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Posts tagged with "iOS"

Tweet It Makes Tweeting from iOS Simple and Integrated

There’s no shortage of Twitter clients with embedded web views on the iPhone and iPad: most Twitter apps nowadays allow you to check out a webpage inline without leaving the timeline and jumping to Safari, thus making it easy to follow links from people you follow and go back to the main view in seconds. However, most of the time I still find myself discovering articles and stuff I want to tweet when browsing the Internet using Safari or iCab mobile: whether it’s a new post by Ben Brooks or Shawn Blanc, or a cool video I stumble upon on YouTube, I want to be able to easily send a webpage from the browser to my Twitter client of choice. But that’s usually not possible, as Twitter clients typically don’t offer integration with the system browser in the way I want – that is, being able to send both the webpage title and URL from Safari to the client. And those apps that do offer bookmarklets to send a link from the browser straight to the app are often limited to the link itself and not the title, which I always have to copy and paste manually.

Tweet It, a new $1.99 universal app released today, provides a sweet solution to tweet links to webpages including the title of the original source, also allowing you to set up a custom URL shortening service for a bit of personalization, and other options to make tweeting super simple. Tweet It is solely focused on enabling you to tweet links: the app supports multiple Twitter accounts but there’s so timeline at all – it’s an app to tweet links you found interesting. Sure you can send regular status updates too, but the focus on browser integration is made obvious by buttons to shorten a link using CloudApp, bit.ly and goo.gl, or an embedded web view that, through another button, lets you open webpages within Tweet It and choose to insert a title, URL or title+URL in the message. Alternatively, if you’ve copied a link from Safari and you launch Tweet It, the app will detect the link in your clipboard and offer you the possibility to fire it off to Twitter. There’s more: with the installation of a bookmarklet, you’ll be able to send a webpage title and URL from Safari to Tweet It in seconds. In any way you want to share a page, Tweet It has you covered.

Tweet It is minimal, simple and powered by a delicious UI. It runs both on the iPhone and iPad, and it’s got some clever ideas to make tweeting links a real pleasure. You can download Tweet It at $1.99 from the App Store.

Picturescue Recovers Photos from iOS Backups

When an iPhone or iPad gets stolen or lost, we immediately worry about our personal data stored on the device (like email, contacts, passwords and history) being accessed by someone else with no good intentions. Whilst Apple’s free Find my iPhone service allows us to easily block and wipe a device that’s no longer with us, the loss of personal media like photos and videos is something we can’t fix remotely, at least not yet. Picturescue, a new Mac app by developers Pádraig Kennedy and John Ryan, provides a dead-simple solution to recover photos from an iOS device: rather than plugging directly into an iPhone or iPad, Picturescue reads the backup stored locally on your computer to retrieve photos and export them in their original format to a new location. This means that, provided you’ve synced your device with iTunes and you’ve decided to save an unencrypted backup (Picturescue can’t read encrypted iTunes backups for now), you’ll be able to view photos and export them at any time. It’s as easy as firing up the software, selecting the device in the sidebar, and choosing the photos to export.

Picturescue can be downloaded for free if you only want to view photos found in the backup file, and a $4.99 purchase gives you the possibility to export. The lack of support for encrypted backups is a major downside, but considering iTunes defaults to unencrypted backups on Mac and Windows machines, this shouldn’t be a problem for all those people that don’t care about password-protecting their iOS device backups. Get the app here.

iOS Devices Now Included In Amazon’s Trade-In Program

As noted by TUAW, online retailer Amazon has updated their electronics trade-in program to include Apple devices like older iPod touch and iPhone 3GS models, iPod Classics and original iPads. The webpage is available here, Amazon states it’s currently in “beta” status and items have to match several criteria to be eligible for the program. The devices have to be working units of course, must be in good hardware conditions, and mailing one back to Amazon (though a separate retailer handles the program, Amazon still provides the backend interface) will get you credits to spend on Amazon.com.

Prices seem to be pretty convenient, too: trading in a third-generation 64 GB iPod touch will result in $156 of credit, whilst an old 8 GB iPhone 3GS is priced at $162. A WiFi iPad 1st gen with 16 GB of storage has a trade-in value of $235, and a 16 GB iPad 2 (WiFi) is listed at $330.

PhotoForge 2 Released, Brings Powerful Image Editing to iOS

Announced last week as a successor to the popular lightweight image editing software for iPhone and iPad PhotoForge (which we reviewed here), PhotoForge 2 is a complete rewrite of the original app, sporting a completely new UI, more image editing features, new export options and a faster engine to bring semi-professional editing to the iPhone. In spite of the iPad version being advertised in the launch promo video, PhotoForge 2 is available today at $0.99 on the iPhone, with the iPad version coming in the next weeks as a Universal update. The GhostBird Software developers have decided to make PhotoForge 2 a standalone app, as the App Store doesn’t come with an upgrade policy and they felt that version 2.0 was worth paying a separate price. Indeed, the app sports several new functionalities and paying $0.99 now with the promise of an iPad update for free relatively soon sounds like a great deal. Plus, once the iPad update comes out the app will be priced at $2.99 for the remainder of May, although the full retail price is $4.99. That means you can get the app now and save $4, or wait for the iPad update and still save $2. The app has started propagating this morning in iTunes and is available here.

PhotoForge 2 is a full-featured image editing app for iOS, perhaps the most powerful available on the App Store. Whilst I can’t go through all the features now as I’ve played with the iPhone app for less than an hour (but we’ll make sure to have a full review once the iPad app is released), I can say there’s a notable difference when using the PhotoForge 1 and this 2.0 update. PhotoForge 2.0 has got a whole new interface revolving around the concept of “docks” (like the standard OS X one) that are basically a list of icons and buttons to navigate through the various image editing functions. Once you load a photo from your Camera Roll and start a new project,  you can tap on the FX button in the bottom toolbar to scroll through a series of effects to apply to your photo in real-time, most of them being similar to the ones offered in apps like Instagram and Camera+. In PhotoForge 2.0, photos fit to screen by default, but you can double-tap them to edit them at full resolution looking at all pixels on screen. As I said effects are applied in real-time, with a loading bar at the top showing progress – on the iPhone 4, everything is quite smooth and responsive, though I expect the iPad 2 version to be a little snappier given the A5 processor. There’s lot of stuff to play with in PhotoForge 2.0, including layers, exposure control, brightness and contrast, or standard RGB levels. It feels like a mini Photoshop version, ported to a smaller screen with controls rewritten for multi-touch. Of course, you can’t expect all the functionalities of Photoshop to be available in PhotoForge 2.0, but this thing does undoubtedly have more options and settings than the average iOS photo editor. You can tweak opacity and blend modes, create and duplicate layers or fill a new one with color, copy and paste masks or apply sharpening and noise reduction.

Because the feature list is huge and I’ve only been playing with the app this morning, here’s a list of functionalities for comparison’s sake:

  • Curves & Levels with RGB, CMYK and LAB colorspaces.
  • Sharpening & Noise Reduction
  • HSL & Channel Mixer controls
  • Brightness & Contrast, Exposure, Vibrance
  • White Balance, Shadows & Highlights
  • Auto Exposure & Auto White Balance
  • Precise Image Cropping and Resizing
  • Customize your film, lens, flash and much more to create amazing looking photographs with the Pop! Cam add-on
  • Great Black & White and Sepia filters
  • Lomo, Gothic, Dreamy and 3D
  • Crystallize, Pointallize and Impressionist.
  • Bulge, Pinch & Twirl

PhotoForge 2.0 is meant for both for professional and casual users (thanks to an intuitive interface), and I have a feeling the iPad counterpart, with larger real screen estate, will make image editing even better as I’ve noticed editing on the iPhone can be sometimes a little frustrating because of the smaller screen – meaning, when applying some effects or setting other options there’s a chance you won’t see the full image in front of you, and the iPad should fix this issue. However, I was impressed by the sharing functionalities of PhotoForge 2.0, which include Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter sharing, FTP and Dropbox uploading, or standard emailing and saving to the Camera Roll. The selection of services is really impressive and the Dropbox addition quite welcome, though I’d like to see direct CloudApp integration as well.

As it stands now, I think PhotoForge 2.0 is the most powerful and beautiful image editor for iPhone. The iPad version is something I’m really looking forward to, and while you wait you should get the app here at $0.99. It’s simply a great update.

WordPress iOS App Updated with Stats, Quick Photo, Fixes

The official WordPress app for iOS, available for iPhone and iPad and often criticized by many (including me) for its proverbial instability and lack of poweruser-oriented features, has been updated earlier today to include a new button to quickly insert a new photo – they call the feature Quick Photo – as well as stats for your WordPress blogs. The new Quick Photo functionality only works on the iPhone for now, and WordPress notes in the 2.8 changelog this may be the last update that supports older systems running iPhone OS 3. Quick Photo is clearly oriented to those users who maintain a photo-centric blog, as it’s meant to let you snap a picture as quickly as possible without even selecting the destination blog first. Stats, on the other hand, are a welcome addition that are enabled by default on WordPress.com blogs, but require the installation of the standalone plugin or Jetpack on self-hosted WordPress.org blogs. The WordPress developers write on the iOS blog:

Finally you’re able to check your blog’s statistics on the go. There are charts for Daily, Weekly, and Monthly page views, swipe over them to see the others. You can also see Daily Views by date, as well as top Post Views, Referrers, Search Terms, and Clicks for the past 7 days.

Last, the update also introduces localizations for 10 languages (Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew, German, Dutch, French, and Croatian) and bug fixes. WordPress says they’ve fixed 3/4 of the problems reported by users in the previous version, released in March. Get the app here.