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!

WordPress iOS app updated with bugs?

Posted on October 15, 2010 by IdeaMonster

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.

Pixelmator update released

Posted on October 12, 2010 by IdeaMonster

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!

Photoshop and Illustrator on a budget

Posted on September 21, 2010 by IdeaMonster

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.

Cool little thing : “Line art” iPad app

Posted on September 21, 2010 by IdeaMonster

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:

Continue reading →

Pixelmator 1.6 released

Posted on July 13, 2010 by IdeaMonster

pixelmator16

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?

Well sort of

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

Adobe Ideas for your iPhone

Posted on June 25, 2010 by IdeaMonster

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.

What does it do?

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!

Pixelmator 1.5.1 released!

Posted on February 13, 2010 by IdeaMonster

The guys from “Pixelmator team” are back! And after the long wait they present the next, 1.5.1 version of this supercool raster design software. This is a small update as it only fixes most bugs and adds some nice little features. But finally you can organize your brushes and the way this is done shows, that they don’t want to copy others, instead creating very usable workflows on their own. There’s also the announcement of the next, 1.6 version called Nucleus that they have started working on and that just adds to the overall excitement! Only three more functions (a proper text tool, layer styles and groups) and I’m dumping photoshop forever :)

You can check the software out (Mac only!) at pixelmator.com

Iphone music app development

Posted on February 7, 2010 by IdeaMonster

We’re starting to work on a little project for the iphone – a simple 5 octave keyboard with combining two synth patches playing at once + an optional drum pattern underneath. You can see the first version of the GUI here.