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Posts tagged with "iPad"

Adobe To Launch 3 New iPad Apps That Highlight Potential of Photoshop Touch SDK

Adobe today announced that it will release Creative Suite 5.5 (a “mid-cycle update”) on May 3 along with three new iPad apps that will complement the full-featured desktop version of Photoshop. The three apps are actually designed as a demo of how developers can take advantage of the new Photoshop Touch SDK (which was released today) and create their own apps that complement and add additional functionality to the desktop version of Photoshop but through an Android, BlackBerry or iOS app.

The three iPad apps; Adobe Color Lava, Adobe Eazel and Adobe Nav will all arrive on May 3rd on the same day as Creative Suite’s 5.5 update goes live.  Adobe Color Lava (priced at $2.99) is in simple terms a digital paint palette that will allow you to mix paints and generate a five-color palette that can be sent to the Photoshop color chip or swatch palette. Adobe Eazel ($4.99) is essentially a basic drawing program (similar to Brushes) that features a unique interface in which by placing 5 fingers on the screen a pop-up menu will appear above each finger, sliding up with the relevant finger will select that menu which will then let you to alter the relevant value (such as color or brush size) . Finally and perhaps most useful is Adobe Nav ($1.99), this app turns the iPad into a dedicated control that has the various tool palettes displayed, selecting a particular tool will select that tool on the desktop version of Photoshop, the app will also let you easily cycle between the various files you may have open in Photoshop.

UPDATE: Shawn Welch has already shown off his third party app that takes advantage of the new Photoshop Touch SDK. His app, Photoshop Remote, allows users to view a live preview thumbnail of any image that is open on a network connected Photoshop client and it can handle multiple clients at once. It even adds a dashboard that replicates a lot of the functionality of the Adobe Nav application including; “tool selection, color selection, filters, adjustment layers, and more.” Jump the break for his video demonstrating the app.

Also after the break is a video demonstrating Adobe Eazel and Adobe Nav apps and jump over to CNet where they wrote a short review of each of the 3 apps, also if you are a developer that is interested in implementing the Photoshop Touch SDK make sure to visit the Adobe Developer Center.

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Blogsy: A Better Blogging App for iPad

The lack of great blogging apps for the iPad always puzzled me as a strange inconsistency with a device – and overall, a platform – that in the past year has proved to be more than a simple ecosystem for games and utilities. The iPad – and to an extent, iOS – has become more than a lightweight piece of glass and aluminum for watching movies and playing some Angry Birds. Sure it’s great at those tasks, but then I look at OmniFocus, Simplenote, iFiles, or LogMeIn and I realize there’s so much to do on this device than just consuming content. The iPad was indeed quickly dismissed by many as a “media tablet” when it came out last year: but think about the musicians, the writers, the designers and the movie editors that did all those amazing things using only an iPad. Clearly, this isn’t just about playing games anymore. This isn’t about the passive interaction with content: it’s about the two-way relationship with consuming and creating content made possible by the 75,000 apps available in the App Store.

But then I look at bloggers, people like me, and I don’t understand why it is so difficult to rely on the iPad as a tool for working purposes. Let’s be honest: if you’re a geek and you happen to run a blog with lots of new posts added every day, you’ve had issues with using the iPad as your main work machine. We’ve all been there before: the soft keyboard takes a while getting used to, but it’s the lack of great blogging software designed specifically for the iPad that make us question the possibilities opened by this device as far as blogging is concerned. Getting down to my personal issues with the iPad and writing for MacStories, I identify three main problems: the official WordPress app isn’t that great (an euphemism); among the alternatives, several apps lack advanced functionalities like remote draft editing or custom fields; both 3rd party apps and the official WordPress one are terrible at allowing you to easily insert links, photos, and videos. We’re swimming in a sea of text editors, but as I said many times on Twitter in the past we need a more powerful app – something that combines the simplicity of text editors with rich features like media management and full access to the WordPress backend. I know, I’m asking for a complex solution, and quite possibly a software built for a niche rather than the Doodle Jump masses.

After months of waiting for the perfect blogging app to come around and convince us that the iPad could also be used professionally for blogging, I looked at Blogsy with a bit of skepticism. At first glance, it seemed that this new app borrowed a lot from dPad, an HTML editor I reviewed a while ago that’s aimed at quickly inserting media in documents. Considering that Blogsy, however, was touted as an app for bloggers with WordPress and Blogger integration, I decided that I could take it for a spin. Read more

#MacStoriesDeals - Friday

If you didn’t already know, we’ve set up a new twitter account for Deals, it’s @MacStoriesDeals. We’ll tweet the daily deals there as well as exclusive weekend deals too. Help spread the word! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

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#MacStoriesDeals - Thursday

If you didn’t already know, we’ve set up a new twitter account for Deals, it’s @MacStoriesDeals. We’ll tweet the daily deals there as well as exclusive weekend deals too. Help spread the word! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

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Microsoft Releases Bing for iPad

Bing for iPad has just been released onto the iTunes App Store and it is Microsoft’s first app to make it onto the tablet device. Just like their Bing iPhone app and the Bing website, the daily image is the first thing you’ll notice with the app and it looks beautiful on the iPad’s screen. Furthermore the app gives you a quick glance of key information of Weather, News, Movies, Trends and more in a bar at the bottom of the screen.

The app contains a wealth of features and has been exceedingly well-designed to take advantage of the iPad’s strengths - this can definitely not be called just a search engine app. Those bottom tabs of information are a gateway into a full screen of lots more information. However probably the best feature of the app is the Trends page which gives you a very nice, almost FlipBoard-esque, page with all the top searches on Bing, along with a relevant image. Like the iPhone app it features a Voice Search (which works pretty well) and search, whether it be done via text or voice, can be for a website, news, image, video or map.

There is a lot of swiping that can be done in the app and it allows you to go back and forward from your last ‘panel’ of information, whether it be a web search, news page or weather. Bing Maps is included and fully functional letting you search for an address or business, find local business and even get directions.

The iPad app is curiously only available in the US iTunes app store which is certainly odd considering the web version does have international editions, that even have a different daily picture. However even weirder is that I downloaded it from the US store and ran it in Australia and it not only gave me the correct weather but the daily image was the Australian one and even Bing Maps showed my location and correctly showed local businesses, only the movie theatre times didn’t work. Jump the break for some more screenshots of the app.

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ESPN Launches ‘WatchESPN’ App, Commercial for iDevices

ESPN announced today its flagship network ESPN as well as ESPN2, ESPNU and ESPN3.com are now available to subscribers of Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks and Verizon FiOS TV via the new ‘WatchESPN’ App in the iTunes App Store.

WatchESPN has shown up in time for the Masters, the NBA Playoffs and the Major League Baseball season. Qualified subscribers who receive the linear networks as part of their video subscription can now watch the channels from the convenience of their iDevices. They even made a very funny commercial to promote the app, check it out after the break. Read more

US Privacy Investigation Targeting Smartphone App Developers

Federal prosecutors in New Jersey are reportedly investigating whether various smartphone applications are illegally obtaining and transmitting data from users without their consent or knowledge. In the US it is a violation of federal computer fraud laws for companies to collect information about a user without notice or authorization.

The prosecutors are investigating whether various apps on smartphones such as the iPhone and various Android phones are not notifying users what data is being collected and why such data is required by the app. This data being collected ranges from a users location to the unique identification data for that device and even personal information. The Wall Street Journal tested 101 apps and discovered that 56 of those transmitted the unique identification number for the device without letting users know, 47 transmitted the phones location and 5 sent a users age, gender and other personal information. Worryingly 45 of the apps tested did not have any privacy policy either in the app or on their website.

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FileBrowser for iPad Lets You Access Computers, Network Drives, Shared Folders

Earlier today I mentioned (again) Cloud Connect Pro, a universal $24.99 app that enables you to access online services like iDisk and Dropbox, local and remote computers, AirPort Disks and much more. Cloud Connect is a pricey app, but it also packs a whole screensharing app, runs on iPhone and iPads and it’s got the possibility to navigate a computer’s filesystem with a Finder-like interface. For quite some time, however, I’ve been using a cheaper alternative to Cloud Connect called FileBrowser that runs only on the iPad, it doesn’t have screensharing functionalities or Dropbox / iDisk / Google Docs integration but enables you to connect to your computers, shared folders and network drives just fine.

FileBrowser uses the CIFS and SMB protocols to connect to Windows and Mac computers, and NAS drives. Linux is also partially supported but you can’t connect using Apple File Sharing (AFP) or FTP. Once File Sharing is enabled on your Mac, FileBrowser should be able to see your machine on a local network. There’s no support for automatic computer discovery, but you can easily add a new computer by typing “username.local” in the “Name or Address” field – where “username” is the actual name you chose for your Mac’s Home folder. With the same .local domain, FileBrowser can connect to an AirPort Extreme station (and thus open the contents of a shared drive) or recognize the folders you’ve decided to share (besides Home) in your Mac’s System Preferences. This app is quite powerful in the way it lets you remotely connect to a machine using a DynDns hostname, enter username and password in the Settings (to avoid being asked every time), or tweak the Advanced Settings to change the SMB port number and pipelining.

FileBrowser can also open and preview a variety of file types, including music files and video formats supported by the iPad (no, it won’t do live conversion for your AVIs like Air Video). Songs can play in the background and be shared through AirPlay, but the app goes fullscreen when playing them and there’s no way to keep browsing or creating a queue. I’m okay with having videos in fullscreen, but the developers should find another implementation for music playback. The app can load images and documents like PDFs too, plus every file can be saved as a “bookmark” for quick access or emailed as an attachment. Again, these files come from your computer and network drives, not the iPad itself. There’s a temporary file cache that you can “purge” from the Settings, alongside many other options to enable admin shares or change the remote permissions for file creation / deletion, for example. There’s a lot of stuff to play with to turn FileBrowser into a powerful app, finely tuned to connect to your computers and network drives. FileBrowser doesn’t have the best interface the iPad has ever seen, but as far as functionality is concerned we have a great piece of software here. Fast, stable, feature-rich and being actively developed by Stratospherix.

At $3.99 in the App Store, FileBrowser gives you the tools you need to access and browse computers and drives from your iPad. Make sure to also check out NetPortal for iPhone, from the same developers, which brings most of the functionalities of FileBrowser to the iPhone.

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#MacStoriesDeals - Wednesday

If you didn’t already know, we’ve set up a new twitter account for Deals, it’s @MacStoriesDeals. We’ll tweet the daily deals there as well as exclusive weekend deals too. Help spread the word! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Read more