Poster 1.0 is released today. Poster is an application for Mac OS X that provides a first-class experience for posting photos and videos to the web.

Until now, there hasn’t been an ideal solution for uploading photos to the web. Uploading through a web page is usually a miserable experience. iPhoto and Aperture’s support remains fairly basic, and everything else out there is clumsy to use or shows your photos as minuscule thumbnails. Plug-ins suffer from being trapped in a box, where you can’t change your mind without losing what you’ve done so far and where every button feels like a terrible burden.

Poster explodes out of that box as a standalone app for uploading to multiple sites and accounts with a sleek design that not only lets you see your photos properly, but work with them effortlessly too. Working with Flickr and Facebook at launch, Poster takes a tailored approach that makes the most of each site’s unique features.

For Flickr, Poster can post both photos and videos, auto-complete tags, allows you to create and choose sets, submit photos to groups, tag people and moderate your photos all within the app. Its All Items view lets you work with an entire set of photos as easily as just one.

On Facebook, Poster is able not only to post to your profile, but also any pages that you administer, making Poster ideal for anyone whose business, band or cause takes advantage of Facebook’s massive user community.

Poster works with the photo editing and management applications you use and can even perform some tricks of its own, such as rotating and resizing photos before uploading. As a convenience, plug-ins are provided for iPhoto and Aperture to launch Poster with the exported files.

The best part of Poster is that it is a pleasure to use. Packed with thoughtful touches, its understated design and tasteful animations are both intuitive and easy on the eye and its support for multitouch gestures and full keyboard navigation help make posting your photos and videos as enjoyable an experience as taking them.

Poster 1.0 requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later, and is available as a 15-day trial that can be unlocked upon purchase. A full license of Poster 1.0 costs $19.95.

Try Poster now: Poster.dmg

The Fourth edition of the Give Good Food to Your Mac promotion is now on. Give Good Food to Your Mac is a highly-respected promotion where you can find a wide range of software at amazing prices.

Discounts range from 20% to 60% off; the more apps you buy, the less you pay.

The promotion runs from November 26th to the 10th of December 2010.

Apps include Pixelmator, Speed Download, Relationship, Freeway Express, BannerZest, Feeder, Together and much more. Check out givegoodfood2yourmac.com to see everything on offer.

Reinvented Software’s apps will be submitted to the Mac App Store for its launch, whenever that might be.

It’s somewhat interesting as developers need to create custom versions of their applications for Apple, mostly to exclude things such as built-in software updates, to use Apple’s secuity and copy protection and any other changes required to conform to the store’s submission guidelines.

With those two versions of the apps also comes two licensing schemes. A license bought through the App Store will not be transferrable to one bought directly from Reinvented Software or vice versa and, as things stand, the App Store will lack free trials, education, bulk and upgrade discounts and refunds, while new releases may be delayed by the review process (but available immediately for those who purchased directly).

Free trials and (assuming the Mac App Store is 10.6 only) versions to run on Mac OS X 10.5 and PowerPC Macs will continue to be available through this site and the trial limitations removed by purchasing a license directly from Reinvented Software.

Even with its compromises, I’m confident the Mac App Store will benefit Mac users through its ease of use and Mac developers by providing increased exposure for their apps. It’s also good that everyone will be able to choose whether to buy through Apple or directly from a developer.

Thanks to changes by Facebook, Feeder 2.1.2 adds the ability to post to groups and pages when announcing items on the site. If you use Feeder to announce on Facebook, even if you don’t need to post to a group or page, there are a few things you need to know.

Authorization

You will need to authorize Feeder to post to Facebook again for two reasons: Facebook has changed their authorization scheme and Feeder needs to be granted new permissions to work with your groups on Facebook. If you don’t reauthorize Facebook, your posts won’t be sent to Facebook when publishing.

To reauthorize Feeder:

• Show the Info view by choosing View > Show Feed Info from the menu.
• Click Settings and then choose Announcements
• Click the Change button next to your Facebook account name
• Log in to Facebook and follow the prompts

Posting to a Group or Page

Once authorized, there’s new a pop-up menu in Feeder’s Announcements view for choosing where to post, which will list any Facebook pages you administer and all the groups to which you belong (it’s not possible for Feeder to determine which groups you administer).

The list is only retrieved when you first authorize Feeder, so if you create a new group or page, choose Refresh from the pop-up menu to update the list. If you only want to post to your wall as before, you can just leave this as “Profile Wall”.

When posting to a group, the post will appear to come from you. When posting to a page, the post will use the page name instead.

Better Thumbnails

Another improvement is that Feeder will now try to use a thumbnail from the item you’re announcing. If you’re using the Media RSS extension, Feeder will send the Thumbnail URL. If not, it’ll use the first image it finds in your post, if any. If it can’t find an image, Facebook will do its regular thing of choosing one from the corresponding web page.

Feeder 2.1 is available today. This version adds support for WebDAV, updates the iTunes preview to match the recent changes to the iTunes Store and supports themes for previewing iTunes U feeds. This release also adds drag and drop Sparkle appcasts, improves MP3 tagging, working with Twitter accounts and will now run as a 64-bit application on Snow Leopard.

Publishing and Announcements

Feeder can now publish feeds using WebDAV, which could previously only be accomplished by connecting to the server as a disk in the Finder and publishing using File Export. The same system is being used to publish to iDisks now too.

Feeder 2.1 also dramatically improves the experience of authorizing Twitter accounts, thanks entirely to Twitter implementing xAuth, an alternative to OAuth for desktop and mobile apps that removes the need to use a web browser to authenticate and authorize applications. This not only makes it much easier to authenticate with Twitter, but also to use different accounts for different feeds, as you no longer need to log out of one Twitter account on the web to authorize another.

64-bit and Snow Leopard

Feeder now runs as a 64-bit application on Snow Leopard. While this is not something you should notice, it will become more important once all your applications make the transition to 64-bit, as the Mac OS X will no longer need to load its 32-bit versions of everything, improving performance and saving memory. Feeder will also use QuickTime X on Snow Leopard when working with audio and video files.

Podcasting

Feeder’s iTunes preview has now been updated to match the recent changes at the iTunes Store and adds customizable colors for iTunes U feeds. Feeder is now also using a completely different third-party framework for tagging MP3 files, which should improve both the reliability of Feeder and compatibility of the audio files.

More

In addition to the above, there are many more tweaks and changes in this release, including drag and drop Sparkle appcasts (drag an application to create a zip file and fill out the version numbers, etc), gestures to zoom the preview, navigate the list and switch editing modes and more.

To see full list of changes and download the latest version, see the Feeder Release Notes page.

Feeder 2.1 requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later, costs $39.95 and is a free upgrade for all registered Feeder 2.0 users. Feeder 1.x users can upgrade for $14.95.