After I spent about an hour playing with Alter Ego, I was really impressed, so impressed that I managed to get an interview with Niclas Bahn.

 Niclas is one of the programmers of the amazing Alter Ego program that lets you add so many effects to your iChat’s and photo booth. 

Where Did The Idea For Alter Ego Come From? 

When the new iChat for leopard came out, and we saw the cool new ability to use special effects filters during our video-chats, we sat down and figured out what we could add. Apple has built in some really cool effects out of the box, but we felt there was a lot we could add. iChat uses an OS technology called Quartz Composer to render the visual effects. We went ahead and made our own Quartz Compositiions work in iChat. Getting the filters to work was the first step, the second was figuring out how to work the distribution of the effects. After some long hours of thinking we came up with a solution that we felt was affordable, scalable, and easy to understand. We decided that AlterEgo effects would work with a credit system. So you can buy a bunch of credits, and then decide which effects (we call them Egos) you want to activate with those credits. This allows the user to really only get the Egos he likes most. The formula is simple 1 Ego = 1 credit = 1$. The user can buy 5, 15 or 30 credits at a time. 

Are there plans in the near future for Alter Ego? 

We plan on adding many more effects to AlterEgo in the near future. Our users have been giving us a lot of feedback, and we are incorporating this feedback into our future designs. We will also very soon be launching our new website www.gravityapps.com. 

Which of the Ego’s is most popular?

 That’s an excellent question. Because of the credit system, we actually have no direct data on which Ego is the most popular. Judging from user feedback/comments and my own taste, I would say the most popular ones are: 

- Psychotic, which really is quite scary if you ask me.
- Galactic intercom, we are big Sci Fi fans :)
- Inverted sketch, gotta love the edge detectors.

 I just want to say Thank You Niclas for your time, I really enjoyed this.