Pixelmator 2.1 is here – alignment guides look awesome!

Posted on August 9, 2012 by IdeaMonster

Another step closer to ending Photoshop rule

Sure it still has a long way to go, but at $15 Pixelmator is what their slogan says – an image editor for the rest of us. The amount of pro and semi-pro features though, put it a little above that line. And yes – it can open and edit PSD files. The new version added a couple of nice features, and one that is simply groundbreaking. But more on that later. First we get some vintage and depth of field effects that are a bit Instagram’esque, but higher quality. That’s the “for the rest of us part” – easily applying filters to our photos for them to get that “hipster look”. But what’s truly awesome about this release are the alignment guides – sure they’re sort of present in Photoshop, but not as precise and user friendly as here. This is the way to do guides, no questions asked. You can even align objects to the same spacing, as other on-screen objects have, along with precise pixel info right there on the image. This is awesome and hopefully PXM will get the much needed layer styles to become the image editor of choice for even more designers.

The App is available as a free update on the Mac App Store. Visit their site at www.pixelmator.com for some nice preview videos.

iOS 6 won’t have the built in YouTube App

Posted on August 6, 2012 by IdeaMonster

Seems like Apple is moving away from Google for good

The new maps – ditching the ones provided by the search giant, were no surprise, but this certainly is. According to Apple, the YouTube app removal is due to the end of the licensing agreement. Of course Google will put out their own, free YouTube app for iOS devices, and YouTube still works in Safari, but omitting it from the OS will certainly confuse some less technical users. Apparently war with Google is well underway.

New Outlook.com email is stunning!

Posted on August 4, 2012 by IdeaMonster

Finally a worthy competitor to Gmail!

Microsoft is really pushing the ~~metro~~ interface (it’s not supposed to be called metro anymore – they’re thinking of a new name) with tiles, colors and beautiful typography. That purely digital, modern approach is finding it’s way in other places, and right now it came to the fully redesigned hotmail little brother – Outlook.com.

The site features skype video calling, facebook integration and a super-clean email experience with no ugly MS ribbons and cluttered menus. This looks so good, that it’s possibly the very best design in web email clients anywhere.

That clean, uncluttered interface IS the future and I seriously hope that Apple will tune down those skeumorphic designs at least a little bit. Since it’s all digital anyway, maybe it’d be best to accept it and become digital design-wise.

Besides it works well from the usability standpoint since it’s all clear, visible and easily accessible. The only thing I don’t quite like is the choice of colors. Maybe MS could tune down those hard colors a bit, or give the users a choice to just type in a hex color themselves. That’d be awesome. Well anyway – since it’s just launched maybe it’s a good time to go and “reserve” your name on there? www.outlook.com

Mountain Lion is here

Posted on July 25, 2012 by IdeaMonster

Everything just works

After installing the recent OS X on the 2011 Macbook Air, I can honestly say it definitely got faster, but most of the new features are rather invisible. Contacts app and the new calendar still look pretty ugly, but the new notification center is a much better piece of design and to some – more widely used. Right now all apps seam to be working right, with no errors or freezes. We’ll see how it turns out in the long(er) run.

UPDATE: Twitter integration (the system-wide one) is hidden in Mail,Contacts & Calendars. Not that easy to find. Also to get to the notification center you need to make a two finger swipe from right to left, but start outside of the trackpad. That’s the only way it’ll work. Took me a while to get to that too.

Attention! Details!

Posted on July 18, 2012 by IdeaMonster

Apps are looking better and better!

I’m currently in the middle of putting the final touches on my first BIG mobile app. By BIG I mean it’s for a big, recognizable company, not a personal project. The sheer amount of brainstorming that went into that, along with ever-changing mockups and UX drafts led me to a conclusion that live app testing is crucial to have something stable and production-ready without too much hassle with updates. From platform UI paradigms to general aestethics mobile app design is no easy task. Sure the canvas is smaller and supposedly easier to do than say a web page, but there’s a lot more that can go wrong.

Maybe that’s because we’re a little used to things going wrong on the web and can look the other way, but we tend to criticize apps that don’t work as advertised. Exciting times ahead, since the mobile space has evolved with apps being able to do more and look better, even using platform specific components (if used creatively and with some twist).

If you want examples try Path and Foursquare for iOS – each uses the basic styles and elements, but with a twist that makes it both original and pretty.

Pixelmator is half price!

Posted on June 23, 2012 by IdeaMonster

Now is the best time to get Pixelmator - even if you already own Photoshop

We have covered Pixelmator many times so far, and we’re generally both impressed and satisfied by the software (if you learn to live with some flaws and omissions it’s perfect ;)) and now if you were holding off to buy it it’s the best time ever, as this almost professional graphic design software is only $15! That’s A LOT lower than the cheapest Photoshop edition. Get it now here

Loads of crapware for EURO2012

Posted on June 10, 2012 by IdeaMonster

Each big event inspires people to think about how it can be app-ified. And that in turn results of even more App Store junk

At some point the idea of half-a-million apps must be turned around a bit towards “less but better”. EURO 2012 soccer tournament is a prime idea of the fact. There are over 50 apps devoted to this event, and most of them – even the official ones – are pretty worthless. I suspect that this little fact will soon transform the users view on apps towards something mostly useless, ugly and ubiquitous.

Apple acquired CHOMP a while ago to refine it’s app store search, while Google relies more on users comments and ratings to filter out garbage. But let’s face it – most people don’t really rate their apps, so we can say that most of the high ratings come from the friends of the developer. And nearly everyone has some friends, so even crappy apps can jump higher.

Crapware is currently about 80% of all mobile apps. That might damage the users perception of an app as a cool and needed thing. Most games are crapware, and some are direct rip-offs or even stolen (like the infamous Canabalt HD which is in fact direct theft from the real Canabalt game). Finding relevant apps and games is now super hard, and review sites don’t really help with that much – mostly because a lot of them promote the games and apps that pay them, and any app can pay money – even a crappy one.

I see two ways the app world might go – either the app store curators (both from Apple and Google) will shrink their app stores to good, beautiful and relevant apps and games, or people will soon get bored with surfing through hundreds of crapware to find one decent app. Or they might even shift back to web-based offerings that Facebook is trying to prepare for them. We’ll see. But if you ask me which EURO 2012 app is the best I can honestly say – switch to your favorite website for the info and news. It seems all of the apps are quickly made, underdeveloped attempts to gain users through a big event. Even the official app kinda sucks and that tells us a lot…

App store mania created some odd businesses on the side

Posted on May 23, 2012 by IdeaMonster

We all know that apps are the hip new thing right now, but there's a whole new side to their popularity

A developer decides to make the next great app or game. He did some research of course and found out that some people got a lot of money from a nicely done product on the App Store (or the Android market, but let’s focus on the former here – most rules apply to the Android market as well anyway). It didn’t occur to him that a lot of people win the lottery every year too. But let’s skip that part for now.

So he sits down, finds some more people and creates an awesome product. No, really. Let’s assume he did a great job. So he has a great product, and he knows what he needs to do – make good screenshots, write a nice description and think through his keywords. Then the upload day comes and the hopes are sky high.

And then comes the sad realization – there’s hundreds of thousands of apps out there, and his app falls down the charts so fast he doesn’t even notice when it’s nowhere to be found. No magic formula and no magic trick can save him now. Or maybe not?

So he goes to google and searches for ways to promote his app. And that’s where it gets funny. He finds many websites that review apps, but most of them want money for the review if he doesn’t want to wait forever-and-a-half. And then there are people who promise him a boost in sales by some unknown practices, but again – it’ll cost him. Another great thing is the free apps every day initiatives. There are plenty of ’em out there and usually they sort of work – boosting the downloads of the free version can result in a bump of the sales when it turns paid again. The catch? They charge so much that in most cases it won’t make a difference. Some say it’s $10,000, some say a bit less. But still it’s pretty expensive and of course there’s no guarantee it’ll work.

The review sites that want your money for a review (or sometimes even a favorable review which isn’t really anything other than an Ad) also don’t give you any guarantee it’ll change anything. The scamy “schemes” of other internet marketers are just that.

So what does it all come down to? We don’t want to fight those people, but we want to let our readers know that currently – there’s a whole bunch of people that get rich off of the App Store without any apps of their own. (even big respectable sites charge thousands of dollars for what later appears as a genuine news recommendation – so now you know why they write about some apps and skip the rest). Basically they earn more money in the long run than the developers they ‘help’. Just a thought.

We think that quality apps and games will sooner or later catch Apple’s attention anyway, so these kinds of promotions should be avoided, unless we want to pay someone’s rent with no guarantee ;)

all Android screen resolutions compared to all iOS resolutions (including the rumored new iPhone)

Posted on May 21, 2012 by IdeaMonster

Steve Jobs said that Android's biggest problem is being fragmented, but new rumors suggest a different resolution iPhone!

There has been all the fuss about how fragmented Android is, especially in comparison to it’s direct blueprint inspiration – iOS. But with all the surfacing rumors about a 4inch iPhone 5 (or New iPhone) it might actually cause Apple to fragment it’s devices as well. At least a little bit.

So here’s the most current comparison of resolutions for iOS and Android mobile devices:

	iOS	Android
Phones	320×480 640×960 (2x) iPhone5 (?) 640×1096 ?	ldpi 240×400 ldpi 240×432 mdpi 320×480 hdpi 480×800 hdpi 480×854 hdpi 600×1024 xhdpi 640×960
Tablets	1024×768 2048×1536 (2x)	ldpi 1024×600 mdpi 1280×800 mdpi 1024×768 mdpi 1280×768 hdpi 1536×1152 hdpi 1920×1152 hdpi 1920×1200 xhdpi 2048×1536 xhdpi 2560×1536 xhdpi 2560×1600

As you can see making a universal Android app is kinda hard, as you need to either make it the way “flexible websites” are made (which will results in Tim Cook mocking the stretched apps once again) or doing it for all those resolutions. Apple has only two resolutions with a 2x option. And if the new iPhone will stay the same 640×960 it won’t have any problem with a fragmented app ecosystem and/or app size.

But for all of you who need a quick resolution reference – enjoy! It’s always so hard to find it in a neat table without plenty of scrolling ;)

Is it the end of apps for businesses?

Posted on May 13, 2012 by IdeaMonster

According to our calculations, about 2% of businesses need a mobile app. Another 50% needs a mobile version of their website. The rest might use a mobile site, but don't really need one.

A while ago mobile apps have become the new web pages of the modern times. Everyone seemed to need one, even for the most bizarre kinds of businesses. Right now the reality has become more like an internet bubble of the late 90’s, and overcharged apps can in fact be a laughable novelty. At first they were charged higher than web pages, but the market quickly caught up to that, and right now they’re about the same price. And that feels kind of justified, because it’s not so special anymore after almost a million apps and games on the market (iOS and Android combined). If someone wrote a million apps in about 4 years now, it must mean that there are plenty of app programmers out there.

The other factor is the mobile market fragmentation. With iOS and Android plus all the competitors, to have an app for everyone, one must develop for many platforms, often different technology-wise. Websites that stretch to the mobile screen size will simply eliminate the need for most apps. Sure – people trust apps more than websites, as some of the images are pre-cached and feel more responsive, but that will soon change with LTE coming to power in more and more countries each day.

But the most important thing here is to understand why do we need apps at all. Games, Entertainment and Social apps are self explanatory. Utility apps (like wikipedia, calculators, measure converters etc.) are a nice thing to have to. But who wants an app of a company that makes sugar-filled soda? Or cars? How many times do we change cars in a lifetime? Probably less, than we change smartphones, but all rare occurrences will surely do with just a mobile website. A small percent of people travels a lot, so they might need a hotel-chain app, but most will have to do with a generic “search all hotels” app, and that market is already saturated.

Who else needs mobile apps? Seriously. That doesn’t of course mean that apps are dead. They can still make impressions (and money) but mostly with a creative idea of their makers. Not apps made for a client. Think Opus, Instagram and such.

Do you know any business that’s not saturated with apps, and REALLY needs them?

How game design works – based on HungrySquid for iOS

Posted on May 7, 2012 by IdeaMonster

Our friends at Hype4 shared some of the knowledge about how the development of HungrySquid went, and also some tips on what they did wrong in the App Store at the beginning.

First of all, normally – as a company a game like HungrySquid could’ve been done in about two months. Since Hype4 was working on it overtime, it took about 4 months to complete. The idea was born last summer, when Mike observed some water ripples while throwing pebbles at a pond. The story was written quickly (available as a free iBook) and the game design followed. It didn’t look like it does now though. The first idea was for the tentacles to grow, instead of fluorescent goo, but with many intersections and shapes it just looked weird and unnatural – even for a squid in space. The game was developed using Cocos2D (and Partially Kobold2d) and most of the graphics were drawn in 2048×1536 resolution, even though the new iPad was yet to be announced. It’s sometimes good to trust your instincts, because it would be really hard to make the Retina iPad version.

Continue reading →

Photoshop Touch is finally here

Posted on February 27, 2012 by IdeaMonster

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!

Posted on February 15, 2012 by IdeaMonster

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.

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

Posted on February 11, 2012 by IdeaMonster

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.