Realmac Software, makers of Clear and Ember, today announced they will revert to a single, Universal version of Clear after the heavily criticized launch of Clear+ in September. Clear+ was a paid, separate version of Clear that added iPad support, but several existing Clear customers responded negatively to the launch as the original Clear app would no longer receive updates. Following feedback, Realmac then tried to keep two versions of Clear on the App Store – the original Clear app as an iPhone-only version, and Clear+ as a Universal app – but that only generated further confusion.

In a letter to customers published today, Realmac’s Dan Counsell explains the company’s new strategy for Clear:

We’re going to be returning to just one, universal version of Clear for iOS, with the original version of Clear gaining iPad support. If you already own a copy of Clear, you don’t need to do anything as we’ve just launched an updated version of Clear with iPad support.

As Apple doesn’t offer a way to migrate users between copies of an app, we’re going to make Clear free for 24 hours so owners of Clear+ can move to the correct version free of charge.

To make sure as many people as possible can move to Clear, we’re going to do this twice in the next few weeks. We know this is risky - we rely on the income from Clear to run our small, independent company - and so whilst this was by no means an easy decision for us to make, we simply want to do the right thing for you, our customers.

Realmac has also posted a FAQ page with details on how to migrate lists from Clear+ to Clear – the migration is handled locally on iOS upon launching the original Clear app, which was updated today.

As part of the transition from Clear+, Clear will be available for free on the App Store for a limited time as a Universal app for iOS 7; Realmac will communicate details of the 24-hour sale through the company’s newsletter.

Ember

Ember for iOS, Realmac’s image organization app for iOS first released in December, has been updated today to version 1.1, which starts bringing some of the Mac app’s features to the iPhone and iPad as In-App Purchases. In this release, Realmac added support for Annotations and Screenshot Auto-Import as two separate IAPs priced at $4.99 and $0.99, respectively. The app is still free, and can be used with iCloud sync as a companion utility to the full Ember for OS X experience.

Ember is an app to collect and organize images, and the iOS app, especially on the iPhone, has the convenience of having a camera always available. Therefore, adding annotations to iOS is the right move for Realmac, as users who depend on Ember for pictures they take are likely to take those directly on iOS. In the app, you can now use the Smart Drawing, freehand, and text tools that Realmac first brought to Ember for Mac months ago; new to both Ember for iOS and OS X (the Mac version has also been updated to 1.3 today), blur and pixelate tools let you obfuscate parts of images that you don’t want anyone else to see.

Ember’s annotations tools on iOS are like a simpler version of Skitch. There’s a toolbar at the top of the screen with available tools, and edits can be drawn on screen by touching and swiping; once added, they can be rearranged on the canvas, but they can’t be manually resized with a pinch gesture like Skitch. In my tests, I found that I couldn’t make text annotations bigger, as Ember kept using a font size too small for my taste; I then realized that to change annotation size, you have to tap the color popover, which gives you three sizes to choose from.

Overall, Ember 1.1 provides a mix of the functionalities seen in Marco Arment’s Bugshot and Evernote’s Skitch, only in an app that syncs with iCloud across devices, including the Mac. At this point, the major feature missing from Ember for iOS is Subscriptions, which I assume will be added at some point as another In-App Purchase in the Ember Store.

It will be interesting to see how Realmac will keep adding more functionality to Ember on OS X in the future while trying a different business model on iOS. Right now, the annotations tools aren’t as flexible as Skitch in terms of manual editing options, but they work well and they’re easy to use.

Ember for Mac is available at $49.99 on the Mac App Store, with a free trial available from Realmac’s website. Ember for iOS is free on the App Store with In-App Purchases.

Ember

In July, Realmac Software released Ember, the successor to LittleSnapper that allows you to organize images in a digital scrapbook for OS X. From our review:

Ember is a very polished app with a fantastic UI, slick animations, full-screen mode and it’s simply a fun app to use and organize images with. If you’re a digital creative person and want to organize your screenshots, inspirational images and reference files, Ember could be what you need.

Today, Realmac is back with Ember for iOS, a free companion app for the iPhone and iPad that lets you manage and organize your library but that doesn’t come with editing features yet. Realmac decided to start with a free app as a foundation for all Ember customers; annotations will be added in a future update with In-App Purchases – a trend that’s making several indepedent developers and small software shops, such as Realmac, experiment with different business models than the traditional paid app approach. Read more

When I reviewed Realmac’s Analog, a lightweight photo sharing app, back in September, I was impressed by the execution of a simple concept – applying filters to your photos to share them online – that was made popular on iOS by apps like Instagram and Camera+. From my review:

Analog offers 20 filters, which have been carefully researched by Realmac over the past months to make sure each one of them has its own personality (something we know that matters in this kind of apps) and will make your photos look great. Now I’m no photography expert, but I can recognize a nice filter when I see it. Analog’s filters range from washed out (Hefga, Golden Hour) to black & white (Noir, Dark Knight, Bromide — three B&W variations with different grey scales and contrast) to contrasty (Memory, XProcess) and other interesting options that I can’t quite classify (Kyoto, Hawkeye). Analog’s filters look good, and I definitely like the choice of 20 different filters offered by Realmac. You might argue some of them look similar to each other, but the developers have also implemented a system that ensures scratches, noise and other effects are always randomized on each processing session.

I had a chance to try out a pre-release version of Analog 1.1, which is coming out tomorrow, and it looks like those who liked the workflow and polished design of version 1.0 might have to hit the Mac App Store’s Update section as soon as the app goes live. Analog 1.1 improves on several aspects of the first version: performances and memory management have been improved, making the app snappier and more responsive when adding filters and switching between edited and non-edited versions of a photo.

The update will bring three new filters (I tested them, they look good), two new borders, and, more importantly, a new slider to adjust the intensity of your chosen filter. In my tests, this has turned out to be quite handy to manually refine the amount of modifications I wanted to make to an image. Obviously, Analog 1.1 retains the filter randomization capabilities of the previous version (so that scratches, noise and other effects are randomized on each processing session) and all the other features that made Analog 1.0 intuitive and fun to use.

Analog 1.0 is currently available on the Mac App Store at $6.99. Analog 1.1 will be available tomorrow (January 24th) as a free update for existing Analog customers.