domingo, 21 de abril de 2013

iPad By Davis: “Un-bagging safe solvent: A look at Martin Reisch's camera gear” plus 5 more

iPad By Davis: “Un-bagging safe solvent: A look at Martin Reisch's camera gear” plus 5 more

Un-bagging safe solvent: A look at Martin Reisch's camera gear

Posted: 20 Apr 2013 08:47 PM PDT

Martin Reisch, aka safe solvent is iMore's go-to videographer for events like CES and Macworld, and he's just joined us in New York City for our big, upcoming [Redacted]. The moment he landed he walked in with a giant Crumpler Dry Red No. 9 gear bag, and we just knew we had to get a look inside it.

Starting at the top, Martin had his 5D Mark III, and since he's a firm believer in backup bodies, he had his 5D Mark II as well. For lenses, he brought with him his Canon 24-70 F2.8 L, Canon 50 F1.2 L, and Canon 70-200 F2.8 L.

He also packed his RED Scarlet, a massively impressive 4K camera with an EF mount that lets him use the very same Canon lenses.

Despite all that glass, Martin's daily driver is still his iPhone 5, along with a Joby Gorilla Pod GripTight. You can see samples of that work over on Instagram, and as for the work he's doing this week...

... Stay tuned!

    

Apps of the Week: Mr. Crab, Nat Geo Today, TextExpander, and more

Posted: 20 Apr 2013 10:36 AM PDT

Apps of the Week: Mr. Crab, Nat Geo Today, TextExpander, and more

Every week, the editors and writers at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This week's selections include a couple games about crabs, a National Geographic app, an app for your music creation apps, an app that will help you type faster than ever, and an oceanography photography app.

Mr. Crab - Ally Kazmucha

I've been on the hunt lately for new games that aren't the regular ones I play all the time. While browsing a section in the App Store, I wandered across Mr. Crab for iPhone and iPad. The premise of the game is simple but still strangely addicting.

If anything, it reminds be a bit of Temple Run since the idea is the same. The objective is to rescue as many baby crabs as you can and collect other goodies while trying to reach the top of each level. If you run into barricades, you'll get turned back around. The further you get into the game, the more complicated the levels become.

The best part is for only $0.99, you get both the iPhone and iPad version in one.

Crabitron - Simon Sage

Crabitron puts players in charge of a malicious, ever-hungering intergalactic crab that devours all in its path. By using two fingers per limb, players can open, close, and move claws about the immediate area to grasp at passing by space ships and shield against pathetic mortal resistance. Don't worry about getting damaged - you can always gobble up free-floating aliens that you've left stranded to the cold embrace of outer space for an extra boost to health. To break up the redundancy of violent mayhem, occasionally you'll encounter mini-games and boss fights. Over the course of gameplay, you earn coins which can be spent on upgrading claws, consumable power-ups found throughout levels, and projectile burps. Between the unique gameplay and the premise of cosmic chaos, Crabitron is a great way to kill time - and the universe.

Nat Geo Today - Chris Parsons

Nat Geo Today is a pretty awesome app for those of you other there who enjoy the daily offerings from National Geographic. Personally, I enjoy the beautiful photos but there are often times I come across some great editorials within the app as well. Although the app focuses on 'Today', it does allow you to go back and view a weeks worth of content. That includes all the awesome photos, videos, editorials, games and quizzes they include. Overall, the content is well laid out, the app runs well and you can share what you're reading through social channels. It's free and well, I'm a sucker for free apps.

Audiobus - Joseph Keller

Audiobus is unique among apps in that it is less a full app in its own right and more of a hub for other apps, specifically those centered around music creation. Audiobus allows you to connect supported apps, such as Propellerhead's Figure and Apple's Garageband, and move audio from one app to another without hassle. A simple workflow would look something like this: record audio in Chrodion, apply effects in AmpKit, and then output the result directly to Garageband. All done with a few button presses.

What's more, you can actually use some of the functionality of one app while in a connected app. Figure is able to record audio on its own, but if I'm just going to send that to an app like Loopy HD, why not just have Loopy record it in the first place? When an app is connected to Audiobus, a panel appears on either the left or right side of the screen that lets you do something like record audio directly to another app. If you enjoy creating music on your iPhone or iPad at all, take a look at Audiobus. It's a universal app, currently on sale for $4.99 on the App Store.

TextExpander for iOS - Rene Ritchie

TextExpander from the fine folks at Smile Software is a Mac app that lets you type short snippets of text that it almost immediately replaces with longer strings of words or code. For example, if I type this:

ssocial

It almost immediately gets automagically replaced with this

Twitter: http://twitter.com/imore Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/imorecom Google+: http://www.gplus.to/imore YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/imorevideo

I use it to insert common hyperlinks, code embeds, addresses, and much, much, more.

And thanks to TextExpander of iOS, all the stuff I use on the Mac gets synced over Dropbox to my iPhone and iPad so that I can use them to, in apps that support it.

That's the only downside. Apple doesn't let apps inter-communicate, nor does it allow for the deep system integration TextExpander would need to work on iOS the way it does on OS X. Still, a lot of the apps that I like, respect, and use took it upon themselves to integrate with TextExpander, so I have one seamless if not ubiquitous system at the moment.

(I use iOS' built in text correction feature to mimic the same functionality in built-in Apple apps. For example, ggm spits out my email address for logins, something tedious to type repeatedly in iOS.)

Pretty much any string I have to type more than once or twice a month gets made into a snippet at this point. Saves time, well worth the money.

Ocean Encounters: A Photographic Exploration of Marine Wildlife by Brandon Cole - Leanna Lofte

Ocean Encounters is an iPhone and iPad app that explores Marine Wildlife through photography by Brandon Cole. I love animals and I love photography, so when I saw this app in the App Store, it was an immediate buy. The menu design needs a little work, I'll admit, but the photography is gorgeous. It's also fun to look through the photos with my daughter and identify starfish, whales, and colors of fish.

Unfortunately, Ocean Encounters does not support the iPhone 5's bigger display, but I prefer to use it on my iPad, anyway.

Ocean Encounters is currently on sale for $1.99.

Your choice?

Now that we've chosen our favorites for the week, we want to hear yours! Did you pick up a killer app, accessory, or game this week? Let us know in the comments below!

    

Best Free iPad App of the Week: Hopscotch HD

Posted: 20 Apr 2013 09:32 AM PDT

Hopscotch HD iPad app

One of the best things about using an iPad is all the great apps that we can run on it. There are excellent apps for just about any purpose you can think of. Better still, there are lots of great free apps for the iPad. Our Best Free iPad App of the Week posts highlight these apps.

This week's pick is Hopscotch HD, which is a great app with a great purpose – introducing kids to programming. The app does a superb job of making this introduction kid-friendly and compelling.

Here's a little of its App Store intro:

Hopscotch allows kids to create their own games and animations. Kids unleash their creativity with this beautiful, easy-to-use visual programming language.
Inspired by MIT's Scratch, the Hopscotch programming language works by dragging and dropping method blocks into scripts. When you're done with a script, press play to see your code in action! As you get...

Read the whole entry... »

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Status Board iPad App Gets a Huge 1.1 Update

Posted: 20 Apr 2013 08:08 AM PDT

Status Board iPad app

Status Board, the popular new iPad app that offers to present data beautifully, has been updated to Version 1.1 this week. This is a huge update, with a slew of improvements, bug fixes, and enhancements.

Here's my favorite enhancement listed in the update:

Portrait and landscape layouts are independent! That means when you switch orientations and your panels are messy, all you have to do is Edit in that orientation and the panels will stay where you place them. Next time you come back, they're exactly where you left them. Make your status board look perfect in both orientations, then switch between them with abandon!

This makes the app so much smoother and slicker I think. I'm always a big fan of apps that work just as effectively in both landscape and portrait mode.

Here's more of the enormous change list for this update:

We've Been Working Overtime:
•...

Read the whole entry... »

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

How to change the default font in the Notes app for iPhone and iPad

Posted: 20 Apr 2013 07:17 AM PDT

How to change the default font in the Notes app for iPhone and iPad

iOS has always come with a built-in Notes app and serves as a pretty easy way to keep basic notes. While some users may prefer something more powerful like Evernote, the Notes app gets the job done for a lot of people, especially since it supports iCloud sync.

If the default font within the Notes app burns your retinas nearly as it does mine, it may deter you from using the Notes app. There's actually a way to change it.

  1. Launch the Settings app from the Home screen of your iPhone or iPad.
  2. Scroll down and tap on Notes.
  3. Here you can switch between three options; the default Noteworthy font, Marker Felt, and Helvetica. Make your selection and then exit.

While Helvetica may be the only acceptable option at this time, it will be a lot easier on the eyes than the default font.

    

The market for paid apps, and the sum of all compromises

Posted: 20 Apr 2013 06:59 AM PDT

Instapaper and The Magazine developer Marco Arment has an interesting piece up about the market for paid apps, and its viability, on Marco.org:

In most categories, if you either solve a new problem that a lot of people have, or solve an old problem in a new and better way, you can sell a paid app today just as well as you could in 2008. In fact, the market is much bigger now. But, as with any maturing market, you'll need to do more to get noticed since so many problems have already been solved so well.

Here are the problems as I see them, and they're not-coincidentally parallel to the problems associated with iOS gaming:

  1. Apple wants to keep things simple, so they compromise on features. Apple does not allow for trials or demos on the App Store, which means all purchases are for all intents and purposes, up-front, as is, and mostly sight-unseen when it comes to the true, full product experience.

  2. Buyers want to avoid risk and expensing any more money than they have to, so they compromise on buying apps they might otherwise enjoy. Since there are no trials, absent urgent and immediate need or factors like addiction or ego-gratification, most people won't spend any significant amount of money on apps.

  3. Developers need to sell apps, so given the previous two realities, they compromise on money by holding sales, dropping prices, or trying alternate business models.

So we end up with the sum of all those compromises: apps we can't try before we buy, so we don't buy them until they go on sale, their price drops, or a free alternative comes up.

There are things like brand and reputation, social influence, etc. that can alter that reality slightly -- a new app for one of our favorite things, by a rockstar developer, that all our friends tell us we simply must buy now, now, now -- but not enough to alter the general course of the App Store.

If you make another RSS reader or Twitter client, there are certainly a lot of people who could use it, but you'll need to compete with very mature, established apps.

You're also competing against the known with the unknown. How do I know if a new RSS or Twitter app is better for me than what I'm currently using, unless I take a risk on a paid app?

And that's only a silly $1 or $5. Now imagine a $50 app, or a $150 app. For those developers who do Jury-up, how do you help them succeed? Sure, the more niche the app, the smaller and more informed the customer base usually is, but what about new ideas, experimental ideas, ideas that help shape the future?

Arment is right in that there remains a lot of opportunity in the App Store, but until we get a way to reduce risk for buyers without forcing devaluation on developers, there's nowhere near the opportunity there could be, and should be.

(And yes, search and discoverability need to be fixed as well.)

Go read Arment's piece, and I'd also recommend Federico Viticci's take on MacStories.

Source: Marco.org

    
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