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Daily iPad app: Weather 2X is a beautiful and basic weather app
If you're looking for a beautiful, but basic weather app for your iPad, you should take a closer look at Weather 2X from McLean Mobile Solutions. Every time you launch the app, you will be greeted with a gorgeous wallpaper that matches the time and weather conditions outside. The simple UI shows only the current temperature and prevailing weather conditions (clear/sunny, cloudy, rainy, etc) on the main weather screen, but you can view additional details with just a few basic gestures. A tap on the weather conditions will reveal the wind speed, barometric pressure, rainfall amounts, humidity and visibility. You can view the forecast for the next few days by using a pinch-apart or a double-tap gesture on the main screen. A quick swipe across the screen from right to left will show an hourly five-day forecast, while a swipe in the other direction will let you change the settings for the app as well as switch locations for the weather information. Within the settings, you can add a new location, choose between Fahrenheit or Celsius, display the time in 24 hours format, view the local weather using your GPS position and toggle off the sound effects. You can also turn on iCloud so you can sync your settings across devices. The UI is smooth, the nature images look fantastic on the retina iPad and the weather details are accurate. For 99-cents, Weather 2X is a steal.
Daily iPad App: MyScript Memo takes your handwriting and turns it into text
Handwriting is one of those things that seems like it should be easy on the iPad, but, in reality, it is fairly difficult. Unlike Apple's legendarily quirky handwriting recognition on the Newton or the Windows tablets of more recent vintage, the iPad is designed primarily for finger-based input, not for longhand wirting with a stylus. Though it's not optimized for use with a capacitive pen, several companies including Vision Objects are enthusiastic about the iPad as a writing device and have developed apps that'll let you scrawl to your heart's content. MyScript Memo uses a proprietary algorithm that'll take your handwriting on the iPad or iPhone and convert it to text. You can use any stylus or even your finger to write some words and then convert to text when you are ready to share it with a friend via email, SMS, Facebook or Twitter. You can also copy the converted text or save it to Evernote for future reference. The algorithm used to detect the handwriting performed beyond my expectation. Even with my chicken scratch, Memo was able to convert 90 percent of what I had written. One of the most useful features was a movable palm guard that lets you cover the area where your hand sits on the screen. It works really well to block that part of the screen and prevent accidental input from your palm. You can adjust this area to make it bigger or smaller as needed. The app also includes an eraser so you can remove words and a lasso tool to remove blocks of text at a time. MyScript Memo is a universal app and is available for free from the iOS App Store. The free version will let you convert handwriting to text using MyScript's server; an in-app purchase of $2.99 will let you convert directly on your device.
Daily iPad App: Dynamite Jack is a welcome arrival on the iPad
Phil Hassey's great Dynamite Jack game arrived on Steam and the Mac App Store a little while ago, but Phil told us back at GDC this year that he's been planning an iOS release. This week, that finally happened, and Dynamite Jack is now available on the iPad. The game's a 2D stealth affair, where you guide Jack through a series of caverns, trying to dodge guards, cave trolls, lasers, and spiders to collect chips and make it to the exit alive. Hassey's done an impressive job porting the game over here. The virtual controls work just fine and a new line-drawing mode lets you trace a line on the screen to guide Jack's route. At first, I stuck with the virtual controls, but I think for the tougher stealth levels, I actually prefer drawing lines. Impressively, the iOS app includes all of the community-created maps, and a built-in map editor lets you create your own levels. Custom levels come with their own leaderboards. There's a crazy amount of replayability on this one, to be sure. Dynamite Jack is US$2.99 on the App Store, and I think this is the best version of the game released yet. If you've made the mistake of not playing this game yet, now's your chance. This is the version you want.
Daily iPad App: Band Together represents some excellent student work
I first got to meet Dave Taylor last week at WWDC -- he's one of the original members of id software, and is responsible in part for classic games like Quake, Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D. These days, he's still working as a game producer, but has also taken on the role of teacher. Last night, I visited Jim Henson Studios here in Los Angeles, and saw Dave speak for a few minutes about a class he taught last year in San Francisco, in which he tasked students with producing a game a week, in order to get used to the often rapid development cycle in game production today. You can see all of their work over on the school's website -- some of those games are nuts, and some of them are really beautiful, but they all show just how hard these students worked to learn the art and craft of game design and production. After the class finished last year, Dave says he decided to use his job as game producer to try and publish an actual game with a few of the students, and while they had hoped to be done with the game last summer, it's just this week finally arrived on the App Store. Band Together is the title of the app, and it's sort of a 2D, real-time strategy title, in the same vein as Lemmings. By swiping across the screen, you control a set of little creatures, trying to navigate them past various deadly obstacles. The excellent art has been coordinated by a Blizzard veteran that Taylor connected up with the students, and the gameplay is simultaneously meditative and frenetic, as you drag the little Bandies around the screen with your finger. Whether or not you succeed, you're automatically skipped to the next level of the game, so even casual players can just delight in playing around (while more hardcore players will want to go back and clean up every level perfectly). Band Together offers some really well-made, original fun -- it's a perfect start for these students, and it's yet another example that the iOS platform can be home to some really amazing indie and student work. Band Together is out now for the iPad. The full game, published by Backflip Studios (and kudos to them for supporting student work like this), is $4.99.
iLearnWith is an early childhood education program for the iPad
There are a wide range of educational apps in the App Store. Some titles like Tapfish are fun, while others like the iLearnWith program from Tribal Nova are geared for learning. The thing that sets iLearnWith apart from its competition is the ability to set up profiles for multiple children and track their progress across more than one app. iLearnWith is more than just a few loosely-associated apps with profiles. It's an iPad-based learning environment with several different apps that interact and share data with each other. The apps are geared towards the younger set (ages 3 to 6) and focus on basic skills like letters, phonics, and addition. There are also a few titles that explore science by introducing topics like animals and weather. Each educational app has a different theme and tests a different set of skills. There's i Learn With Poko: Seasons and Weather! HD which covers weather; i Learn With Boing: Ice Land Adventures! HD which focuses on letters phonics and spelling; i Learn With Savanna Adventures! HD which mixes animals with math; i Learn With the Mighty Jungle: Animals! HD which showcases animals and i Learn With Poko: Fun Counting and Addition! HD which introduces math. When your child is done learning, they can open the Planet Boing app, which offers kids a break from drills and lets them dress-up and play with a variety of cartoon aliens. When you launch one of the iLearnWith apps, you are greeted with an animated launch screen that matches the theme of the app. From here, you can start a lesson, select a child's profile, view your child's progress or browse other iLearnWith apps that are installed on your device. I was impressed with the sharing and tracking that exists between the apps when you use them with an iLearnWith account (available for free). I was able to launch one app, pull up my child's progress records from all the apps and then jump to another app to begin lessons. It was seamless to move from one app to another. I've used four of the apps in the series, and each app is colorful and engaging. The characters are cute and there's enough animation to keep your child focused on the activity. Instructions are very clear and tell your child exactly what they need to do at each screen. If your child forgets, there's always a character like Mister Murphy the Monkey hanging around to help. There's also background music and sound effects in the apps, but they add to the experience and are not overbearing. Children get positive reinforcement and earn rewards when they answer correctly. When a mistake is made, a sad noise gives mild correction and the child is prompted to try again. The reward system gives your child medals and trinkets that they can use in Planet Boing, an app within the series that's a more of a digital playground than a learning app. For parents or teachers, iLearnWith has section dedicated to tracking your child's progress in not just one, but all the iLearnWith apps. When you open the progress hub, you can view the learning activities for each app and the level your child has completed. At the top is the current app and its statistics, which in the detailed view can include the number of times the child completed an activity, their success rate and the average success rate of the group. At the bottom of the progress section are the other apps and their completion level. Parents can tap an activity, like adding up to 10 in the Addition! app, and that app will launch. Tribal Nova, the company behind the iLearnWith apps, is no stranger to early childhood education and it shows. The apps are filled with progress tracking features for parents and fun for kids who want to learn. You can read more about iLearnWith at the company's website and check out their other work which includes PBS KIDS PLAY!, Kid's CBC Wonder World, and Bayam. The iLearnWith apps are available in the iOS App Store for US$2.99 each. Select titles in the series are on sale now for a limited time.
Daily iPad App: Algoriddim's vjay brings real-time video mixing to the iPad
If your creative expressions include mixing and cutting videos, then you're going to love vjay, the latest app from the folks at Algoriddim. The company's known for its popular djay app, and it has brought a similar experience to video with vjay. The vjay app leverages the processing power of the iPad (current or previous-gen; it does not work on the iPad 1) and lets you mix two video clips on the fly. The app ties into iTunes and lets you select videos and audio clips from your library. You can also record your own source video using the camera on the iPad. If you don't want to bother with all that, Algoriddim includes a handful of stock clips for you to use. Once you select your video and audio, all the mixing is done in real-time, so there's no worrying about splicing at the right frame or picking the perfect transition. The app uses two scratch pads, one for each video, and has a center mixing window where all the action happens. Each scratch pad has a variety of effects that you can add to your videos on the fly. You can add a strobe, twirl, fisheye, and crush. Moving your finger on each video scratch pad will adjust the effect as well as let you speed up or slow down the clip. You can also run the clip in reverse. The mixing window also has several transitions that control how the final, mixed video appears. You can blend the two videos and use a slider to adjust the blend from one video to the other. There's also cube, grid, swap, push and mosaic transitions that let's you get creative with the your final clip. While mixing, you can record the video and save it to your camera roll. For live VJ sessions, you can output the app's mix to a TV using an HDMI cable or stream it to an Apple TV using AirPlay. You'll spend $9.99 to get vjay; it is available now in the iOS App Store. If you have even the slightest inclination towards playing with video, you're going to love vjay. Not only is it a blast to be able to mix videos on the fly, the performance is amazingly smooth on the iPad 3. I didn't see any perceptible lag and any stuttering was from user error. More than once in the middle of a mix, I clicked on the wrong effect or slide the mixing slider too far to the left or right, but that's all part of the fun. You can see how vjay works in the video below and read more about it on Algoriddim's website.
Daily iPad App: League of Evil 2 proves platformers and touchscreens can play nice
There are a lot of awesome games on sale in the Because We May event going on this weekend, but of the titles I've picked up so far, League of Evil 2 is probably my favorite. It's a platformer title, in the vein of Super Meat Boy, in that it's basically a quick and simple romp through a series of quick levels. But while a lot of platformers don't work all that well on the iPad's touchscreen, League of Evil 2 works great. The virtual buttons are not only big and easy to hit, but they're very responsive, and great character and animation designs make it easy to move around the level quickly in very precise ways. Each level is pretty quick to get through, but there are hidden briefcases to find in each one, and you're also timed as you go, with a max three star rating to earn. There are over 100 levels to play, and with the game on sale for just 99 cents, League of Evil 2 is the best way to spend a buck this Memorial Day weekend. Don't miss it!
Daily iPad App: Feed Me Oil HD
Chillingo's Feed Me Oil was released a little while ago, and it's a solid game that didn't get a ton of press when it first dropped. The reason for that is probably because it's somewhat similar to Where's My Water, in that you're trying to get a fluid simulation into a certain place on the screen by tweaking physics-enabled objects in the world. But while Where's My Water was all about digging, Feed Me Oil is much more about creation -- you place objects like platforms and wheels in the world to try and get the "black gold" flowing where you need it to go. Like pretty much all of Chillingo's other titles, there is lots of content here to play through: Lots of levels and puzzles with an increasing number of objects to use and move around to your heart's content. And while the game is on the iPhone as well, it's much better on the iPad -- the graphics are bigger and the objects are easier to manipulate in the game's space. Feed Me Oil is an excellent game, and especially because it's on sale today for completely free. Check it out.
Daily iPad App: Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is gonna take you for a ride
After quite a while, Capcom has finally released Marvel vs. Capcom 2 in the App Store, and you probably know right away if you want it or not. This Dreamcast-era fighting game might be a little silly and colorful, but it offers up some insane, excessive action that other fighting games have yet to match. Those on full consoles are already playing version 3, of course, but version 2 is a masterpiece of 2D animation, with all of Capcom's and Marvel's heroes decked out with great graphics and animations. Unfortunately, the game suffers from the same issues that most fighting games on the iPad and iPhone do: The virtual controls aren't the best for this type of gameplay. Capcom's dealt with it as best they can with something called the "flick button," but still, for games like this, nothing's going to substitute for a real joystick and buttons. The app description doesn't mention iCade support, but that would be nice. The title does have local multiplayer over Bluetooth, however, so you and a friend can face off locally, and all 56 characters are here and playable out of the game. If you have a new iPad, the graphics aren't yet compatible with the new Retina Display, but that's not too big a bother, and an update might fix that anyway. For its launch sale price of $2.99 (until May 6), Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is definitely a great title for those who love fighting games. It's so Pringles!
Daily iPad App: Total War Battles brings big-time RTS to iOS
I first saw Total War Battles (now out on the iPad and iPhone) at GDC earlier this year, and walked away excited about its potential. The Creative Assembly has been making phenomenal Total War games for the PC for years, with deep, intelligent war strategy across several time periods. Now Creative Assembly faces the challenge of bringing an involved, deep strategy game meant for a mouse and keyboard to iOS. Their answer is Total War Battles. It's been streamlined a lot, but all of the elements of real-time strategy combat are still there. You build bases, hire units, and lead them forward onto a (very compressed, hex-based) battlefield. What Creative Assembly actually came up with is somewhat similar to the popular Legendary Wars, but I think it's a bit cleaner and nicer than that one. That's not surprising, given how experienced Creative Assembly already was at making great games. Aside from the hex battle maps, there's a ten-hour long, story-based campaign to play through, and as Creative Assembly told me at GDC, the basic storyline is fairly easy, meant for more casual players. More difficult maps are available to those who want a challenge. Total War Battles also offers local multiplayer. You can face off against an opponent 1v1 on the same iPad screen. It's not quite as deep as the core game, but it is kind of a wacky take on strategy that's worth a try. Total War Battles is US$6.99, and despite its quality, I'm pretty sure that Creative Assembly won't get nearly the audience they're hoping to at that price. Still, it's a great game -- if you like real-time strategy games, it's a must-play, and if you play PC games at all, TWB is worth a look just to see the choices Creative Assembly made in translating its work to the iOS screen. And if all else fails, just wait -- the next time Sega runs a big sale, this will likely be a little cheaper.
Daily iPad App: The Little Girl Who Could Fly is a delightful interactive book for children
Today we are stepping outside our typical app reviews for the iPad and looking at an interactive book. Because of their interactive elements, these titles stray over into the app category. This particular title, The Little Girl Who Could Fly from YellowPixie, is an animated, illustrated adapatation of Karl Capek's children's book, The Man Who Knew How to Fly. The digital book opens with an illustrated page that has the book's credits, a start reading button and two toggles for controlling the background sound and the narration. The narration is pleasant and is an excellent accompaniment for younger children. Each page of the book has navigation arrows that let you move back and forward through the pages. There's also a home button and a toggle to turn off the background sound on every page. The 20 or so illustrations throughout the book are light-hearted and colorful. They are animated and move along with the story. Each page is filled with adventure as there are three to six illustrated items that'll move or make a noise when your child taps on them. My favorite is the teacher's hat that'll do a flip when you tap on it. Your child can also tilt the iPad and control the main character when she is flying. There are also two mini-games within the book. One will let your child color along with the lead character and another is a dress-up game that the little girls in the audience will enjoy. The games pop up in the middle of the story, but they fit in with the story line. As a result, the games add to the story and only minimally distract from it. The storyline about a girl who proves she can fly is fun. My children read the book, both with me and by themselves, several times. It's definitely geared towards the younger set, but it's not an early reader like See Jack Run. It's a storybook with a delightful tale that's perfect for a parent or an older sibling to read to their three to six-year-old. Set aside some time when you first read the book to your child as some of the words are long. You may have to explain the meaning of words like delegation and 90-degree angle, before you let them loose on their own. You can download The Little Girl Who Could Fly from iTunes for US$4.99.
Daily iPad App: Fibble is Crytek's entry onto iOS
If you had told me, just a couple of years ago, that Epic and Crytek would both have iOS apps in the store, I'm not sure I would have believed you. The Unreal Engine is one of the most popular graphical engines for major high resolution games, but Crytek is also very popular for its graphical work on Crysis and a few other titles. Epic has had a couple of hits in the App Store already with the Infinity Blade series, and here comes Crytek, working not on a big-time shooter for iOS, but a much cuter physics platformer-style game called Fibble. Fibble looks great, especially on the newer iOS devices. Crytek has brought its full engine expertise to bear, and so textures look terrific, everything's bright and clear, and the game runs very well. The gameplay is sort of a weird mix of platforming and golf. You move Fibble around by flicking him like a slingshot, and then you can use a series of other controls (like jumping or speeding up) to navigate a course, trying to get to a certain point in as few "flicks" as possible. It's simple, but there's a fair amount of things to do in 30 different levels. Unfortunately, Crytek's entry into iOS isn't quite as groundbreaking as Infinity Blade. The company aimed a little too close to Angry Birds rather than trying to blaze their own trail as an AAA iOS developer like Epic did. It would have been nice to see Crytek really break out and try something a little more innovative (or with a little more content -- 30 levels isn't small, but compared to some other games like this, it's not huge either). As it is, it's a fair first entry onto iOS, and has some excellent graphical sparkle, but you would be fine with waiting to see if it drops off of the current US$4.99 price for the HD version.
Daily iPad App: Bounty Bots is full of cartoony shooter action
MunkyFun is the group of developers behind first-person shooter Archetype for the iPhone, so they know already how to put a console-style shooter on Apple's mobile devices. Archetype was published by Villian, but MunkyFun's latest title is self-published. It's called Bounty Bots, and it's available for free on the App Store right now. Hopefully, at the word "free," you already went to go and download the game to see what it's like. But in case not, I'll tell you that it's a shooter where your main goal is to run around collecting coins as quickly as possible, and then to deliver those coins into banks (but without getting killed by other players). Coins delivered get banked, but you still get XP for picking up coins, so even if you're terrible, you can progress through the game. Progression gets you various parts to customize your bot with, and the game is finely tuned for both casual and hardcore players, so those ready for a real challenge can buy special parts that make things tougher but can also come with rewards as well. The game's freemium bent can be frustrating at times (if you ever lose all your coins, you're locked in a jail that you can then pay your way out of, which seems targeted right at guaranteeing those all-important in-app purchases). But there's enough action here that it's worth the free download, and if you get hooked, well, all the better. And MunkyFun is already updating the title as well, so there's more content on the way. Bounty Bots is a fun use of the company's expertise so far, and I'm sure it will lead to even better things in their future.
Daily iPad App: Soundbrush lets you create music with a brush
SoundBrush is a US $1.99 iPad app that lets you create original compositions by swiping your finger across the iPad screen. The description sounded a bit odd, but I had fun playing with SoundBrush and discovering what it could do. You can have a total of 4 instrumental lines -- piano, strings, flute and synth, and it appears the app selects proper harmonies when you lay your tracks down. I was surprised how good my little compositions sounded, although I wasn't quite ready for a concert. The app lets you hear the notes as you draw them, and you can super-impose a grid to show you the notes you are drawing. You can delete anything you have written with a double tap, so you can actually edit the music you create. The canvas scrolls, so you can have lengthy compositions. You can also control the playback speed, which also comes in handy when you are editing. This might be a great way to get a young person involved in music, and the combination of the dynamic colors and music that flows from the drawings you make are bound to be a stimulus to any young mind. I'm no kid, and I really enjoyed experimenting. I would have loved to have the app creators include some sample compositions, because starting cold, you don't know what to expect. I also think having some percussion options would be nice. Using the app doesn't require any musical knowledge, but I expect the more you know, the better your compositions will be. Soundbrush requires iOS 5 and an iPad, and it supports the retina display on the new iPad. %Gallery-153096%
Daily iPad App: Say Anything lets you get somebody's attention without saying a thing
Sometimes you need to get a person's attention without saying a word. You can wave your hand wildly at them, but all that vigorous movement may scare them away. A better way to get someone's attention is to pull out your iPad and fire up a banner app like Say Anything from Appy Inc. Say Anything is a simple banner app that lets you type in text and scroll it across your iPad's display just like a ticker tape. It has a swipe-based interface that uses both vertical and horizontal swiping gestures. A horizontal swipe sets your banner in motion and controls the speed, while a vertical swipe lets you scroll among your messages. Speaking of messages, your messages can have unlimited characters and you can save them for later use. You can save an unlimited number of preset messages (99-cent in-app purchase required) and use a favorites list to make it easy to find your most used messages. Unlike the paper banners of yore, you can jazz up your messages on the fly by changing the background color and adjusting the font color and face. There's also a mirror mode that's available as a 99-cent in-app purchase. Your message and its background are fully customizable, but, like mirror mode and unlimited presets, these changes come with a cost. If you want to adjust the size of the text, add more fonts or swap out the background for an image or a texture, you have to activate those features via an in-app purchase. Each feature costs 99-cents, but you can save yourself some cash and buy all five features (fonts, scaling, background, mirror and unlimited preset messages) for a reasonable US$1.99. What sets Say Anything apart from its competition is its ease of use and quality design. It's a fast, responsive app with a clean UI that lets you get your message across to someone in just a few seconds. I've been using it off and on for the past few weeks and am pleased with its performance. The developers are also responsive to problems and committed to producing a quality app. Say Anything is available for free from the iOS App Store, so you can try the basic features of the app without spending any money. If you like the app, then you should spend the $1.99 to unlock all five features and get rid of those pop-ups that appear every time you click on a paid feature that you haven't bought yet. You'll be glad you did.
Daily iPad App: Adobe Reader is an easy way to add annotations and signatures to your PDF documents
Adobe updated its Reader app for iOS, and what was a good PDF reader is now an excellent tool to annotate and sign documents. As luck would have it, I needed to add a note and sign a PDF file that was sent to me via email today. This rare occurrence gave me the opportunity to check out these new features using the iPad version of the Reader app. The latest version of Adobe Reader has several new tools for marking up a document including a freehand drawing tool, a highlighter, strikethrough, and underline. You can take a page in a PDF document and use these tools to point out spelling errors, highlight important text, mark sections for deletion and more. If you need to add a longer correction, you can even attach a sticky note to any position in the document. Besides annotation, there's a new form feature that lets you toggle radio buttons or select a text field and start typing in text. A new signature feature aso lets you add your signature and place it anywhere in a document. Your placement has to be good, because once you set the signature down on the page, you can't move it. Overall, Adobe Reader is an excellent tool for someone who doesn't need advanced features like Dropbox backup. If you only need to mark-up or add a quick signature to a PDF file, then you can't go wrong with Adobe's software. It's available for free from the iOS App Store.
Daily iPad App: National Geographic Today
National Geographic is known for its stunning photography and outstanding videos. Now you can get a portion of both each day with the National Geographic Today App. Released last week, the iPad app includes news, videos, quizzes, articles, and jaw-dropping photography. The National Geographic Today app serves up a fresh dose of material each day and lets you browse through seven days of back content. Like the other National Geographic apps, the format and content of the Today app looks fantastic on the first iPad and the iPad 2. Unfortunately, it does not take advantage of the retina display of the new iPad but, hopefully, this is just a temporary situation and a retina update will be available soon. You can download National Geographic Today from the iOS App Store for free.
Daily iPad App: Paper by FiftyThree may make you an artist
I am not an artist. I love art, but don't have the necessary skills (except for those I've picked up on my own) to really do anything that I'd want other people to see. When some of the early iPad drawing/painting apps started coming out, I eagerly bought them to try, but found that my lack of talent was just transferred to a new medium. A new iPad app, Paper by FiftyThree (Free, in-app tool purchases available) may actually help me to become a half-decent artist. After you've downloaded Paper, you have a one tool available - Draw. Draw is an expressive ink pen that responds much like the steel-nibbed pens we used in art class in 7th grade, except there's no way to drip ink on yourself or the page. All of the other art tools -- Color, Sketch, Write, and Outline -- are available through in-app purchase for US$1.99 each or as a combined "Essentials" purchase for $7.99. Launching Paper, you see three Moleskine-like notebooks on the screen. To open one for viewing, you tap on it, and you're immediately rewarded with a two-page view of the notebook. To zoom in on a set of pages, make another tap; to get back to the notebook view, you pinch two fingers together. New notebooks can be added from the main screen of the app by tapping a "+" button, or erased with the tap of a trash can button. You can name each notebook, and give it a cover photo or texture. Once you're in a page view in a notebook, you can begin to draw or paint. I immediately purchased the Color (water painting) and Sketch (pencil drawing) tools; I frankly wish I had just spent the full $7.99 and bought the Essentials. When drawing or painting, you can either use the eraser tool or a "rewind" function to get rid of mistakes. Rewind uses an swipe and rotate gesture to "turn back the clock" on your misdeeds. The tools are all available from a tool tray that slides up with a swipe and can be put away with another swipe. I found myself grabbing a tool and color, then dropping the tray out of sight so I could concentrate on my work. For each tool, you have a limited palette of nine colors. Unfortunately, you can't change that palette. The Fifty-Three team says that they want people to concentrate on creating, not getting picky about colors. While this works well with some tools, like Color, which let you blend transparent colors, it's kind of annoying with the pen and pencil tools. You can layer different colors, of course, so I'm not sure that alternative palettes are a definite need -- instead, Paper users just need to understand how to layer colors properly. A quick look at the comments on the FiftyThree support forums shows that many people are asking for alternative palettes. I've dabbled in watercolors in the past, and I found the Color tool to be the closest thing yet to a watercolor set for the iPad. The tool works just like a watercolor brush, letting you build up color by laying on more "paint," blend colors, even use the white paint like a gouache. I didn't try the Write and Outline tools, but they are essentially fine and broad point markers for marking up your paper. The Sketch tool is also the best pencil-drawing tool I've found for the iPad. Using my Adonit Writer Pro stylus with Paper, I felt like I was really drawing on a piece of paper. Speaking of the paper, your "canvas" is 2048 x 1536 pixels, so it takes advantage of the Retina display. Images that you create can be shared through Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter or by sending an email. When you share an image, it's exported as a JPEG at 1024 x 768 pixels. I found a good way to get full-resolution images -- I just do an iPad screenshot, and then the image shows up in my Photo Stream in full resolution. How good is Paper? Let's just say that every other "art app" that I purchased in the past has been taken off of my iPad. I love the concept and execution of this app, and it's going to be my sketch and watercolor pad from now on. Paper makes me wish that I hadn't spent a lot of money a few years ago putting together a portable watercolor kit...
Daily iPad App: Pholium
The iPad's journey to becoming more of a content-producing and creative tool took another step forward recently with the release of a new app called Pholium (US$9.99). The app is centered around the creation, viewing, and sharing of iPad photo ebooks. All of the creation of the photo ebooks is done on the iPad. Whether you're taking images from a camera through the Apple Camera Connection Kit or using photos you took with the iPad's camera, all of your camera roll images are available in the Pholium Gallery. The Gallery lets you bring in Photo Stream images as well, and you can store the pictures that you want to use in your ebook. Once you have a collection of photos to place in your ebook, you move to the Studio -- a place in the app where images are placed into the book for viewing, arranged or rotated, and text is added. One issue I had with the app is that text can only be added to certain special pages -- when producing photo books with iPhoto, I like to put some captions on images and occasionally write a paragraph or two describing a place shown in the pictures. At least with the 1.0 version of Pholium, you can't do that. %Gallery-152510% Pholium optimizes photos to look their best in the books, and you can only had cup to 42 images per book. With a 2-page spread, you're limited to 4 images, or 1 image on a full 2-page spread. Pages can be added or removed easily, so it's easy to make your book a bit larger. I felt that the 42 image limit was quite limiting, and I'm hoping that the next version of the app will increase or eliminate the limit. Once you're done creating a book, you can store it in the Pholium Library, and also share the book through the Pholium website with up to 10 recipients. After the first 10 recipients, you need to purchase a new "Pholda" that provides another 10 readers with the ability to see your ebook. Reading the ebooks is a treat -- the app uses an animation that's familiar to iBook readers to emulate the turning of pages. One gripe I had was that the faux "fold" between the left and right pages was too darkly shadowed and really distracting when looking at images that went across both pages. If your recipients don't have Pholium -- which is likely to be the case -- they're sent a low resolution PDF of the images in the books. I preferred the look of the images in the book, where they could be rotated during my production of the book, then tapped by readers for viewing in a larger, non-rotated image. One cool feature was the ability for readers to tap a single button to see a slideshow of all of the images in the book. However, the timing of the appearance of the images and the transitions between images could not be adjusted. Pholium is a pretty powerful and very useful photo ebook tool, but it could benefit from some additional work. I'd like to see the app get rid of the 42 image limitation, add the ability to send the formatted ebook to a print-on-demand service to create a "real" book (like those created with iPhoto), and the ability to add captions and text boxes to every page in the book. Still, if you want to create and share your own picture ebooks with friends or relatives, Pholium is a really easy way to publish without a lot of hassle.
Daily iPad App: CameraSim lets you hone your DSLR photo-taking skills
If you're new to DSLR photography or just looking to brush up on your skills then you should take a look at CameraSim for the iPad. The app is a camera simulation that lets you focus on a subject and change common camera settings like shutter speed and aperture to see how each one influences the final picture. CameraSim launches with a clean UI that has sliders for eight camera settings. In the center of the screen is a sample subject of a girl with a pinwheel at a playground. You can tweak the settings like the lighting, ISO, focal length and more. When you are done, you just press the "snap photo" button to take the picture. The iPad app will then show your resulting shot and offer encouragement if the photo was good or provide suggestions if the photo needs improvement. The app has a decent database of information that'll help you learn about each of these settings, not just change them wildly. CameraSim is an easy way for shutterbugs to practice their photo techniques without picking up their camera. It's also an excellent tool for future DSLR owners who want pick up some basic photography skills before they make that big purchase. The only drawback I found is the sample photo. There is only one sample and it gets boring fast. I would love to see more sample photos that present a variety of photo-taking situations like a portrait, a landscape shot and so on. It would also be great if you could use the camera to take your own snapshot and use that for practice. CameraSim for the iPad is available for US$1.99.
