Over the weekend we had a bit of a play with the new iPhone photo sharing app Rando, produced by digital design studio Ustwo as an exercise in “just fucking doing it” – getting something up and running in super quick time.

The app is a stripped back from of photosharing – when you take a shot, it is automatically cropped within a circle. You can’t edit your shot, can’t add any filters, can’t name it nor tag it. You can’t like anyone elses shots, can’t follow any users, can’t set up a profile.

If you’re happy with the picture you’ve taken, you upload it, and it is sent at random to one other user of the app. They aren’t told any information about you or the image, other than being shown roughly where it was taken (so they’ll know which city you’re in, but nothing more).

Once you’ve sent a shot, you are sent a shot from someone else in return – you give and you receive.

It’s a peculiar experience, and initially at least, oddly addictive. You keep hoping that the next shot that loads up will be something unexpected, or beautiful, or funny. Or a glimpse into a life entirely different from your own. And there’s a vague feeling that you should try to make your own shots as interesting as possible. Give something good and karma dictates that you’ll get something good in return.

From a creative point of view, the circular format is really refreshing, forcing you to depart from standard rectangular compositions.

Interestingly, given the voyeuristic / exhibitionist format, it so far doesn’t seem to have descended into an endless stream of porn. Perhaps the folks at ustwo are just policing it carefully for now.

Anyway. Sort of pointless. Sort of fun.

Well, it’s been a longtime coming, but Flickr have finally pulled a decent iPhone app out of the bag, and it’s looking Instagram square in the face.

It combines Flickr’s great sharing & viewing functionality with a fairly solid camera application (following hot on Twitter’s heels, using the SDK from the folks at Aviary).

It shoots at full iPhone size (2448 x 3264 pixels on the iPhone 5′s main camera, above; 960 x 1280 pixels on the front facing camera, below).

Before you take the shot, you can take a light reading from one place, and focus on another (drag your fingers apart on your phone’s screen to do that), set a background grid to straighten your shot, and zoom in (though that’s an artificial zoom, you’re really just cropping into the pixels).

Once you’ve taken your shot, before it’s saved, the app lets you play around with some admittedly rather arbitrarily named filters, as well as make various adjustments: cropping, brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpness. You can also add some very basic text, do some basic drawing, add brightness and fix blemishes. All of that while keeping the image at full size (though you can set it to be smaller in the settings if you want).

Once you’re done editing, you upload the image (it only saves to the camera roll at this point, which speeds things up, but can lead to you thinking you’ve saved a shot that you haven’t).

You can upload directly to Flickr of course, with all your tags in place, and send it to all the Groups and Sets you fancy at the same time. Rather neatly, at the same time as it loads to Flickr, you can send the image to Twitter (works well on the native app, but not at all on a third party app like TweetDeck) and Facebook (the images are hi-res, and dumped into a Flickr Photos album on your page).

Once you’ve finished shooting, you can do all the browsing you’d expect too – that’s Alistair’s Signs and lettering set below.

Good work Flickr.