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Daily iPad App: NASA's Earth As Art shows us our beautiful planet
NASA has a series of excellent educational iOS apps that appeal to adults and kids alike. Most have a strong scientific bent, but if you lean more towards art than science, NASA has an iPad app for you, too. Mixing a little bit of earth and planetary science with a keen eye for art, NASA has created its Earth As Art app, an iPad title that shows off the unseen beauty of our planet. NASA's Earth As Art app picks the best images of Earth from the Terra, Landsat 5, Landsat 7, EO-1 and Aqua satellites. It also adds in some choice photos from the USGS Landsat image gallery. The satellites used to take these photos can measure light outside the visible range. The resulting images show you the Earth as you have never seen it before. The images are presented in gallery format, allowing you to see a thumbnail of each stunning photograph. You can also switch to list format, which is sorted by geographical location. When viewing an image, you can pinch and zoom to look closely at a specific section. Each image has a brief and only slightly scientific description that you can access by tapping on the "i" in the corner. You may not understand the scientific reasons why each photo looks the way it does, but this is an art-centric app. You are expected to sit back and enjoy the images, not necessarily dissect them. Besides stunning images, the app also has a several time-lapse photos that show changes in a specific location. I particularly enjoyed the Dubai series that shows the creation of its artificial palm islands and the rapid development of the area. The changes in just a short 11 years is unbelievable. The NASA Earth As Art app is available for free. It's an iPad app and requires iOS 4.3 or later.
Daily iPad App: Use Moldiv to quickly create a collage
JellyBus, the makers of popular iOS image-editing software PicsPlayPro, recently launched a collage-making app, Moldiv, and packed it full of features that'll appeal to creative types who are looking to throw together a beautiful collage. The first thing you notice about Modiv is the large number of frames available at your fingertips. There are 80 free frames and 60 premiums that you can buy as a pack via a US$1.99. Moldiv's basic frames provide you with a variety of columnar and angular layouts that are sufficient for most users. The next thing you notice about Moldiv is how easy it is to use. Tap on your frame to select your photo layout and then tap on a section to add a photo. You can pull the photo from your photo gallery or take a new one using the camera. Once you add in your photos, you can spend a few minutes tweaking the layout by adjusting the frame width and adding a background to fill in the white parts of the frame. Just like the frame options, the background selection is robust. You can choose from a set of 40 free backgrounds or buy a second, more colorful set for $0.99. Moldiv also lets you add text or stamps on your collage. Similar to other parts of the app, Moldiv offers a set of free stamps and premium stamps that cost 99 cents each. There's also a shape tool that lets you overlay another photo on your collage. You can select your shape and then choose a photo from your camera roll. You can adjust the shape to fit the photo and get the right look. I used this feature in a collage of my one-year old. I used a four-square layout with pictures of him playing and then put a heart-shaped insert with a close-up photo right in the middle. It looked great! Moldiv is a no-frills editor that lets you create collages quickly. You pick your frame, add your photos and then embellish them a bit with text or stamps. When you are done, you can save the collage to your camera roll, send it to other apps or share it on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or Flickr. Moldiv does have its fair share of in-app purchases, which some may find bothersome. I wasn't frustrated by them as I found the basic options were creative enough to suit my needs. I don't mind paying extra if I want to get fancier with my photos. I would like to see an "unlock all" option that would let me buy everything at once. Moldiv is available for free from the iOS App Store. I used the iPad version as I enjoy editing on my iPad and not my iPhone. Moldiv is a universal app, so you can edit on either device.
Daily iPhone App: Wizard Ops Tactics offers well-made tactical battles
Wizard Ops arrived on the App Store a couple of years ago -- it was a wild and wooly take on magical combat that played more like a shooter than a fantasy RPG. Developers Phyken Media have now returned to the world of Wizard Ops, though not the genre, with a new title called Wizard Ops Tactics. As you may have reckoned from the title, Wizard Ops Tactics is a turn-based strategy game, where you move various wizards and combatants around a 3D board, casting spells across various terrains to beat the other side. Just like the original Wizard Ops, the graphics on this one can get a little goofy, but also like the original game, the depth of gameplay is very impressive. Each turn consists of a planning phase and an action phase, and while you can use as much time as you like to plan your turns, lining up the right moves in quick succession can get you combo bonuses and even allow you to get a nice advantage over the other team. Wizard Ops Tactics is great fun, offers lots and lots of content (you can play through a full campaign or get involved in turn-based multiplayer, all while unlocking new units and customizing your current ones), and it's completely free to download and play. Even if you didn't try the first Wizard Ops game, but are looking for a great example of turn-based strategy, go pick this one up today.
Daily iPad App: Leviathan Warships features sweet, turn-based boat warfare
First of all, go enjoy the wonderful trailer for this game. If you're not sold on Leviathan Warships (US$4.99 on the App Store) after watching that, then I'm not exactly sure what else you want. Leviathan Warships is a turn-based naval strategy game. Your job is to guide a series of ships through watery battlegrounds, leading them turn by turn against your opponents. The game is similar to Bungie's Crimson: Steam Pirates, in that you guide ships around by dragging them, but it's much more complicated. You can aim each ship's guns separately, upgrade your ships as you see fit and take on co-op and multiplayer battles in addition to the main campaign. The whole package is impressively thorough, and in that sense, the trailer is dead on. In fact, there might be a little bit too much here to play with. Those looking for a casual title will find Leviathan Warships overwhelming. But the $4.99 price is fitting -- enough to signify the game is substantial, but still cheap enough for anyone interested to jump right in. Leviathan Warships is highly recommended for sure.
Daily iPad App: Draw This App challenges you to refine your drawing technique
Aspiring artists may want to grab their stylus and check out Draw This App from Peter Hamilton. The app improves your drawing skills by practicing your copying technique and challenging you to do better each time you sit down and draw. The app is basic in its scope and is designed for beginning artists looking to improve their skills or more experienced artists who want to practice their copying skills. The app offers a handful of objects that are relatively easy to draw, including 3D shapes like cubes, body parts like eyes and different types of faces. Each object is drawn step-by-step and you are prompted to draw along with the app. You can choose to draw an ear, for example, and the app will draw the ear, one part at a time starting with the outer lobe. You must follow along with this drawing lesson, drawing the ear in increments. The app tracks your drawing technique and grades you based on how you closely you replicate the original object. Don't fret if you are a lefty, the app lets you select your handedness and will grade accordingly. Draw This App is a new app, and the number of lessons are limited. The grading is also easier than I expected. Every once in a while I was careless while drawing, and I still received a decent score (above 20%). Maybe I am a glutton for punishment, but I expected a bigger penalty when I was very sloppy with my technique. Hopefully, the developer will improve the stringency of the scoring, maybe by introducing levels of easy, medium or difficult, and add to the library of drawing tutorials over time. Draw This App is available for free from the iOS App Store. You can unlock the first group of drawing lessons via a 99-cent in-app purchase. It is compatible with iPad and requires iOS 6.1 or later.
Daily iPad App: ScreenLab
If you look at your lock screen and see wasted screen real estate, then you should check out ScreenLab from Lemonskin. ScreenLab allows you to design a lock screen wallpaper filled with useful information. Because it uses the lock screen, ScreenLab can display these details to anyone, even when they don't have the passcode to your iOS device. ScreenLab allows you to choose a background for your lock screen and then add items to make it more personal. You can add contact information in case your iOS device is lost, a calendar to help you with dates and a checklist to keep track of important tasks. There's also an option to put a photo with borders and a block of text that you can use to say anything you want to the world. ScreenLab lets you move and rotate each element on the screen so you can get the arrangement that you like. You can also change the style and color to match your background. The iPad app has a nice editing screen that helps you design a lock screen that looks great in landscape and portrait orientation. When you are done, you can preview your lock screen and then export it to your camera roll. Because of the way iOS works, you then have to manually set the lock screen image using the Photos application. The iOS lock screen image is also static, which means you have to create a new image each time you want to change the information on your screen. It's a slightly cumbersome process, but doable for folks who want more than just a pretty photo when they wake up their device. ScreenLab is available for US$1.99 from the iOS App Store.
Daily iPad App: Eclipse: New Dawn for the Galaxy is a great board game adaptation
Eclipse is one of the most popular board games around right now -- it's a vast, involving epic "4X" game, where those four Xs stand for eXploration, eXpansion, eXploitation (as in mining crops and resources from various planets) and eXtermination (as in finishing off your alien opponents). It was recently announced that Big Daddy's Creations would be adapting the game for iPad, and the iOS version has now arrived on the App Store, available for US$6.99. As a board game, I think Eclipse is terrific -- it's very well-balanced, and all of the various things you can do offer plenty of different strategies to play with. There are three resources (money, science and material) that you can use to exert your influence on various areas of a galaxy, research new technologies for starships or your empire or build up those ships and other various structures to combat your enemies. The game's almost endlessly flexible, in that you can try to win over the game's nine turns in any number of ways. The drawback here, however, is that all of that flexibility and complexity make the game, well, complicated. This is not a casual game by any means, and while the iOS version's interface is fairly good at converting all of the information you need into a visible, touchable form, it's not very good at actually explaining what all of that information is. So when you're confronted by 30-50 icons on screen at the same time and asked to choose one, the game can be overwhelming to say the least. Still, if you like great board games and are up for a challenge, Eclipse is excellent. And if you're already familiar with the board game, then this might end up becoming one of your favorite games on the App Store. My only other complaint is that there's no real "metagame" to it -- winning or losing the various games you play doesn't matter much in the larger picture at all. Still, Eclipse is an incredible adaptation of a brilliant board game, and it comes highly recommended. Even at the price of $6.99, it's one of the best board game apps out there.
Daily iPad App: Gradients is a free iOS photo editor that is worth a look
I'm always on the lookout for free photo apps that do a good job, and Gradients for the iPad or iPhone (free, universal) fits the bill. The app lets you add gradients to existing photos with almost infinite variations and control. I often create gradients in Photoshop, especially to tone down the sky in landscapes. It's nice to have a lightweight utility to handle that simple task. There are 46 filter styles available, and each one is customizable in parameters like opacity and tilt. You can turn photos into black-and-white images. You can even create a custom gradient and save it for future use. Unlike so many photo apps, Gradients doesn't throw in-app purchases at you. Everything is included. When your editing is done, you can save your photo, or share it via Twitter or Facebook. %Gallery-187386% Editing is easy, and as you make changes on the Gradients control panel you can see a thumbnail of your image. The only thing I found lacking is any kind of undo feature. You can tap on a new filter and the old one will go away, but there is no way to return to your starting point without reloading the image. Gradients is a universal app and optimized for the iPhone 5. It requires iOS 6 or later.
Daily iPad App: Tipping Point Adventure for iPad is clever and engaging
My experience as an adventure game player goes way back to the text-only Colossal Cave game, which then morphed into the classic Zork text games from Infocom (which, by the way, you can play even now on iOS with the Lost Treasures of Infocom app). Now, with speed and graphic power, games are a lot more immersive and fun to play. Tipping Point Adventure, is a recent iPad-only release that is rich in puzzles and high quality graphics. The game is currently on sale for U.S. $1.99 in the app store. You begin the game sitting in your virtual home watching TV, when a strange message sets you off on an epic adventure. At first, I was stabbing around the screen looking for things to interact with, but soon I saw a logic to the way the game was constructed. I liked a lot of the subtle things the author has done, like picking up the TV remote and selecting stations has old movies actually playing on the TV. The game has built-in hints available but there is no in-app purchase required to get them, so unlike some other games, you don't have to buy them. I still needed one or two of the built-in hints. One hint told me I had to go to a particular TV channel for a message, and with hundreds of channels available, I don't think I would have figured that one out for myself. %Gallery-187323% There's a sizable story line, lots of puzzles and challenges to play with, an original music score, and quite a few surprises to find. Tipping Point is a great, reasonably priced diversion that offers up a nice throwback experience to those old text-only adventure games of old. The game is a hefty 255 MB download, and requires iOS 4.3 or later.
Daily iPad App: Animator's Survival Kit moves to iPad, brings in-depth look at drawing essentials
Richard Williams is an Oscar-winning animator, with an extensive history in the film business. His well-reviewed Animator's Survival Kit (US$22 on Amazon) is currently in its second edition. For a mere $959.50, you can pick up a 16-DVD boxed set showcasing all the material covered in the book. Now, the survival kit series has finally arrived on the iPad. For $34.99, you can pick up an app that teaches core principles of animation combining both text and video into a single product. At 882 MB, this is a big app, offering a hybrid of written explanation and interactive experience. In many ways, this app feels like an iBook -- embedded videos, the integrated sliding table of contents, but it's presented with a style that's all its own. The design is sumptuous. You skip directly to the coverage you're interested in, whether it's running and walking or timing and anticipation -- the book / app covers all the basic principles of animation. There you find page after page with detailed explanations, embedded video links and color commentary (delightfully, this is often literally the case) that guide you through understanding how concepts transform into drawings over time. It's very well put together. I particularly loved the embedded visits to his studio. Williams discusses topics, introducing them to the reader with a great deal of charm. For example, "Why does this app have so many pages on walks? Walks are the hardest thing to animate well." He then goes on to discuss how important it is to practice movement and how walks form the testing ground for most animation. The book is filled with great advice. It's hard to go to any page and not learn something. Whether it's picking the correct foot to start walking ("It's unnatural to start a walk with the farthest foot from the direction we're going") to expressing speech ("The thing is to think of the word shapes and phrases, not of the letters"), the book offers Williams' years of experience, produced in a way that's sure to engage. I can't imagine an audience who won't love this app. From school kids, just growing an interest in drawing to retirees, this book / app is perfect for anyone looking for a wonderful excursion into a new topic or attempting to expand their craft. Want to look before you buy? There's a free sample app for you to try out, before committing to the full purchase.
Daily iPad App: Quicklytics is the Analytics client that Google should have made
If you obsess over your website traffic and bemoan the fact that Google doesn't have a decent iOS Analytics client, then you should take a moment to check out Quicklytics. Quicklytics pulls your Google Analytics data and gives you a detailed look at your almost realtime** website traffic in just a few taps. The iPad version of the app has an attractive, split-pane layout that places the most commonly checked statistics at the top of the screen in portrait view or on the left in landscape. This section includes a graph and six smaller panes that show metrics like pageviews, visits, goals value and more. Tapping on the pane changes the graph, which now shows the data for the metric you just selected. Tap and hold on one of these panes, and you can change the metric. It's an intuitive layout that packs a lot of information into a relatively compact space. The other section of Quicklytics contains the bulk of your metrics. You can view your audience information, sources of your traffic, content information and ad conversions. Each one of these sections has between 10 and 30 variables that you can pour over. Quicklytics also supports multiple Google analytics accounts, and you can easily switch between each one with a swipe to the left or to the right. It's a staggering amount of data that you can carry around with you in your bag. There are several smaller features that make Quicklytics useful for anyone who is involved in running a website. With a single tap, you can compile a report and share the metrics for a variable like visit duration, device information and others. There is support for filters so you can curb the firehose of data when you need to look at the little picture instead of the big one. A series of tabs let you view your traffic data for today, yesterday, the month, or a custom time frame. Quicklytics is available in the iOS App Store for US$1.99, down from the regular $4.99. This sale price is available through Friday. **How quickly you will see your data change is dependent on your site's traffic. Smaller sites, like the ones I tested with, will see changes hit the app faster, while larger sites may take longer to update. In general, the developer says most sites will see traffic updates every 5-10 minutes.
Daily iPad App: Hone your culinary skills with the Baking with Dorie app
Most people can whip up some brownies or bust out a batch of cookies on a whim, but if you want to prepare a pie from scratch, you may need some help. One of the best apps to boost your baking skills is the new Baking with Dorie app. The multimedia-rich app features baking lessons from culinary guru Dorie Greenspan. She's known for her baking cookbooks including the popular Baking with Julia, a classic cookbook that pays homage to Julia Child with recipes from more than 20 of the top bakers in the US. The Baking with Dorie app takes the recipe and images from a traditional cookbook and pairs it with videos to create the ultimate digital cooking lesson. You not only get to see some lovely baked goods, you also get to watch a video that shows you how to make them. All the recipes include text, images and tips, but the videos are extra. The app has one free recipe with videos, and you can buy additional recipe videos for US$0.99 each. You can also pay $9.99 to unlock videos for all the recipes. There are about 25 recipes available as of the writing of this post. The recipes are presented either in cookbook, stepview, spinview or chartview style, and you can pick the one that best fits your needs. Besides recipes, Baking with Dorie also has a timer and grocery list to help make sure you have the right ingredients on hand. The Baking with Dorie app is available for free from the iOS App Store. It's a must-have for anyone who enjoys spending time in the kitchen.
Daily iPad App: Numerosity challenges children to learn their math facts
Math drills for elementary school children can be dry and boring, but they are a necessary part of learning math. One way to liven up this repetitive process is through Numerosity: Play with Addition!, a math facts app from ThoughtBox that recently landed in the iOS App Store. Numerosity starts off with basic addition like 4 + 5 and gradually gets more difficult with each level that is successfully completed. There are 20 levels that'll challenge most K-2 children. The app's main screen is a whiteboard-like slate that has math facts in the center and a cute character, Skruff The Streetwise Dog, on the side. Skruff cheers when your child answers a math problem correctly. When your child is not doing so well, Skruff's demeanor becomes sad. Skruff will even lay down when your child is taking too long to answer. Skruff is cute enough that he will entertain your child, but he is not the focal point of the app. Math is at the heart of Numerosity and each level presents your child with an addition problem in the middle of the screen. It also places several possible answers in a row at the bottom of the screen. Your child then taps on the correct answer to select it and drags it on top of the equation to answer the math statement. Each correct answer earns your child points. One thing you will notice right away is the timer at the top of the screen. To make Numerosity even more challenging, your child has a set amount of time to answer all the questions in a level. They must answer each question without too much delay or risk failing the level. They can pause, but the length of the pause is also limited by a timer. Each time you pause, that amount of time you are allowed gets a little shorter. It's a clever way to really challenge your children to memorize their math facts and not just count on their fingers. One aspect of Numerosity I really appreciated is that it mixes up the equations and doesn't always present your child with 10 + 2. Sometimes your child is given one addend and the answer, such as 10 + X = 15. Your child then has to select the addend that'll solve the problem correctly. This breaks up the monotony of addition and forces your child to think a bit more about the math problem in front of them. Another useful feature is the ability to setup four profiles, so you can easily use the app with multiple children. You also have the ability to print up a certificate showing that your child completed the game and mastered their math facts. Numerosity is mostly child-friendly -- there are no ads and no in-app purchases, but there is an option to send an email to the developer. Numerosity: Play with Addition! is available for US$1.99 from the iOS App Store. It's compatible with any iPad running iOS 5.1 or later.
Daily iPhone App: Daedalus Touch
If there's one thing bad about being a tech blogger, it's that you're constantly exposed to new and exciting hardware and software. More often than not, a first glance at an app turns into a buying opportunity, and the next thing you know you've spent anywhere from $0.99 to "a big amount" on the latest and greatest. That was the situation I found myself in with an OS X text editor called Ulysses III (US$39.99) after Megan Lavey-Heaton wrote about it. Well, it turns out that I'm now using Ulysses every day for blogging, and that it also has a companion iOS app named Daedalus Touch ($4.99, universal), which of course I had to buy. Both apps are products of German development house The Soulmen GBR, and there are some similarities between the two. Both work on the concept of stacks of sheets of paper and both are amazing plaintext editors. Install Daedalus Touch on your iPhone or iPad, choose to sync it with iCloud, and a Daedalus folder shows up in Ulysses III on your Mac. One of the features of Ulysses III that I appreciate so much is the "fourth pane" that can be added to the app window that provides one-click access to just about every Markdown style. While Daedalus doesn't supply that pane, it does support export of Markdown style conversions from the app. However, I made up for the lack of that pane by just creating a text document with the Markdown commands I use most often. Like Ulysses III, there's a row of customizable shortcut buttons that appear over the top of the iOS virtual keyboard. That keyboard row also displays a character and word count, perfect for authors who are tied to a specific document length. Daedalus Touch can import files or folders from Dropbox, WebDAV, and Box.com, and even opens zipped text files. Documents can be exported as single or multiple sheets, or entire stacks of sheets. The export options available include emailing as TXT, PDF, RTF, and zip archive, creating an ePub ebook file (including asking for a cover image and meta information), printing, converting Markdown styles, copying to the iOS clipboard, or opening documents in other iOS apps. There are four different color themes, including modes for editing at night, and three nice typefaces. One of my favorite features in Daedalus Touch has to be its excellent use of gestures for navigation in the app, many of which are included in the video embedded below. Another nice touch is a web browser built into the iPad version of Daedalus Touch, which makes it quite easy to do research without having to leave the app. The Soulmen GBR have created a winner with Daedalus Touch, and if you've already succumbed to the charms of Ulysses III, do yourself a favor and get the iOS app.
Daily iPad: Celebrate Yuri's Night with Space Race Card Match
Tonight is Yuri's Night, the night that space exploration enthusiasts around the world celebrate Yuri Gagarin's first manned spaceflight on April 12, 1961 and the first space shuttle launch on the same date in 1981. If you are staying home with family and want to commemorate this event, you should check out the Space Race Card Match app from Kids Discover. Space Race Card Match is a memory / matching game with an astronomy theme. The app is challenging as you have to successfully match every card on the board in a short period of time. If you make too many mistakes or take too long, you are forced to repeat the level. If you win the round, you are rewarded with beautiful images, diagrams and facts about the sun. The app ships with a free sun-themed level, and you can buy either a space exploration theme or a life in space theme. Both of these latter themes are available as US$0.99 in-app purchases. Space Race Card Match is available for free from the iOS App Store. Kids Discover also created Kids Discover Space, which is a mini-encyclopedia about all things astronomy.
Daily iPad App: Magicka arrives on iOS with Wizards of the Square Tablet
Magicka is a long-running game series from Swedish developer Paradox Interactive that the company has recently decided to go big on. In addition to an upcoming multiplayer spinoff, Paradox has released this version for iOS today, hoping to bring some of the PC game's magic to Apple's touchscreen platform. And in general, they're successful. While it's not perfect, Magicka for iOS does recreate some of the desktop series' wackiness and creativity. On the PC, Magicka is a top-down RPG of sorts, where players can control various wizards that run around blasting off spells. On iOS, that game has been translated to a side-scrolling beat-em-up, but the spell-combining mechanic from the original title is still included. Basically, you have a series of elemental icons across the bottom of the screen, and you can combine any four to create spells on the fly. Hit four fire icons or ice icons to cast spells of those types, or you can combine fire and water to cast a steam spell, or fire and electricity to cast a thunderstorm spell, or water and electricity to both wet down your enemies, and then light them up with current. You can attack any of the bad guys that are pestering you or your allies (the game offers local co-op, which can be a lot of fun). There's also a "life" spell to either heal yourself or others. The spells have some really fun effects, too. For example, casting life on the undead hurts them. You can also use a wall spell on your various elements. Extra weapons and robes provide stat bonuses, just like in the main game, but most of the fun involves sussing out which spells to use in any given situation. The game also carries a wacky tone -- Paradox's Swedish sense of humor shines in its weirdness. I don't think Magicka for iOS is quite as fun or original as the PC title. To a certain extent, Paradox is just trying to spread the brand more than creating an original iOS game. But it is a lot of fun. Whether you're a Magicka die-hard or just want to try the game's spell-creation system on your iPad, Wizards of the Square Tablet is a very good time for a price of US$1.99.
Daily iPad App: Deco Sketch Pro is a unique photo editor and graphics creation tool
Deco Sketch Pro is a universal iOS app that features geometric effects that can be added to images you have, or you can start from scratch. The US$2.99 universal app includes 10 brush types with 130 variations. You can extract color from a photo and use it as the base for an effect. You can start with a blank page and create your own designs, useful for creating desktops or other graphic art. The app is simple to use, and when you first load it, you get some help in identifying the on-screen icons. From there, I found it's just a matter of exploring. With photos, you can add things such as sunbursts or other shapes -- whatever you can dream up. It's powerful as a painting tool as well, and while I am no artist, I was able to create some interesting designs that would have been difficult to create with other drawing for painting programs. Controls allow you to zoom so you can work in detail on your image, and unlimited undos let you can fix anything that went wrong. The app worked smoothly on my iPad as well as my iPhone 5. When you are done creating, the app lets you output 8 MB images (2,448 x 3,264), which matches the iPhone 5 camera resolution. The app lets you share your creations to Facebook, Twitter and email. It's a bit hard to describe the compelling output from this app, but check the gallery for some samples. %Gallery-181961% Deco Sketch Pro is a 32 MB download and is optimized for the iPhone 5. It requires iOS 4.3 or greater.
Daily iPad App: FX Photo Studio HD adds more filters, Retina support
FX Photo Studio HD has been a staple on my iPads for a while. The US$1.99 app from MacPhun, which is used to edit and apply a variety of effects to images, has recently been updated to version 5.0, adding more effect filters and now including support for Retina displays. The update also improves performance on the iPad mini and officially provides support for iOS 6. If you're not familiar with FX Photo Studio HD, it's well worth the investment if you want to jazz up your photos, crop them or adjust the colors. Thanks to a well-designed UI, the app is a snap to learn and use. Images are imported by tapping a "load photos" button (it looks like a flower) which then displays three buttons -- one to load from your iPad photo library, one to import images through a Camera Connection Kit, and one to take a photo using the iPad camera. Once an image is loaded, it is displayed with a palette of tools across the top and a scrollable list of effects on the right side of the screen. %Gallery-181404% Those tools include items for loading photo, undoing or redoing edits, cropping or rotating photos, resizing images, or making adjustments to such items as gamma, brightness, contrast, hue or saturation. If you want to compare your doctored image with the original, a small "eye" button to the lower right of the photo reverts instantaneously to your original photo. The updated Photo Studio HD has 190 included effects, textures, frames and tints to enhance (or degrade) your favorite photo. While most effects are quite useful, there are some that are downright cheesy -- the one that adds lipstick marks and the little teddy bear are notable examples. Of course, your tastes and needs might be different from mine... There are also a number of $0.99 in-app purchases that provide additional frames and effects, perfect if you want to add more power to an already loaded app. FX Photo Studio HD is a worthwhile app to load on any iPad, whether you're an experienced digital photographer or just beginning to dabble in the digital arts.
Daily iPad App: My Measures & Dimensions PRO
Today's Daily iPad App is My Measures & Dimensions PRO. It's universal, but I only tested it on the iPad. The app is a beautiful and useful tool for anyone who needs to take measurements around the house. Though it's designed with carpenters, engineers, architects or landscapers in mind I found it an incredibly useful app to have during my recent move between flats. My Measures & Dimensions PRO allows you to snap a picture quickly or choose an existing picture from your library and add photos with measurements to objects in the app. For example, say you're viewing a new apartment and you want to know if your furniture is going to fit. With the app, simply take a picture of the new apartment, tap the screen with two fingers and then drag to place a lined arrow on the desired area. Then simply add the measurement of the area you are recording. Measurements can be entered in Imperial, metric, Chinese or Japanese standards. Measurements must obviously be inputted manually as the app cannot calculate the distance between two points just from a photo. Another great feature is the ability to easily add angle measurements. Just select the angle tool and adjust its degrees by dragging the tool to match the angles and the photograph. Angles are calculated automatically. What's really great about the app is it can also calculate the sum of all your measurements and even the surface area of your measurements. Lastly, the app allows you to write simple text on photos so you can make notes on the same canvas you're recording dimensions on. What My Measures & Dimensions PRO does is it allows you to stop carrying around a pen and paper for your measuring needs. By taking a photo and recording measurement on a photo you'll have a much better idea of what the space you are working in actually provides and looks like. Another nice feature lets you export your measurements as a PDF. That way you can share your measurements with just about anyone. There is also a basic version of My Measures & Dimensions PRO. That version, called My Measures & Dimensions, is a few dollars cheaper and lacks some of the features of the PRO version including iCloud sync and backup, the ability to zoom in on pictures, the ability to snap arrowheads together, and loupes and cross mode. The only problem I had with My Measures & Dimensions PRO was that the iCloud sync feature didn't appear to work on the iPad version of the app. I took photos and measurements with the iPhone version of the app and I could see that those documents were stored in my iCloud account, but for some reason the iPad app couldn't see the documents were there. Still, once that bug is ironed out, I can't recommend My Measures & Dimensions PRO enough. My Measures & Dimensions PRO is US$5.99. The My Measures & Dimensions basic version is US$2.99.
Daily iPad App: Thirst aggregates the news so you don't have to
Thirst is a newsreader and news-discovery app with a personalized twist. It has a magazine-like tiled layout that reminds me of Flipboard. Each tile is a news category and the default homescreen includes a broad range of categories like sports, politics and tech. You can narrow these categories down based on your interests. The app breaks away from other newsreaders by relying on an intelligent search feature to find news articles instead of an RSS fead. Thirst uses an algorithm to search the web for articles that fit those categories you have put on your homescreen. Being an Apple fan, my Thirst homescreen has Apple, iPad, iPad mini and app categories. The content within those categories comes from a wide variety of news sources, some of which I have never encountered before. Thirst also has a social side and includes a discussion feature that lets you write and respond to comments on those articles that you read. Like most commenting forums, the comments are as good as the people reading and responding. I saw my fair share of useless drivel and a few engaging discussions that I was happy to read. Besides commenting, users can also share articles via Facebook or Twitter. I'm a longtime RSS user and have to admit that I was skeptical about Thirst at first. The app won me over when it used its intelligent search to pull up new and interesting articles that I never would have read if I had only browsed through my favorite RSS feeds. Thirst is available for free from the iOS App Store. It's worth a download just to checkout the news-discovery feature of the app. Use it long enough and you might find that you have become hooked on this search-based way of reading the news.
