Bellamax has released a new workflow application, UpShot, and they've decided to give it away free until July 4th. After that, UpShot will still only be $20, so it's worth a look even if you have plans this weekend.  UpShot is a combination gallery, image manipulation, and publication tool that integrates directly with several photo sharing sites and on-line printing sites. Flickr, SnapFish, and Blogger are all supported, among others. Supported formats include RAW. The best way I can think to describe it is Picassa on steroids. The included color correction and retouching tools are intuitive and seem effective in most situations--as you'd expect from a leading supplier of professional lab automation products.

This is definitely a product aimed at the casual photographer, though. If you're getting started with digital photography and don't feel ready to shell out the cash for something like iView Pro, UpShot is well worth a try. It makes things easy, the interface is friendly, it seems reliable, and the photo sharing/printing integration is a nice touch. If you're working with substantial numbers of images or large file sizes, though, performance is an issue. A dump of the a 1GBcard of full-size jpegs from a D70s quickly slowed indexing to a crawl, and opening the images in any of the various tools too upwards of a minute on my test computer, which, while not ideal, is no slouch with a 3.2Ghz P4 with 512MB RAM (the minimum requirement). You probably don't want to run this with less than the recommended 1GB.