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Pixelmator 2.2 Blueberry

Viva la Pixelmator!

Viva la Pixelmator!

Pixelmator 2.2, codenamed Blueberry, includes more than 100 new features and improvements for quickly creating and shaping shapes, contextually working with images and vectors, and recreating sunny retro-inspired images. Artists will find new Color Popovers for faster access to color swatches, new gradient presets, improved drawing tools, a refined Type Tool, and the ability to copy a shape’s style to other shapes.

The standout features in Pixelmator 2.2 let artists quickly create and edit shapes for logos, web elements, flyers, and more. Smart Shapes provide easy-to-use controls for adjusting a shape’s outline, while Shape Styles make adding gradients, changing stroke styles, and adjusting inner shadow effortless. For those looking for a jumping off point, a brand new Shapes palette comes prepackaged with over 40 custom shapes that can be added to the canvas with a simple drag and drop. New shapes can easily be added to the palette, and new shapes can be quickly shared with friends and coworkers by simply dragging the palette to the Desktop. Text can also be converted into shape layers with the new Convert Text into Shape tool, allowing artists to reshape individual letters to apply separate gradients, shadows, and strokes. As image layers and shapes can intermingle, the Smart Move Tool brings up the appropriate options you need as items on the canvas are selected. And swapping between image and vector editing is as easy as a keyboard shortcut.

For budding photographers, the new Paint Selection Tool lets anyone simply brush the canvas to select objects in their images without having to manually trace an outline or use selection tools. The new Light Leak effect can also add a bit of flair to images for creating retro-artistically illuminated images.

Pixelmator 2.2 is now available for download through the Mac App Store at a promotional price of $14.99, or as a free update to previous customers. A free 30-day trial of Pixelmator can be downloaded from Pixelmator’s homepage. Read more

PDF Expert Adds New Annotation Features

Readdle’s PDF Expert has been my favorite PDF reader for iPad for a long time now. With Dropbox integration and a clean UI full of powerful options, PDF Expert is the app I rely upon when it comes to reading and editing PDF documents. The 4.6 version, released today on the App Store, adds a series of new features that make adding annotations and managing them inside a document even easier.

Annotations can now be copied and pasted inside a document and across different documents in PDF Expert: to do so, you can use a new selection tool available in the top toolbar. This new tool will let you select a single annotation/shape and use iOS’ familiar copy & paste menu – but you can also select multiple annotations at once to move them, copy them, delete them, or change their properties. PDF Expert’s selection is also smart: if you select two shapes, the popup menu will show options for shape thickness and color (also new in version 4.6); if you drag the selection on top of text annotation, the app will show properties for font, colors, and font sizes.

In this update, Readdle also included a new custom date/time keyboard (which reminded me of a similar keyboard from another Readdle app, Calendars+) that makes it easier to fill date fields in PDF forms.

While I prefer Skitch for “quick” annotations that involve shapes and callouts, PDF Expert remains my choice for text annotations and reading long documents. PDF Expert is available at $9.99 on the App Store.

The Verge Interviews Peter Belanger, an Apple Product Photographer→

I imagine this has to be one of the coolest jobs in the world. Apple’s product photos are both legendary and seen by millions of people world wide, either in advertisements in magazines, on Apple’s website, or sometimes even on sites like ours. Peter Belanger, a photographer whose clients include Apple, Nike, and Square, was interviewed by The Verge and asked how he recreates the kind of simplicity that Apple portrays in its marketing.

I need to have control over each and every surface so when the client asks for a highlight to be elongated, I can do that. It’s similar to working on a file in Photoshop: you don’t do all your work on one layer. I think of my lights as layers that I can adjust individually to get the desired results.

While Peter shoots with a Canon 5D Mark III, he’s also the same individual who shot the Macworld iPhone 4 cover with an iPhone 4 itself. His process and attention to detail are absolutely amazing.

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Photos Needs to be Simpler→

Apple’s Photos app is the default location for saving and sharing photos with friends on iOS. It’s a place where I spend a lot of time either deleting old screenshots (unique to us bloggers) or sorting images into albums as best I can before syncing them with iPhoto. The app has never made much sense to me, between how it simply handles moving images into albums from the Camera Roll or into Photo Stream, and I don’t particularly care for how it whisks away old photos after a period of time on a per device basis in Photo Stream. Peter Nixey was featured on Hacker News earlier today for his thoughts on how managing photos could be better on iOS, and I agree with the general idea:

I want the canonical copy of my iPhoto library in the cloud. One iPhoto library in the cloud, many devices with access to it. I want to edit, organise and delete photos on any device and see the same changes on all other devices. No master/slave setup - just straight cloud access.

I get that there are limitations and lots of things happening in the background, but a lot of that makes itself evident in Photos if you look closely enough. I don’t necessarily agree with Peter’s pricing ideas or that Dropbox and the like are even a threat. But what I do agree with is that the dumb syncing silo that is Photo Stream has to go. Camera Roll can stay as it is — I don’t necessarily need the two merged. When I move photos from the camera roll into a new album, that photo should be gone — moved from my Camera Roll. And those albums should simply show up everywhere from my iPhone to my iPad and on my Mac or Windows box. The “duplication” that happens everywhere with photos right now on iOS is absolutely crazy. And if I want to use the iPhoto app on iOS instead… can’t I just make that the default?

I love taking pictures on my iPhone. But the syncing, the managing, the sorting… it’s not great.

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Pizza Compass→

Genius idea, great promo video:

Pizza Compass is a $0.99 app that lets you find pizza joints nearby. Unlike other discovery apps for local businesses, Pizza Compass uses a slice of pizza…as a compass to show the distance from a pizza joint. You can turn the slice of pizza around, and tap on a pizza joint’s name to open an embedded Foursquare page.

I have downloaded the app, and it’s surprisingly full of accurate results for Viterbo; however, local results don’t seem to feature opening and closing times here, so the bottom bar that’s supposed to be color-coded is grayed out for me.

Get Pizza Compass here.

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Tally and x-callback-url→

Greg Pierce:

Tally 1.1 adds x-callback-url support to our quick-counting app for iPhone. Tally supports two actions, “increment” and “decrement” – with full support of callbacks. This allows Tally to be included in automation workflows with Drafts and other apps – should you feel like you need to keep track of how many times you executed a workflow or similar.

I’ve never had a use for Tally, but this update looks interesting. If, for instance, you were to use a Draft 3.0 action to append text to an Evernote journal, you could integrate Tally to count the times the action is fired every day – perhaps by triggering everything from a Launch Center Pro timed notification.

If you’re looking for more examples, Eric Pramono has some good ones.

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The Later Box→

An interesting workflow by Jeff Hunsberger:

What Mailbox pointed out to me is that I need is a Later box. A place to stick emails that I don’t want jamming up my Inbox but I really do need to act on “later”. Ideally, the number of emails flagged in this way should be relatively few. If it is more than a handful, it is probably pointing to a different kind of problem – the last thing I need is an interim archive. I need two things – a place to hold emails until I return to my Mac and the discipline and discernment to act on them when I get there.

I like the idea of using Keyboard Maestro to automatically put emails back in the Inbox every day. I use Triage on a daily basis now, but I’m curious to see how Mailbox will change under Dropbox.

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There’s an Ad for That→

A good take by Harry Marks on the differences between Apple and Samsung ads. You know where I stand.

Towards the end, I especially liked this bit:

It’s been rumored that iOS 7 is going to bring a drastic overhaul to the UX, including a new home screen and enhanced features. This will inevitably bring a level of complication users haven’t had to deal with yet. Seeing as how this is Apple we’re talking about, I doubt these updated bells and whistles will be difficult to trigger, but there will most likely be a bit of a learning curve in the beginning. Every familiar paradigm starts out as something new and unknown.

I don’t know how much ads can be an effective teaching tool for users, but I agree: there will be a new learning curve, but some changes are necessary.

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