I got a hold of a copy of “The Project” – new, hyped magazine for the iPad that’s supposed to revolutionize the way we think about digital magazines. I got to play with it for a while and despite the fact it’s pretty pricey (almost 3 euros) it also has some really cool ideas too. It probably won’t revolutionize the market but it brought a couple of things to it and we might see them in other publications.
Will it redefine the interfaces for tablet publishing? Will that in turn redefine the web as we know it a little bit? We’ll have to wait and see. Right now they have a pretty neat and at the same time grungy/electronic Tron cover with animations and flashes known from some thriller movies. That might be fun. We’re witnessing some sort of future here, and another one when “The Daily” comes out. Exciting times to be a web designer. A lot of new trends will emerge REALLY soon. See the vid :
Project magazine cover video from Project on Vimeo.
Apple is pushing forward the magazine revolution by cooperating with news corp. and they want to create a tablet-only newspaper. This is revolutionary and exciting for a couple of reasons. One – right now the tablet papers are “versions” of a regular paper. This one will be completely 1’s and 0’s so less trees will die in the process. Good.
There seems to be a lot of discussion about it recently, but mostly content-wise or about their future plans – i.e. more electronic only but high quality content publications. And yet everyone seems to be missing one point – since we already kinda know how a tablet magazine should look and work in terms of visuals and interface, is it the time for an “apple style revolution” again? Will they invent a tablet newspaper interface of their own, or will they simply base it on the best ones out there (Flipboard). ?
We’ll probably see sometime mid-december. And if the interface will be new it might be a start for A LOT of change coming soon to the tablet publishing industry. Well unless it’s actually any good…
Since the Washington Post made an iPad app too, I think it’s both the time to elaborate on interfaces and the time to admit, that the change is surely coming. The dying press industry can actually revive with this new medium, which is good because we need well written content. There’s nothing wrong with amateur bloggers, but the most valuable content is and will always be made by professional writers and journalists. So now we have the chance to try those out because the new york times, washington post and newsweek all made really nice applications that bring the press to the new medium. And of course they will also be available on other tablets when they finally come out. And that leads to a conclusion that there’s another change in interfaces coming.
Apparently a click to view interface doesn’t really work with press on a tablet. No, every one of the magazines has swiping motion to change pages / browse through articles. People don’t like to point and click, they like to browse. And what’s more natural than a swiping motion? Right!
And since the tablets are slowly taking over, we might want to consider websites that are also navigated that way (or can be navigated with both regular and modern touch controls). That might lead to a regression of thought, because we’re actually coming back to the system that was dominant before the PC revolution. And this system is already catching on. So it might either be a case of nostalgia, or simply a way to do it right. And if it’s the latter we should consider that with all of our feature layouts.
Below you can see the AD for washington post, pretty funny, especially the last sentence ;)
Many people were skeptical at first about the Flash VS html5 war, but it seems like HTML5 has already won, as after 6 months from apple’s decision to ban flash, HTML5 has now over half of the online video. Which leads to a simple conclusion, that in a year we won’t be seeing flash all that often. Maybe it’s start to learn some new tools?
You might want to wait a while before installing the update to the vey popular wordpress app. It added features like random shutdowns and forgetting your password every few minutes. I’d wait for an update to this update.
Finally the New York Times has realised that people expect a little more from ipad news apps than a sort-of website version. Following in the footsteps of flipboard – which by the way has set new standards in the industry – it’s easy to use and well designed.
Those changes and an evolution of interfaces towards the touch can a very well be the main reasons for the apps to steal more market from their paper counterparts and save some trees.
Now it’s time for a flipboard style app that let’s you add blogs of your choice frokm wordpress and other types. And a creation machine app would be nice too, right ? ;)
The pixelmator team has released an update to their amazing photo-editing app. The update is free to all the current users and it’s mostly about bug fixes and adding “weppy” image format support to the mix. Go grab 1.6.2 at pixelmator.com now!
If you own a mac you’ve probably already spent a lot of cash on it. So digging deep in your pockets you might not find another hundreds of dollars for photoshop and illustrator right off the bat. But fear not as there are alternatives that are getting closer to the moment in which they can become substitutes. Sure they lack a lot of functions of the big brothers, but for most tasks they do just fine and are both around 60 dollars. So you can get a whole package for a little over a hundred. Which wouldn’t get you even the cardboard box for photoshop CS5.
Limited functionality is being worked on constantly so if something’s missing that you need in these apps it’ll probably come up pretty soon in the next version anyway. Of course if you need Adobe you’ll have to go with adobe. But it’s good to know that there are alternatives, maybe not for all tasks but still alternatives.
For raster graphics you have the beautifully designed Pixelmator and for vectors there’s Vector Designer . Both cheap but pretty capable. Abduzeedo promotes pixelmator and have quite a lot of tutorials for it, but there’s also a “Learn” section on their website that you can check out to see for yourself if the app is good enough for you.
Well it also works on iPhones and iPods, but on the iPad it truly shows it’s potential. Now imagine that as a VJ app with a couple more elements and mixing techniques and you get yourself something truly remarkable. It’s also pretty cool for making backgrounds / website elements that are a little bit random. And it’s 100% free! Screens below:
At a point in time, when facebook is the internet inside the internet, and when many people think of it as THE internet, rarely using anything else, an interesting thing has happened. Many had pleaded, many had wished for it (especially web developers), and even Microsoft urged for it. No success. Nobody was able to kill Internet Explorer 6, mainly because it’s preinstalled with windows XP and this is still what the majority uses. So all of the office computers, and all the home computers of casual users remained the silent majority of web browsing.
This of course led to websites being done ESPECIALLY for IE6 and for the rest of the world. Twice as much work. Or actually more, since IE6 had it’s humors and wasn’t really following standards, so it was all a hit or miss scenario constantly. And as years have gone by, the usage of IE6 was shrinking, but not fast enough so it’d be convincing for a client to skip IE6 version of the site. Even at 25% of the market (and it still has more than that, significantly more) nobody would decide to skip IE6 version while building a site.
Well until now. A while ago youtube stopped supporting IE6, but most of it worked just fine in IE6 anyway.
Now facebook comes into play, and since it has all those apps and all those quizes the casual user really loves, they’ll see a big difference. And that alone – a decision of a website they spend half their awake time on – can lead them to upgrade. Sure firefox, chrome, safari and opera are better than any IE iteration, but for god’s sake! Make them upgrade to at least IE7 and that, as terrible a browser as it is – is still a huge step for the web world.
IE6 Rest in peace.
There are many ways for achieving “BIG formats” in graphics. One is using very high resolution images. Another one is using vector graphics which is scaleable without artifacts and is great for logos and simple elements. But what if we have a pretty small photo and we’d like it to be big anyway? For a while there weren’t many options but a couple of years ago I found something that I want to share with you.
Rasterbator is a tool that you can use to make large prints from small graphic files such as posters, photos etc. How large can it be? Well let’s quote their website:
The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. Upload an image, print the resulting multi-page pdf file and assemble the pages into extremely cool looking poster up to 20 meters in size.
20 meters is quite large, isn’t it? And it’s all done by creating lots of little (and bigger) circles of many colors that when viewed from a distance create the image we want. It’s actually quite simple, a technique that was known before and used in print (old newspapers) in a slightly different way. Here it’s an algorithm that enables you to convert your photos from simple pixel x pixel ratio to something much, much bigger using dots. And many of them. What’s great about it is that it’s free to use for commercial purposes as well, so another good thing coming from the so called “community” for the fun and usage by the masses. And it’s pretty easy too.
It even can divide the image into smaller portions (let’s say A4 page format) and export a PDF with a4 pages that you can print on your home printer and then hang in the proper order to have the whole big image. Now that’s creative!
You can check out rasterbator at http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator. Don’t forget to see the amazing photo gallery!
It’s been a long time since the last version of pixelmator hit the internets, and now the long awaited 1.6 is out. Was it worth it? Is it super-cool? Is it a photoshop killer?
What we get in 1.6 is the long awaited layer groups (FINALLY!) which are done much nicer and user-friendly than in Photoshop. So yeah, this is a big plus.
We also get performance improvements and 64 bit / Grand Central Dispatch and all that other technical mambo jumbo. Bottom line? It’s 40% faster. This is of course always a good “feature”.
Precision transform tools are now more precise, rulers are now more ruler’y and there are supposed to be little tweaks here and there.
Still no real text tool though which is a buzz kill because that is the only major feature setting the app a bit behind but hopefully we’ll see text tools in 1.7. I’d just hate to wait for it for a year ;)
Overall performance is much better, and I love the new layer groups.
There’s also importing from devices such as cameras, iphones, ipads, and exporting to popular social sites. Might come in handy, although I don’t think it’s as important as the text tool ;)
So yeah, it got better, and closer to beating photoshop’s price-to-quality ratio. A good app and you should at least give it a try at pixelmator.com
Whoa, didn’t expect Adobe to release such a fun and actually useful mobile app for free. Since mobile photoshop for the iphone is a big disappointment I wasn’t expecting much from “Ideas”. But trust me it’s perfect.
It let’s you sketch just like other sketch apps do (but with more style) but that’s not all. Aside from the standards like brush size / opacity and color (with a great interface – seriously) you can also draw on photos (which isn’t new but done beautifully) and what’s super cool you can “extract” color schemes from pictures. Which basically means it can generate matching colors from any picture you take – so if you see some nice colors somewhere you can snap a picture and extract them easily.
It also categorizes your ideas (sketches if you must) and organizes them. I’ve tried many apps like that and this one simply owns them all. Seriously. Having (mobile) ideas can be fun!
The new iphone is out and aside from the fact whether you like it or not it does bring one thing that is truly revolutionary. And it’s not the hires screen.
Think about it – having a 720p camera in your pocket and imovie to edit it on the go will break apple’s own division of mobile products being only for consuming media while computers being the tools to create.
This changes everything because the best camera is the one you have with you, and using free time (like on a bus) to edit it will result of more creative things done “in the moment”.
And higher quality plus having your tools with you all the time is the path towards better digital media and perhaps youtube 3.0
Exciting times since now all other phone makers will make a video editing app and the trend will spread.
Also expect more virals ;)
I downloaded the trial version of CS5 today and of course the first thing I wanted to see is how well does it really handle the hyped content aware fill. Below are my results.
Note that sometimes I had to use the content aware fill a couple of times to fix little mistakes previous fills had done. But overall it’s a very powerfull tool. The results are not as perfect as their promotional video but jaw-dropping nonetheless.
Test 1 – removing me and my snowboard from a cellphone picture. So there’s dirt and heavy jpg compression at the start.
The before picture you can see above, the after just below.
