Author Archives: IdeaMonster

About IdeaMonster

Krop, Square Extension, Dust|box artist. Illusion of sense art group founder, creative director, open mind.

Photoshop Touch is finally here

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iPad2 only, but still it's a nice way to sketch some projects on the go, and finish them on the real PS at home

Adobe has just released Photoshop Touch for the second generation iPad. The software was present on the Android platform since november, but apparently it wasn’t so easy to port. The good thing is that they didn’t use that “toilet paper roll logo” this time, going for something a little bit more classy. The software itself will probably be expanded with new features as soon as the third iPad gets here and Android tablets will get a power boost. But for now it’s probably the most powerful image editor out there, just a little bit ahead of PhotoForge 2 (which is also great but lacks some features).

In this video they emphasize the ease of use and sharing, which might suggest it’s pointed mostly to casual users editing their facebook pictures, but time will tell if it’ll be adopted by professionals as well.

You can download the software here:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adobe-photoshop-touch/id495716481?mt=8

New Photoshop CS6 Content Aware functions!

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Just like Content Aware fill made us go "WOW" the last time, Adobe comes back with features that will force us to drool over them

Content Aware fill is an extremely useful tool, that helps us intelligently covering missing parts of the image, or removing an object from a background. But that’s not all, cause in CS6 Adobe comes back with more content-aware goodness. Apparently some mad scientists worked day and night and figured out a formula that can even do content aware move, expand and more. See the video below.

Out of Facebook, into the life

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So it finally happened. I deleted my Facebook account, because it was counterproductive to say the least. The stupid posts were about 99,9% of all of them, constantly reminding me that people are idiots. And all the distractions aside I can finally focus on what I wanted to do for a long time – writing more posts.

Pixelmator is not all sweet and awesome – here are the cons

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Pixelmator looks great at first try, but using it for a real project reveals hidden bugs and annoyances

A while ago I was considering retiring my Photoshop license for a cheap and well defined solution from the Pixelmator Team. Their app – Pixelmator has been a huge success, generated millions of income and a lot of praise. As a power user of Photoshop I tested it and was pleasantly surprised at first. Aside from the lack of still a few important functions (layer styles) it seemed like it can transform the industry and steal some cake from the big brother.

Unfortunately after using it for my professional project (that was a one time try, because actually doing something for work is the best test ever) I found that it’s ridden with bugs and annoyances. First of all – the selection tool is terrible – it sometimes selects something quite different than intended, the selected areas move outside of the screen for no reason. Yuck. They supposedly fixed it in 2.0, but I encountered the problem a couple of times still.

The definitely most annoying thing it the text, that you create with otherwise pretty decent type tool. Normally the text box (in Photoshop) has a safe area that covers it’s height and width including higher and lower letters. Well in Pixelmator it appears to be the same, but there’s on little change. If you have two text layers, with the smallest possible safe area and they’re not overlapping at all, you can only select the top layer by CMD + Clicking on it. The only way to select the bottom layer is to select it from the Layer palette, and that simply sucks for larger projects. It appears as if the text that’s on the top layer has a magic shield around it that forbids you to easily reach other text. Sure it might be fun for a photo with a helvetica, pseudo typography Paulo Coelho quote on it, but as soon as you add another text you’re screwed.

Inconsistency is another thing that’s worth mentioning – if we change the app design for that nice looking black overlay, why do we still use the native color picker, the native extended font chooser? Besides the native color picker doesn’t have the built in hex value on every tab, rendering it quite useless for webdesigners.

So yeah, that’s a little bit of bitc**** in the morning, but I can’t help it – at the current state Pixelmator cannot be used in professional design without irritation and slower pace. Hopefully they’ll fix it and enhance the features.

Mac OS X Lion made in pure CSS3!

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This is a stunning example of how the web can look in a few years

Some people seem to have a bit too much time on their hands, but let’s not complain because their work is astonishing. A while ago we’ve seen iPad running inside the browser, that was made with CSS3, and now here’s Mac OS X Lion, with even the login screen included. It’s a work in progress by a designer by the name Alessi Atzeni, and you can see it for yourself at:
http://www.alessioatzeni.com/mac-osx-lion-css3/

Photoshop CS6 will improve the UI look and feel!

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Photoshop took some cues from Pixelmator on UI design?

Finally, after many apps have shown that darker interfaces are easier to work with (even some Adobe Apps had these) the change is coming to the flagship product. It took about 20 years for them to realize that, which is typical Adobe-slow, but apparently cheaper competition breating down their backs with new features (pixelmator 2.0 is really getting there, although it’s not there … yet) maybe they decided to improve everything they possibly can so they’ll stop using customers. Especially after those odd decisions that only the two last versions of their products can be upgraded to the most recent one – the rest having to buy it all over again.

iPads are becoming more and more useful for the creatives

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iPad has transformed from a tool to consume content to something that can be more useful for content creation

Sure, it did start as a content consuming device initially, with all the “sit in your comfy chair, watch a movie, read a book, post to facebook you’re sitting in your comfy chair” babble. But with releasing a much powerful iPad2, and an upcoming retina display iPad3, more and more companies are making add-ons and apps that can actually do a lot for the creatives. Sure we don’t have photoshop yet, but there are plenty of CSS/HTML editors with FTP support and preview, there are tools for sketching layouts, for UX designers, VJ’s, DJ’s and regular musicians.

More and more DAW apps are appearing in the app store, a trend started with FruityLoops, expanded by GarageBand. These are for now simplified, but more and more things are bound to appear. Remember this – 4 to 5 years ago computers most people used for recording their albums were about the power of the iPad. And if the iPad3 will be significantly faster it’ll encourage bigger DAW’s to come to the platform as well. Ableton Live for iOS anyone?

NAMM this year was actually dominated by iOS – we’ve seen external sound cards (some quite robust), guitar and drum effects, and even an akai dedicated MPC interface (the MPC FLY). This all proves that it CAN be used to create things, and maybe that change is needed to switch from the old ways of thinking and jump into the new. New possibilities await us right ?

Is IE 6 finally going to die?

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For years web developers have been begging and petitioning for this to happen. Now it's finally just around the corner.

Microsoft has launched a campaign of it’s own to free the world of it’s dreadful (to developers) browser from yesteryear. Go to http://www.ie6countdown.com/ to see for yourself the steady decline of usage which is now finally below 10%. That means that web developers no longer need to put time and effort to make an IE6 specific version of their websites. Ain’t that a nice new year’s gift? Microsoft thinks so too, even though the decline in IE6 doesn’t necessarily result in an incline for newer explorers. More and more people are turning to chrome and firefox. Which is fine, cause anything is better than IE6. And a year from now at this rate it will finally be extinct.

Quicklook not showing photoshop files? Here’s the fix!

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A lot of people have been struggling with quicklook and Photoshop, so who's to blame here? Adobe or Apple?

Neither. In fact in most cases the blame is on the user side. First of all check your file handling, because maximize compatibility might be set to “Never”. That’s one culprit that does that. Did that help? If not there’s another thing that makes QuickLook show only a white rectangle instead of the PSD file. The problem is the color profile – you have to embed it in the file or QuickLook will be VERY confused. Poor ol’ QuickLook. Doesn’t matter if it’s CMYK or “DISPLAY”, just remember to embed it while you’re saving your PSD’s and all will be fine and dandy.

That helps A LOT while browsing for that one PSD from a year ago ;)

Skitch came to the iPad!

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The annotations just got a lot more fun!

After Evernote acquired Skitch – the annotations editor, some people were afraid that it will cease to exist and instead be merged into the evernote app itself. Good news is that it’s not entirely true, since the Mac app is now free, and we just got our hands on the iPad version which is even better.

To review and annotate designs has never been easier and more fun. Touch controls for apps like that are an amazing improvement of the workflow. The only downside is that it sometimes freezes the iPad completely, but I guess it’ll be fixed. You can download Skitch for iPad for free below:

http://itunes.apple.com/pl/app/skitch-for-ipad/id490505997?mt=8

Physynth – amazing user interface design

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Every now and then in a sea of copycats we see something truly new and unique that catches our attention

Physynth stands out not only for it’s musical capabilities, but most notably for great and innovative design. It uses the iPad’s accelerometer to simulate light and shadows on it’s surface. That means if you turn your device to the left, the shadows of the knobs and dials will go to the right and so forth. It all looks so “real” and “artificial” at the same time, that it really catches attention.

The app is just 1$ and it’s available at:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/physynth/id469924626?mt=8

The Verge sums up iOS UI updates!

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The Verge has posted a very detailed view on how the iOS UI has changed and improved (along with the list of added features) over the years.

It’s an impressive post, full of images, and it makes you think about revised UI in your own projects too. The image on the left shows how little really changed in fundamental elements, and yet how fine it still works today, with more modern features on top of those designs. Do you think that changing the design completely every few years is THAT important? Because the original iPod design came from the 60’s and didn’t change much after that. Some good designs are here to stay. The only thing dreadful on the image on the left is that terrible “Music” logo on the icon. Why is it dark? Why doesn’t it match the phone icon, the voice recorder icon or the SMS icon? OR for that matter the previous iPod icon. A white icon on an orange background would look MUCH MUCH better.

You can read the full Verge post here

Android Ice Cream Sandwich finally has integrated credit card purchases!

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Finally Google has come to it's senses about their Android Market app quality.

It took a while of sms, freemium and ad based Android Apps, but now apparently the new version of google’s iOS ripoff original operating system has credit card information built in the way Apple does it. That allows the users to purchase the Apps more efficiently, which in turn can lead to better apps for the platform, which right now is treated by developers as a side dish to iOS. Do you think this move will improve app quality in the market?

WebOS will go open source. Will it influence phone makers to switch from lawsuit troubled Android?

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HP has just announced, that their palm inheritance - the Web OS, which ran on the discontinued HP TouchPad disaster (and post-Palm phones), will go Open Source!

This means that it’ll eventually be available to phone makers the same way Android is today. And with all those legal battles, Carrier IQ’s, viruses, malware, piracy and whatnot it might not be a bad choice for the likes of HTC (or even Samsung) to quit the Android platform once and for all.
Web OS is actually a well designed, intuitive and original piece of software, unlike Android, so it’ll push the market forward instead of just being a poor (but popular) copy of iOS. The repeating story of windows poorly copying Mac OS comes to mind here, doesn’t it?

If it all goes through, making mobile apps and games will be harder than ever, with way too many platforms for indie developers to successfully develop for. But in any case this is good news, because I much prefer Web OS over Android, and would like to see the platform grow. Exciting times with Windows Phone 7 gaining market share we might have a re-shuffle of the mobile system ranks soon.