing to release producrs that lack one or more features that are standard equipment on everyone else's computers if he thinks they're unnecessary or offend his design principles or aesthetic sense.

Better brushes and photo tools make for a winning upgrade.

You could make a case that there's no such thing as a full-blown office suite that can't do presentations. And if that's true, Google Docs just became a full-blown office suite.

Apple's operating system upgrade is full of good stuff, but there's room for improvement. Lots and lots of it. Herewith, my list of gripes, requests, and puzzlements.