MacUpdate posted a new bundle deal in which you get $700 worth of apps, fonts etc for $49,99. Those deals are pretty common lately, and they usually contain one gem, that’s worth the whole deal. This time it’s a bundle (300$ worth) of 6200 commercial use fonts, so getting that for fifty bucks is a great deal!
Go and buy it at: https://www.mupromo.com/
Microsoft is generally considered a non-creative, "suit philosophy" company. Sometimes though, it takes a step away from that and creates something cool. Bing, xbox, some recent ads and most notably the Windows Phone interface. The latter you can now preview on your iPhone or Android device inside the browser. Sure it’s not a full experience, and reminds us a bit of the Web iPad demo, but it’s a clever way to show how the interface is innovative and cool to use. Good job microsoft. To test it open this url on your phone:
http://aka.ms/wpdemo
Decentralized creation processes work the best. Chaotic ones with rigid rules lead to subpar final products. I guess it’s all about the right people being in the right place. Squash!
Never thought I’d fall into that trap, but on the first day I downloaded a couple of paid books, and spent hours on the couch reading. This is the future of reading that will exist alongside real books, but for travel and quick reads it’s just plain perfect. Bought the standard kindle 4 (no touch), because I already have a tablet and I hate audiobooks :)
Rating: 
Galleried is an awesome app for finding great web designs, managing a collection of inspirations (some call them "stealing enhancers") between your devices. The App is 8Eur for the Mac, and has a free companion app for both iPhone and iPad. They sync through dropbox, so you’re always up to date with your findings no matter the device. The selection is made from a couple of sites that feature good design and 9 out of 10 times it gets the right sites. Sometimes we can see something that doesn’t quite fit, but in general there’s plenty of inspiration there. I think it’s the best app of that kind for any designer so you should get it right now! It’s worth the money.
It feels nice to be living in a world in which we have so many tools to deliver content. Sure most of the cheap HTML5 editors are for the Mac, but that will change sooner or later. The dominance of Adobe has never been threatened the way it is now by cheaper and efficient alternatives. The death of Flash and a whole range of tools for HTML5 will define the future of the web for years to come.
A while ago I tested the Content Aware Fill feature of Photoshop by removing myself from an image of some mountains. It worked surprisingly well, so I decided to do the exact same test with Pixelmator now. Above you can see the original photo. It took 3 separate content aware steps to do both images. The first step was for the whole part to be removed, and then the other two to remove little artifacts and errors afterwards. See the results after the break.
Adobe Flash on the iOS platform was a hot topic for quite a while. Many handset makers (like samsung or htc) even put the ability to play flash content inside their ads, to differentiate their phones from in their opinion a crippled product like the iPhone. They omitted from these ads the facts about battery and procesor usage when flash is on. Who cares if you can use it for 10 minutes, but you can use flash. Yay! The truth is that even Adobe finally realized, that web wants to be more efficient and less processor heavy – not only for mobile devices. They released their own HTML5 authoring tools, and now in the next step – they’re abandoning the development of flash for mobile platforms completely. That means that in a few years flash in the mobile space will be even more non-existant than it is now. Good!
Funny to see their whining though – saying that it was Apple who killed mobile flash. Well Apple also killed the diskette, and nobody’s complaining about that now. The same fate will meet flash soon enough.
Also don’t get me wrong. I love Adobe Flash app. It’s the best creative vector-drawing editor ever. The tools are perfect for drawing (far easier to use and more fun than illustrator’s). But flash is much better for animation and cartoons, than websites. HTML5 is the future and we’re all ready for it!
The author of the Camera+ iOS App has compared the cameras from all of the iPhone iterations and the progress is stunning. The latest addition – the 4S can easily battle some popular compact cameras and it’s only a phone! With the tech world progressing as fast as it does now we’re going to see some amazing things in the near future! Go to the Camera+ page to see more pictures.
Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but we’re working hard on rebuilding CM to be a better and more resourceful place. We’re also redesigning the layout! New additions will include app reviews, app comparisons, more tutorials and free designer content added monthly. Come back soon for the redesign!
Rating:
Tiny Wings is a phenomenon almost the size of Angry Birds. It’s simple, yet addictive in a way that’s completely unexplainable. The game revolves around the idea that you’re a bird (go figure!) that has those little wings, and yet you want to fly. So you use the hills (which by the way are randomly generated everyday so the game always looks differently) to gain momentum and jump into the air, where flapping those little wings can give you a few seconds of flight. There are islands between which you travel, coins to collect and clouds to touch. There are also achievements to achieve (which is a nice thing and makes the gameplay less boring after a while). The only thing that can ‘hurt’ you is the sun setting, so your time of flight is limited, but other than that you can’t really “die” in this nice, colourful game which makes it all the more “fun”.
It’s one of those games that should get boring after a while and yet it doesn’t. It’s mesmerizing and when I’m looking at my games folder thinking what to play casually for a short while it beats the other games nearly every time. You can get it on the App Store for 0,69 quid, and sadly there’s no iPad version (yet), but it does play well even in 2x mode.
Image credit: I Love Design.com
It’s 2011, so saying that someone should update their website through editing HTML files (or as some people say “programming” ;)) sounds quite insane doesn’t it? Maybe so, but is the ease of updating worth the compromises on quality? Sure, some CMS driven sites can be pretty interesting, but it’s hard for them to have a distinct style, that doesn’t look like it’s a set of boxy templates. Apple’s website seems boxy at first, but it breaks most template rules by having each page look completely differently – as if it was designed for a fine printed book, and not through a set of CMS templates. Sure the main page is just a big banner with some smaller ones below, and that can be easily customizable through some backend, but once you get to any page it will look almost like it’s taken from a full-colour manual, rather than one-design-fits-all-template.
The point here is – should smaller websites (like a small hostel, a pet shop, a cafe) really use CMS, or go for something unique, creative and new. What I mean is that they should have each page designed as a separate website, using a set of overall rules, but even breaking the text in just the right place. Sure CMS is necessary for news sites, blogs and e-stores, but the internet itself is actually going into stagnation.
We had that Flash-explosion a few years ago where websites were made into all-flash-all-singing-all-dancing animated multimedia presentations, and that was fun … for a while. Then Flash started to recede towards HTML5 animation and simplicity. But the CMS underneath it all is I think what keeps the real creativity still in the box.
Maybe we should think about it – maybe the web after a few years of finding it’s way, is actually going back to imitating fine-printed books, magazines and brochures? Maybe the attention to every detail, every word and every image would lead us away from square thumbnails with “float: left;”, a small margin and justified text on their right side?
I sure hope so…
Rating: 
League of Evil is one of those rare, 8bit platformers that don’t suck. In fact it’s probably one of the best such games in the App Store, and no, they’re not paying me to write that (yet;)). The whole appeal of this game can be pinpointed to simple, yet addictive gameplay (which actually works that way with every good game) and a GREAT set of controls. They’re onscreen, which usually ruins the fun, but here they’re super-responsive and after a while of getting used to them the gameplay just flows flawlessly. Seriously – think of a touch-controlled game in which you don’t do unintended things. The graphics are pretty good too – 8bit, simple, but beautiful at the same time. Gotta warn you though – the people you kill in this game (soliders and evil scientists) explode into a pile of blood, guts and gore. Sure it’s just a few red pixels but the imagination adds a lot to that. So yeah, it’s a brutal game, but isn’t life that way?
The levels are pretty simple and quite short, but the goal is to be quick – you get more points for speed, pretty much like Keanu Reeves in that one movie about speed. You know which one I’m talking about. Yeah, the Matrix!
Your mission is simple – get to the evil scientist, kill him and find a briefcase with his evil plans and the world will be saved again. Bruce Willis was on vacation so they chose you. Yeah, lucky you. So instead of working, you can be sitting in the corporation toilet for half an hour saving the world. Pretty neat huh? It’s addictive enough to be time-consuming, and simple enough to play “just one level at a time” every now and then (especially at work). Games like LoE are to blame for the decreasing amount of work being done in the workplace. But we do save worlds on the other hand so I guess we’re ok.
Go and get that awesome universal app for 0,69 quid at : <a href=”http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/league-of-evil/id405552598?mt=8″ target=”_blank”>http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/league-of-evil/id405552598?mt=8</a>
Recently headspark got a couple of older iPhones for app testing purposes and among them was the famous 3G model,with 4.2.1 firmware. What struck us was that the system was running so slow, it was barely useable at times. Getting into the messages app would take a lot of time, dialing was sluggish, and the overall performance far from perfect. So what’s the plan to fix that? Many people think that the best way is to downgrade it to 3.1.3 or 3.0 firmware and then it’ll work. Sure it had less features, but at least it worked well, right?
Well sure, you can do that, but if you jailbreak or unlock it might not be the best idea. And even if you don’t, why skipping on all the new features that came with 4.0 ?
Luckily there IS a way of simply turning off the two main reasons your iPhone 3G runs so slow: Multitasking and Wallpaper under the icons. Multitasking is obvious – for a device with less RAM it’s probably not the best idea, right? But why the wallpaper? Surely the device can handle displaying a small image without a huge memory loss? Yeah, it probably would, but when you have a wallpaper enabled (the one behind the icons), the icons generate a real-time shadow effect on that wallpaper and the app names so they’re readable on any kind of wallpaper. And that shadow is taking our processing power that could be used elsewhere. So here’s how to fix those two things:
Here’s what to do
1. First go and download iPhone Explorer app. It’s a simple tool that you can use to get to your iPhone’s filesystem.
2. Open the app and connect your iPhone. It should recognize it and display two (or more) folders.
3. Go to root\System\Library\CoreServices\SpringBoard.app\ and look for N82AP.plist file
4. Copy the file N82AP.plist to your desktop and edit it with a text editor. You’re looking for two lines to alter:
<key>homescreen-wallpaper</key> <true/>
and
<key>multitasking</key> <true/>
Change “true” to “false” in both cases, save the file and copy it back to the folder. Click on replace, restart your iphone and feel the difference!
So I had the big “2.0” for a couple of days now and I can honestly say that it ALMOST got me to the point where I can sell my Photoshop license and go have a party for the money. Sure it’s lacking CMYK support – but most printers nowadays even for big posters prefer RGB anyway, or even no color profile at all. The most annoying thing is lack of Layer Styles, but I’m almost sure they’ll turn up in some 2.x iteration sooner or later. The other annoyance is the color palette which is not a part of the Pixelmator interface, just like the previous type tool was. It should be more streamlined, easier to use and better looking (better UX)
The rest of the added tools are good and/or sufficient for day to day creation, and it’s now possible to do website layouts and posters, which could’ve been done in PXM before, but not without frustration. Now it’s ALMOST completely there, and I’m starting the slow (and potentialy painfull) move towards it instead of the big brother. The Vector Tools are AMAZING by the way – and Adobe could learn a thing or two from the Pixelmator Team on this one.
With Hype and Purple hitting the Mac App Store there are also nice and cheap tools for HTML5 animation, so being a designer on a budget loses the dogma of doing crappy products because of underpowered tools. The tools are there, now it’s up to us to get that creativity rolling.
I think PXM 2.0 is 9 out of 10 stars, but it’ll surely get to the whole 10 in the next couple of months. Good!
Rating:
The Incident is a fun, 8-bit styled game made when there weren’t a gazillion retro games in the App Store yet. It revolves around the idea that “stuff is falling from the sky” – literally everything you can think of from cars, road signs, fridges, tv sets, painting, beach balls and statues. Your job is to find out what’s causing it (by going up, constantly jumping on the stacks of objects) and of course – to survive. The game offers a story mode, and an endless night mode which as the title proclaims is, well … endless.
You have a nice achievement wall with trophies saying what object landed on your head at what height that ended your short sad life, which is kinda funny. The graphics are pretty good for an 8bit game – pretty detailed and the objects are really complex and well designed. There’s some nice music (8bit of course) and a cool way to use your iphone as a controller, and play on the bigger screen of your iPad. It also supports AirPlay, so you can hook it up to your big screen TV.
It’s a nice and addictive game and for 1,49 quid it’s a steal since it’s an universal App so you pay once for both iPhone and iPad version!
You can download it from the App Store