In my 15 years experience being in the Tech Industries, I’ve rarely seen company acquisition went fine, because at the end of the day some things have got to give, it always need some type of sacrifices. And this particular acquisition was one of those.

Yesterday, without any warning, the iOS development house Ghostbird had announced that it has been acquired by Yahoo! If you are wondering who Ghostbird is, they are the folks who had created 2 high-grade and wonderful iOS Photo Apps, namely Photoforge and KitCam.

Photoforge (the latest version is Photoforge2) is one of the oldest and the best Photoshop-like Photo Editing app for iOS. Before other apps had even thought about doing Layering, Photoforge had done it first. The new Photoforge2 added new Filters, Backgrounds, Borders, etc. – making it not just a great editing tool but also enable photo post-production, Instagram style.

Photoforge and Photoforge2 have been my go-to app to create some of my best photo edits like below. So much so that it’s been always in my ‘Camera Bag‘ folder on my iPhone Home Page, readily accessible any time.

 

As for KitCam, it’s a top-of-the-line Camera replacement app with a myriad of functions that only a few other apps can match. The live filters, where you can see the effect as you take photo OR video, is also quite nice addition. The ability to save photos you are taking in uncompressed TIFF format (or the standard JPEG if you like) shows that this is a serious app for serious photo-taking. In addition to this awesome Camera, KitCam is also a post-production app where you can import your photos and edit it with combination of nicely toned Lenses, Films, and Borders ala Hipstamatics (except that you can choose them after-the-facts).

And here is an example of a video taken with KitCam by one passionate user:

Seaside moment from ale di gangi on Vimeo.

A moment in time of relax.
Done with an iPhone 5 + KitCam app

 

Well, unfortunately, if you haven’t got these two apps by now, you will never ever have the chance to try them, because as for yesterday Ghostbird has pulled them out off the App Store! This is what I mentioned as the Sacrifice.

Sacrifice for what? In its press-release Ghostbird mentions that the dev team has been folded to the Flickr team. So for all Photoforge and KitCam fans sake I really really hope that they will create a similar if not a superior version of Flickr mobile which would include all the best things that Photoforge and KitCam had offered.

Although I can understand the necessity of being discreet, I still regret that Ghostbird didn’t give us even a hint of this plan to be acquired, because otherwise we would’ve promoted Photoforge and KitCam more so even more people would know about them.

A strong note for Yahoo!, please don’t mess this up, like you did for so many things!

And if you want to just admire how these 2 awesome apps like, just have a look at Google Image search for both Photoforge2 and KitCam, those images speaks for themselves.  Again .. such ashamed.