There are certain programs and apps that just beg for you to get creative with them. You may think you have no use for them, but then you start playing around, and suddenly you’re having all kinds of fun working them into your standard software routines. Comic Life is such a program, and now that it’s on the iPad, it’s easier than ever to justify that initial purchase.

When Apple announced the inclusion of the cameras on the iPad 2, my first thought was that a lot of great iPhone photo apps would be more fun to use once they make their way to the iPad’s larger screen. I didn’t consider ports of Macintosh photo apps, but that’s just what plasq has done with Comic Life for iPad, their award winning software for creating, reading and sharing digital photo comics.

Comic Life 2 can be used for much more than just comics. Flyers, photo albums, storyboards, announcements, or anything that combines text and images can be created with Comic Life 2. Even if you already have a page layout program, you might still want to look into Comic Life 2 for some unique features such as speech bubbles, shapes, bendable lettering, and integration with Facebook and email.

I love Skitch. I’ve been using the screenshot/image editing application (in beta) for two years, and it’s become an indispensable part of my online life, allowing me to do screenshot and snap webcam photos as well as edit, annotate, upload and share them. It’s one of those applications that does the things I need to do so elegantly that I keep waiting for Apple to buy it and include it as system software.

Know what you forgot to do? Send out Christmas cards. But there’s no need for excuses. Make it look as if you meant to forget because you planned to send out a Christmas comic instead. More personal than a greeting card and shorter than a form letter (I think…I never actually read them), you can easily create and share a professional looking Christmas comic with Freeverse’s Comic Life Deluxe Edition. Here’s how.

If the two criteria for Mac-ness are “it just works” and being “insanely great,” then Skitch has to be the most Mac-like program I’ve seen in quite some time.

Skitch is a screenshot program, and while there’s nothing wrong with the screenshot capabilities built into OS X (other than it’s deliberately disabled when DVD Player is running), Skitch does everything Grab does, does it better, then adds labeling features you’ll wonder how you ever lived without, along with built-in sharing features that “just work” to allow you pass your pictures on via e-mail, web, and chat.

Currently a free beta from the mad geniuses at Plasq (best known to Mac users as the creators of Comic Life, a program I admire but haven’t found much practical use for), Skitch is a small program that waits in the background until you need to take a screenshot and/or do simple editing to a photo.

I must say that Comic Touch is a very unique application for the iPhone/iPod touch, and does a very good job at editing and adding comical effects to pictures directly on the iPhone or iPod touch. Comic Touch is a mixture of plasq’s two other apps for Mac OS X—Skitch and Comic Life—as it allows users to edit images with a variety of different effects, including Bulge, Dent, Squeeze, Stretch, and Light. It also offers the ability to add speech bubbles and captions to a photo to give it the feel of a comic.

Learn more after the break.

You may be familiar with Plasq’s popular Skitch screenshot-sharing application, and their comic book application: Comic Life (which was pre-installed on many Macs). Plasq have just released another amazing application called Comic Life Magiq. It sports a brand new interface, which aims to be more easy to use and even fun to use. This is more »