Pixelmator 2.0 release today!

Posted on October 26, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Today, on October 26th the Pixelmator team is set to release the 2.0 version of their popular (and cheap) image editor! We’ve been covering pixelmator for quite a while now and while we think the app is really well made, it still lacks a lot of simpler features that are necessary for day to day work. We’re not saying it has to copy photoshop 1to1, it’s more about simple refinements – like an improved type tool, because the current one is dreadful.

2.0 is supposedly bringing a lot of the requested features (along with simple vector tools too!) so let’s keep our fingers crossed. We’ll test the App and tell you if you can delete that 30-day photoshop trial you’ve used for the last couple of years ;) Just kidding! But hopefully this release will at least drive a couple more people to forget about the bloated, over-priced hog that PS has become. Now we play the waiting game…

We’ll let you know when it hits the App Store!

non-Adobe HTML 5 animation tools – Purple vs Hype

Posted on October 20, 2011 by IdeaMonster

We can’t complain for the lack of tools to create rich HTML5 animated content. Even Adobe finally decided that flash is better for other things (like creating cartoons) than web site animations and transitions. Their “Edge” is actually a sign that they gave in to Steve Jobs’ and realized there IS a market for non-flash web animation after all. So it was the iPhone that changed the way we look at the web and influenced the new standards. Good.

We covered Hype a while ago, and now it seems that there’s another tool to create rich HTML5 content and now Mac App Store is promoting “Purple” – another pro tool for HTML5 animation. It seems that the interface is a little bit more refined visually than in Hype. Think – Pixelmator – with all those dark windows and panels it looks quite nice. As far as the performance goes though, I checked out the Purple gallery on my 2011 Macbook Air (core i5) and it performed pretty slow. Hype is much better in that regard, but Purple was just introduced so I hope they’ll work on performance in future releases. Aside from that it seems that as far as functionality goes both Apps are pretty similar, so it doesn’t really matter which one you buy, but Purple is now half the price (introductory) of Hype, so if you buy it now it will be a bargain at 15 Eur.

You can download Hype for 30 Eur here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hype/id436931759?mt=12
And Purple is available here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/purple/id433132196?mt=12

The Angry Birds Effect

Posted on October 7, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Another (this time smaller) infographic about how much time and money is lost in the workplace due to an Angry Birds addiction. It actually is possible, that the yearly amount of wasted money is higher, than the value of it’s creators – Rovio. Now that’s mindblowing…

The more heads the longer the development

Posted on October 5, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Sure people can fool you with washed-up phrases like “there’s no I in TEAM” and such, but the truth in the design community is a little different. Actually the more people involved in a project, the more fragmented it will be. Think of it as an android headset, with all the resolutions, different processors and performance, and a design needs to now fit it all.

With iPhone’s it’s a bit easier – there’s the iPhone (sure, two resolutions, but that’s easy – just double) and you can create something for it actually being sure it will look and work the same. Well let’s not jump into that analogy too far, I hope you got it. The more people involved, the less stable the design is. Thus the best teams are usually the smallest.

Thinking about the successes of recent years in mobile apps and games, (well aside from Rovio) most of the biggest, most creative ideas came from small, 2-3 people teams. Sometimes it can even be a one person, and then the vision is completely as it was imagined from the beginning.

Is it even possible to create something good with a team larger than two people anymore? Well we just need to wait and see.

Adobe Announces Photoshop Touch!

Posted on October 4, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Don’t worry it’s not the crippled Photoshop mobile version, that didn’t even had enough functionality to compete with Photo Forge. It’s a completely new thing and it’s as close to real photoshop, as it ever was. There are layers of course, painting tools, patterns and blending modes. So apparently it’s set for some serious (as far as it can go) photo editing and content creation. That’s a smart move on Adobe’s part, and we’re eager to see when it comes out. Photoshop Touch should be available for iPads soon, Androids a little bit later (even though the demo is on an Android slate). It was announced along a few other apps (including a nice prototyping app, that’s an attempt to take on OmniGraffle I guess) at the annual Adobe MAX conference.

Video by the 9to5mac team

Pixelmator, Vector Designer and Hype as a Budget creative suite?

Posted on October 3, 2011 by IdeaMonster

We have covered the alternatives to Adobe’s expensive suite many times yet, but since the release of Hype, there’s a lot more options for a web designer, to have an almost fully functional set of apps, for a fraction of the price. Sure, Pixelmator is not yet in 2.0 version, which will bring it even closer to Photoshop, but it’s gonna happen soon, and an improved type tool plus many other additions (vectors!) will make many people to seriously consider it. At 40$ it’s a steal. Same with vector designer – sure it’s simpler, but only a small percent of users (those alleged power-users) are actually taking advantage of all that illustrator has to offer. Most of us just want to design a logo quickly and efficiently. Another 40$ and it’s yours.

Flash is nearly gone from the web altogether (even Adobe now has it’s own HTML5 authoring tool), and Hype can do a lot of the things flash did, only with better battery/processor performance on mobile devices (that includes laptops). All of those Apps combined cost less than 150$. And sure they’re underpowered sometimes, and not as feature packed as their Adobe counterparts. But almost 80% of designers use the same tools all the time, the same filters and the same elements. Pixelmator is really close to being able to successfuly replace Photoshop, and both Vector Designer and Hype are constantly being improved as well. We may see a big split in the design community in a year or two, with Adobe loosing a lot of market share towards cheaper options.

I’ve been using those three apps alongside CS5, and I’m sure that I won’t buy the CS 6 update anytime soon. Monopoly is never a good thing, and it led Adobe to the high prices they have today.

Tablet interfaces, web apps and oh, I’m back!

Posted on September 29, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Been away for quite a while, since I’ve been working for one Apple related blog, but now I decided that it’s time to be more creative, instead of repetitive. So CreationMachine is officially back in “business” (whatever business it is) and you can expect more updates soon.

A couple of interesting things happened when I was gone: first and foremost some Android tablets were trying to beat the iPad, the Kindle Fire was announced (and it can shake things up finally), and there’s an explosion of Web Apps led by Financial Times, that withdrew from the App Store to cut the Apple Tax out of it’s subscription. We’ll be seeing more and more of those kinds of apps in the near future, so HTML5 is something to keep an eye on. Especially after “Hype!” and “Edge” by Adobe, which are in fact targeted at app developers and designers.

So there are things happening and there’s been changes, but not too many apparently, so we’ll manage somehow. Just need to redesign the site and connect it to my wider network, so an official start will happen soon. And when I say “soon” it really means soon or it’d drive me crazy ;)

App review: 360 Panorama

Posted on July 19, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Rating:

360 Panorama is a cheap (2Eur) iPhone App that lets you create “dragged” panoramas in a fake 3d, that are both easy to do, and fun to play with. Currently the web view only works in Safari (sorry for that), but it really is impressive. When viewed from the iPhone 4 – even in the browser – we can use the full potential of the built in gyro to rotate around with our phones and preview the 3d world. The App runs surprisingly smooth, although it requires some precision and a fairly steady hand. Most panoramas have at least one jagged line somewhere – usually at the final end.

There also should be an option to do it more “3d” like than two rows of photos, but currently doing more than one can result in a badly stitched result unfortunately. Still it’s a pretty good effort in a cheap app, and can be a nice addition to our iPhone photography folder. The image quality is not bad, even in low light conditions, but there’s no focus and exposition lock, so each panorama-part can actually differ visually and that sucks a lot. But in good lighting conditions it’s a whole different story as seen above (it’d be perfect if not the final error near the end of the panorama).

It is predicted that iPhone 4S / iPhone 5 will have a built in panorama tool in the camera App, but we have to wait until tomorrow to see that anyway.

You can download it at http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/360-panorama/id377342622?mt=8

Is it the end of Adobe Flash? Here comes “Hype!”

Posted on May 22, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Steve Jobs never really loved Adobe Flash. The omission of the technology from Apple’s mobile iOS platform was one of the examples of that. Flash was slow and hard on battery, so Apple decided to start pushing HTML5 technology, that could achieve the same goals, but without the CPU and battery strain. And they somehow succeeded because flash is less and less popular every day. Designers either don’t do animations at all anymore, preferring simpler, more usable sites,or make them in jQuery and HTML5.

The only problem so far has been the fact, that to make anything “moving” with those tools you needed to be a programmer, while Flash had a nice little 700$ application, that any designer can use to create. Well now that has all changed – A small company called Tumultco has released Hype – HTML5 authoring tool, that’s easy to use and you don’t need to put in ANY lines of code for the animations to work.

You can buy it (mac version) in the Mac App Store for the introductory price of just 29$!! That’s 660$ cheaper than Flash! Get it while the price tag lasts!

Here are some examples of the technology in use:
Gallery

Garageband for iPad

Posted on March 13, 2011 by IdeaMonster

I was so excited for GB that as soon as it hit the app store, I got my hands on it and I can only say : Whoa!
But it’s not the fact that it’s such a great app by itself that is appealing. This is a complete package – many instruments, many ways to tweak and multitrack recording. That all combined (though limited) can mean only one thing. Someone will make an even better app in the near future because apparently tablets are our future. They already accept MIDI and some USB sound cards, so the next logical step instead of bringing a laptop along for gigs is taking a tablet + a smaller, usb powered audio interface. Touch interfaces can bring many instruments in one, additional drums, kaoss pads, synths. This could be a good addition for both DJ’s and electronic musicians.

Oh and those smart instruments – they suck. Sorry. Those chords sound nice, but lifeless. There’s no beauty in ultra-perfection. Skip these and play the real things :) Even if lousy.

Oh and “sampler” here is actually useful. You can record your own soundbanks and play that live. Awesome’o 2000! :)

iPad is starting to work for the creatives

Posted on March 3, 2011 by IdeaMonster

A while back I considered the iPad to be nice timekilling tool, but not really a device to create content. Well maybe if you’re a writer and have a keyboard dock you can use it for work. But most other kinds of creative activities were out of the question since the apps were baby-apps, not too powerful and not too serious. That changed a while ago when apple released iMovie for iphone. Sure it’s not Final Cut, but it’s a start – you can be on a bus and edit a video you shot before. This opened up a lot of new possibilities, but it looked like that was about it. Photoshop for iOS is a big disappointment, because of it’s lack of serious tools and layers, and those painting apps, well , they’re for painters not designers.
Sure there’s iFontMaker which is pretty useful and can be considered productive. But yesterday garageband came into the spotlight, because frankly, this is an app in which you can actually do something. Just like iMovie. It’s not a time killer, because if you’re into music making it’s the first big app that doesn’t just let you play with some sounds but also records them and let’s you arrange them. This is big. Sure I can’t imagine a real photoshop or illustrator for mobile devices just yet, but who knows. It’d have to be stylus operated though and that doesn’t sit well with capacitive touch displays. And making a company logo with just your fingers is only good if it’s a logo for fingerpaint selling firm.
But finally we can do some music and that’s great. I can’t wait to see ableton and other bigger players make an approach at this. The new iPad is as capable as the computers from a while back if not better. So the only thing stopping the expansion is the user interface. It has to be redesigned and it has to be done good enough to allow some serious work. Exciting times!

Mess

Posted on March 2, 2011 by IdeaMonster

State of mess is a typical thing for any designer. We see something we like on the web and we bookmark it for future reference. Then we can of course always access it later easily…

Yeah, right!

I have a gazillion of bookmarks and I have no idea what most of them are. Some are years old and I never checked them out again. But I found an app that instead of bookmarks, just snaps images, that you can tag and then find easily. The app is called “Little Snapper” and it simply snaps a screenshot of a website. Think of it as your screenshot catalogue. After a while the amount of images starts to grow, so it’s actually pretty cool to type in “minimal” and “white” to see all the matching sites and get some inspiration (but not too much, right? ;)).

It helped me plenty to keep a better track of what I see online and it also cleared most of my bookmarks that I’d never check anyway.

iFontmaker – make your own fonts on the iPad!

Posted on January 20, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Whoa, this is actually pretty amazing. I mean the idea is simple enough and many apps made use of the “drawing” ideas, but not like this. Still it would be worth nothing without the ability to export the font … which it HAS! For 8 bucks it’s a steal and you can have your OWN fonts to use for logos and websites in no time! Perfect!

an iPad simulator in CSS and JS

Posted on January 12, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Whoa, that’s a pretty cool example of what web-apps are capable of. Sure this is actually pretty pointless, but proving it can be done, it opens a window for more advanced web applications of the future. Check it out here:
http://alexw.me/ipad/

Picasso vs Mac Finder icon – “great artists steal from great artists” ?

Posted on January 9, 2011 by IdeaMonster

The Picasso’ painting “Two characters” looked a little similar to me, when I saw it in a photobook recently, so I searched the web and noticed that some other sites also picked that up. It seems like the finder icon is strongly “inspired” by the painting. Sure it couldn’t be exact (aside from the obvious reasons) because it’s a bit too sad and depressing. But still, can u see it?