Category: I-phone

Today we’re going to look at one of the most powerful vector illustration applications you’ll find on the App Store: iDraw. This excellent app goes well beyond providing you with a few simple brushes and gives you the power to create professional quality artwork on your iPad using many of the same tools you’re used to on a desktop computer.

We’ll go over why it’s different than the other drawing apps you’ve seen and dive into the rich feature set so you can get the full story before you decide whether or not to make the purchase.

Another Drawing App?

After playing with fun but basic applications like Adobe Ideas and even impressively featured apps like SketchBook Pro, I was wondering when we would start to see really powerful vector-based artwork creation and editing apps on iOS.

As crazy as it sounds, I was pretty much looking for Adobe Illustrator in a mobile app. The apps mentioned above provide lots of tools for creating great artwork, but where’s the bezier pen tool, editable paths and boolean commands?

These are just some of the tools that serious graphics professionals have come to rely on for their work and without them, a drawing app is more of a fun toy that a useful tool. Fortunately, you’ll see all these and more in iDraw.

Getting Started

When you first open up iDraw, you’ll see a gallery of canvases. By default, you should have five of these already in your library. Four of them outline the basic features in iDraw and the fifth is a sample piece of art created with iDraw.

If you hit the “Help” button in the top right, the basic controls for the app will pop up. These are all fairly intuitive when you start using the app and I found there was very little that I actually needed instruction on.

To create a new document, you tap on the button at the top left of the screen. This will bring up a screen containing nine different background options for your canvas, including blueprint, grid, image and more.

After you’ve selected your background, you’ll be taken into the main iDraw interface. As you can see below, it looks fairly basic: there’s a strip of tools along the bottom and some controls in each of the corners. However, there is a ton of functionality tucked away in this interface.

Tools

The toolbar along the bottom of the window contains the following: the move/selection tool, pencil, brush, pen tool, line, curve, rectangle, ellipse, polygon, star, text and image. As you would expect, each tool has it’s own unique set of options.

The Brush and Pencil

The brush and pencil tools work exactly like you’d expect: drag your finger to draw a line (an iPad stylus works well here). When you select one of these tools a little window pops up at the right that allows you to set the width of the stroke.

Using the controls in the bottom right, you can set the line color and opacity as shown below.

The really nice thing about using these two tools is that as you draw there is an auto-smoothing effect that really helps in creating nice, clean curves. Sometimes though this can make it difficult to draw sharp edges so I’d like to see some support added for controlling the amount of smoothing that takes place.

Another thing that I noticed about sketching in iDraw is that there is a noticeable lag when compared to Adobe Ideas. In fact, I didn’t notice it until I went back and tried Ideas after spending a long time with iDraw. The Ideas brush is very responsive and does its work very fast whereas in iDraw, if you quickly draw a circle, you wait about a half a second for the shape to complete.

The Pen Tool

As I mentioned about, one of my favorite things about iDraw is that there is a bezier pen tool. As a long time Adobe Illustrator fan I simply can’t live without this tool and I was happy to see it implemented so well here.

Since everything you create in iDraw is vector artwork, you can not only edit the handles and points of lines that you draw with the pen tool, but also those drawn with the brush, pencil and shape tools.

Shapes, Fills, and Gradients

When you select a shape tool, you’ll get an option to set the corner radius, number of sides, etc. With shapes you can not only set the line color but the fill color as well.

One nice feature here is that you aren’t stuck with solid colors but can actually create your own gradients.

Advanced Commands

To aid with various aspects of the main tools, the top toolbar has various secondary commands that perform a number of advanced actions. For instance, by tapping the “i” when you have a shape or stroke selected, you can adjust the stroke of an object and add a background image or even a drop shadow.

In the Geometry tab, you can set an object’s position, size and rotation and choose to lock either the entire or object or just the aspect ratio for proportional scaling.

In the Arrange tab, you can create groups, align objects and flip geometry vertically or horizontally. These commands are great but I’d definitely like to see the addition of a “distribute” command to easily apply even spacing to objects.

The same button that holds the Arrange tab also holds the modify tab. This was a pleasant surprise as I didn’t expect to find Illustrator pathfinder-like options in an iPad app! These commands are awesome for creating complex geometry from simple shapes.

The little gear icon allows you to set various aspects of your canvas. You can change the size and the background in addition to adjusting the grids and rulers.

Finally, you also have a basic set of commands for making selections and performing cut/copy/paste operations along with an undo command (multiple undos supported).

Layers

No professional art program would be complete without a system for layers and iDraw doesn’t disappoint. You can have as many layers as you want, independently activate or deactivate their appearance, arrange their order and even merge them as needed.

I would like to see some support added here for layer opacity and grouping, but the features already present are admittedly more than I’ve seen in other apps.

Now Go Buy It!

iDraw is an excellent application and is really one of the first that I’ve used that made it feel like I had a professional layout tool on an iOS device. Aside from the few feature suggestions I made above, this app has everything I have been looking for and I come back to it daily for quick sketches that I can then export to Illustrator.

I absolutely think that iDraw is worth the $9.99 price tag and definitely recommend that you give it a shot if you make your living as a designer or artist. You might also check out Freeform, a very similar with the same price point. I haven’t tried Freeform yet but it looks like the feature set might be a bit narrower, though I’m sure it has its strengths.

Leave a comment below and let us know what you think of iDraw and how it stacks up to other vector editing applications you’ve tried such as Freeform.

Arguably, one of the easiest ways to publish online is with Posterous. Creating and updating a weblog with Posterous is as simple as sending an email. Now, the gang has created another tool for users to play with: Posterous for iPhone (free). I’ve been using the app for a couple of weeks now. I also had a chat with Posterous CEO and co-founder Sachin Agarwal. Here’s our review of the app and highlights of my discussion with Sachin.

On Posterous

First, a bit about the service itself. To create a Posterous blog, all you need to do is send an email message to [email protected]. That’s it. A site will be created for you with your email’s subject as the first post’s title and the body as the post itself. There’s nothing to configure, install or set up. Likewise, creating a photo gallery is just as easy. Send your pictures to the same address (using the email address you initially chose) and Posterous does the rest, creating a gallery, thumbnails and so on.

Continue reading Posterous for iPhone puts microblogging power at your fingers

Posterous for iPhone puts microblogging power at your fingers originally appeared on TUAW on Sat, 06 Nov 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Will Apple one day soon supplant Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony as the king of the gaming market? ComputerWorld’s Jonny Evans makes a good argument for that outcome in his latest column. As portable devices like the iPhone and iPad get increasingly powerful, the games that can be played directly on them are looking better all the time. Just in terms of portable game sales, iOS devices easily beat the Sony PSP in volume and are competitive with, if not beating, long time champion Nintendo.

Looking forward, the horsepower of console systems will likely increase but it may not be enough to help stay afloat. Apple will shortly be rolling out AirPlay which allows media to be sent from the portable device to an Apple TV. There is no reason that AirPlay can’t be expanded to include sending games from the iPad screen to the big screen. It’s also probable that Apple will add app downloads to the Apple TV itself which could potentially allow the handheld device to simply be the controller.

Services like OnLive are already demonstrating that a fast internet pipe and a server farm can take the place of the local console. Apple still hasn’t revealed what it plans to do with its North Carolina data center, but there is no reason why it couldn’t support high-end gaming in addition to streaming music and video. It’s looking like the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii may well be the last generation of the traditional gaming console.

Computer World: Apple is “taking over the game market” originally appeared on TUAW on Sat, 06 Nov 2010 15:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If only this blogger had held onto that Apple stock that was bought for about $8 while dabbling in the market in the late-1990s. Instead the profits from selling it at $27 a share were put into such wise investments as Webvan. The only good thing about my dot com bubble investing period is that only a small chunk of money was set aside to play with and no more was added. On the other hand if I had just had more patience and stayed in Apple, I’d have a very nice chunk of change with it now trading at over $317 per share and likely to go much higher.

According to a recent Associated Press article, William V. Power, an analyst with R.W. Baird is projecting that AAPL shares will be trading at as much as $410 before long and he is not alone. Numerous analysts have projected $400+ for Apple and the average of 38 different projections is $370.50. The key to that continued growth according to Power is the iPhone which currently only commands about three percent of global mobile phone sales. As smartphones grab an ever larger stake of the handset market, Apple and its prime competitors, Android and Windows Phone 7 are all likely to see big gains in the next few years and that will certainly help Apple’s bottom line and stock price.

AAPL could hit $410 according to R.W. Baird analyst originally appeared on TUAW on Sat, 06 Nov 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you live in the United States, you’re probably already aware that the nation is set to switch to Standard Time on November 7, moving clocks one hour back. What you may not be aware of is that if you’re using an iPhone or other iOS device as your primary alarm clock, it might not make the switch as planned — and you could end up late to work on Monday as a result.

iOS 4 introduced a bug into how iOS devices handle the switch between Daylight Saving and Standard Time. The bug got some attention when it first hit New Zealand back in September — when our clocks rolled forward an hour, our iOS alarms did not. Many New Zealanders woke up an hour early following the switch to DST because of this bug, myself included. The same thing happened a couple weeks later when certain Australian territories switched to DST, and Apple promised a fix.

Southern Hemisphere iOS users had it bad enough being woken up an hour early, but when Europe switched to Standard Time last week, iOS users there found their alarms going off an hour late. The internet was flooded with reports of Europeans whose iPhones and iPods failed to wake them up on time last Monday. At the same time, some of our US commenters noted that alarms in the States were going off an hour early.

Apple has posted a support doc on its iOS DST issues, and the company recommends changing repeating iOS alarms in the Clock app to single-use alarms instead as a way of skirting the issue. This procedure worked for us in New Zealand, but it has the added inconvenience of having to remember to set the alarm every day.

Bottom line: if you’re worried about being late to work on Monday, or losing an hour of sleep, the best advice we can give you is to use a different alarm other than your iPhone or iPod touch for now. While the issue is reportedly resolved in the forthcoming iOS 4.2 update, that update is unlikely to be publicly released before the changeover to Standard Time this Sunday — so if you’re on thin ice at work already, don’t depend on your iPhone to wake you up on Monday morning.

Attention US iPhone users: use a standby alarm clock for now originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve seen some cool tricks done with CSS3 in recent months. From iOS icons made in pure CSS to the OS X Dock animation that Sam mentioned this week, people are embracing the possibilities.

It is, however, only a certain breed of developer that has the mindset and the patience to build these kinds of showcase pieces. For most of us, the idea of recreating even basic Flash feats — such as splash screens and banner ads — in CSS3 is a bit daunting. The future is looking bright, though: Sencha has announced a new tool to take the pain out of complex CSS3 animations.

Sencha Animator is currently available as a Developer Preview running on the Mac, Windows or Linux. It’s buggy as heck, but showcases an intelligent interface with timeline-based animations across all of the available properties. It’s functional enough to really get into, but there’s enough missing (or broken) to keep you wishing for the next update. Nonetheless, it’s very exciting; the tech of the future isn’t looking like a step backward anymore¹.

The app will come in two editions, Standard and Ad Builder. The current developer preview is of the Standard Edition, which apparently has all the bells and whistles, it just lacks the license to use it for ad creation. Interested ad agencies will have to contact Sencha directly to talk licensing. As far as pricing on the standard edition, Sencha says only that they’re “pricing standard edition like a traditional design tool: on a per user basis in the low hundreds of dollars.”

You need a Sencha Forum membership to use the preview, but it’s free to try after you activate your account. If you’re curious about the tools that are going to shape the web of tomorrow, you can check out the demos and give it a try yourself.

¹ I’m choosing not to use this post as a platform to debate the merits of Flash. The fact is that Flash makes it relatively simple to create rich content for platforms that support it, and at the moment HTML5/CSS3 lack the feature set and tools that Adobe/Macromedia have developed over the last decade. I’ll leave it at that.

CSS motion magic with Sencha Animator preview originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Note 11/6/10: food fight! has now been released and is available as Food Fight! – An Interactive Book by Glenn Melenhorst. It is on sale for US$1.99 during its introductory first week.

food fight! is the most beautiful interactive children’s book I’ve seen to date. It’s currently going through the App Store review process and isn’t yet available, but when it hits the iTunes store, it will sell for US$3.99 and be released as a universal app playable on any iOS device. There are a number of things that make this book special, but the most obvious is the amazing 3D graphics found on every page. The book was written and rendered by Glenn Melenhorst, a visual effects artist at the Iloura studio in Melbourne, Australia. Glenn has been instrumental in such projects as The Pacific, Where the Wild Things Are, and Charlotte’s Web. food fight! started as a print book called Little Boys which I couldn’t find anywhere, and perhaps never made it out of Australia.

The book tells the story of Tim, who would eat nothing but sausages no matter how much his parents tried to fool and cajole him into eating something else. It’s also the story of Sammy, from somewhere else altogether, who happens to be a sausage who eats nothing but little boys. Sammy reads about Tim and takes a rocket to earth where they confront each other and come to a workable compromise. It’s a very cute story, whimsically told and I’m sure will entertain children four and above.

The app is beautifully designed and has more play value than most of what I’ve seen in the burgeoning market of interactive children’s fiction. There is no musical soundtrack, but it’s not necessary, since over 80 interactive elements found in its pages all come with their own sounds, voices, and effects. Tapping on most anything kicks off nicely done animations, some of them, in keeping with the 3D look, spill right off the page. The pages can be turned by a quick swipe as is usually the case, or in a manner similar to iBooks, by slowly swiping which displays a nicely dimensional page-turning effect at the speed of your fingers.

Continue reading food fight! A pre-release view of the most beautiful iOS children’s book yet

food fight! A pre-release view of the most beautiful iOS children’s book yet originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Because we veteran Mac sites have to stick together, we’re sending congratulations out to the good folks over at Mac OS X Hints, who yesterday turned the ripe old age (in blogging years, anyway) of ten years old. The site, created by Rob Griffiths and now run by Macworld, continues to be a terrific source of hints, new and old, about cool things to do with our favorite operating system. OS X Hints is just one of the many storied pillars of this wild and crazy Mac community, and we’re glad to have them around.

It seems like just three years ago we wished them well on their seventh birthday. Here’s hoping we can do the same and congratulate them on all of their great work 10 years from now (when we’re all playing with the iPad X and the Mac micro).

Happy 10th birthday to Mac OS X Hints originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As an Apple Consultants Network member who has installed his share of Apple Xserves, I have mixed emotions about Apple’s decision today to pull the plug on the only “real” server that they’ve been selling. On the one hand, Apple hasn’t been selling a lot of the pricey pizza boxes to big business, so it makes sense that Apple would simply re-purpose existing products — the Mac mini and Mac Pro — as servers. On the other hand, I think it sends mixed signals to the enterprise market about Apple’s commitment to business.

Apple Senior World Product Marketing Manager Eric Zelenka stated in a post to the Xsanity forums that Apple is still committed to the server products, technologies, and devices, and that the decision to kill the Xserve has no impact on future Xsan or Mac OS X Server development. I’m wondering if that’s just a lot of marketing-speak to try to calm down admins who have a huge investment in Mac OS X Server, Xsan, and Xserves. According to our own Victor Agreda, who is at MacTech 2010 this week, many Mac IT admins feel that the Mac OS X Server flavor of Mac OS X is safe for the time being. I’m not so sure — read more of my personal thoughts on the next page.

Continue reading Xserve End Of Life: Some opinions and ideas about Apple’s server strategy

Xserve End Of Life: Some opinions and ideas about Apple’s server strategy originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Crashkit is an Open Source Library for better crash handling and reporting. It is made by Praveen Kaler. It helps you understnad why your iOS App crashed out on you.

Although Apple has improved crash reporting a lot, there is a decent open source library that goes beyond Apple’s built in functionality in helping you understand why your App crashed. Basically this library will catch uncaught exceptions and trap signals.

Then it will go back to the main run loop until it can send you an email that contains a detailed report about the crash – or alternatively it can place the crash information and log into your database.

This very handy library, called CrashKit must form a part of every iPhone developers arsenal. It can be found over at – CrashKit: Helping Your iOS/iPhone Apps Suck Less.

Below is a list of new games that readers of this blog have created. As always it’s great to see what other people are doing. I strongly believe in supporting the community so check out the games below and most importantly of all, provide feedback. There is nothing more valuable than constructive feedback, it’s certainly […]

Reader Shane did a little zoom and enhance on Apple’s promo image for the Mac App Store, and divined some potential prices for Apple’s official apps. These same apps are the ones that set the pricing bar on the iPad, and so if these are real (and not just photoshopped in), then they’re the first official indication we’ve gotten of just where Apple imagines pricing should be on the App Store. And where is that? Turns out they’re pretty close to current software prices — the iLife apps are priced out at $15, while the iWork apps are priced at $20, and when you add them all up, they cost about the same as the bundles you can buy in the Apple retail store.

There’s also a few other titles (which appear to be just placeholders, not official Apple software, unless they’re going to premiere some new apps with the App Store) at various prices. There’s a dice game called Roll ‘Em which is priced for free, an app called Color Studio at $29.99, and another game called Fast Lane priced at just $4.99. So as you might expect, there will be prices all over the place. Just like the iOS App Store, developers will probably come up with all sorts of ways to fund and profit from their apps, so I’m sure we’ll see some popular free games as well as premium specialized apps.

But it sounds like Apple is aiming to hit about $15-20 for a standard full-featured Mac app. The question, then, will be what customers are willing to pay — obviously each app is different, and each customer has their own priorities, but it’ll be very interesting to see, as the Mac App Store debuts, just what happens to prices on this software.

Apple’s example Mac app prices land around $15-20 originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This just in: the Skyfire browser, which was released earlier this week and then quickly pulled when the company’s servers were overwhelmed, is being released back into the App Store. But before you do what I did and rush out to purchase it, note that it is only being released in “batches.” That means that for those of us who are seeking a way to watch Adobe Flash video on our iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads may have to wait a bit longer.

Sure enough, the first batch is apparently sold out, as I was unable to find it in the store either in iTunes on my Mac or in the App Store on my iPhone. Skyfire CEO Jeff Gleuck is recommending that people hoping to buy Skyfire follow the company on Twitter or friend them on Facebook. That way, you’ll be notified when the next batch is released.

Skyfire browser back in the App Store, but in limited quantities originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 15:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Family responsibilities have kept me from posting about many amazing developments going on in the Apple TV hacking community this past week but I assure you that things continue to move ahead quickly and in promising directions. Brian Chen wrote up a great summary of this effort over at Wired. This week has brought forth several new system enhancements including NitoTV enhancements and the recently-introduced Plex module that can be installed to the system menu.

There’s more to come. The first alpha of the Apple TV grooveshark client has been written as a collaboration between NitoTV developer Kevin Bradley and @hackfrag, as shown in the video embedded below. Grooveshark provides peer-recommended music streaming as well as Pandora-like playlist generation. It’s yet another exciting Apple TV add-on in its new iOS incarnation.

Continue reading Apple TV Hacking: hackers, grooveshark, Bluetooth stack

Apple TV Hacking: hackers, grooveshark, Bluetooth stack originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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