Me and My Apple Toys by Ron McElfresh
Rick Munarriz in The Motley Fool figures Microsoft’s new Xbox One is a preemptive attack on Apple.
App Store integration naturally means playing games on your TV, and Xbox One naturally will have Apple beat on that front.
Personally, I don’t think Apple cares much about Microsoft or Xbox One. Apple already owns an order of magnitude more devices in the living room than Microsoft in iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
9to5 Mac sites unnamed sources who describe iOS as ‘black, white, and flat all over.’
Ive has not simply picked areas of the software design to tweak. He has essentially made his mark on every corner of the operating system, according to descriptions from sources, all while mostly keeping the essence of what has made iOS so ubiquitous.
Pure speculation. Black? And White? And flat? I don’t think so. Besides, iOS devices, relative to Android devices, are not exactly ubiquitous.
How to do you share files Mac to Mac? Or, Mac to iPhone or iPad? Or, iPhone or iPad to Windows PC? One of the easiest ways ever is the Flick app for Mac (and iPhone and iPad, Windows PCs, even Linux PCs). Flick means what you think it means. Simply flick a file from one device to another with your finger.
You won’t have to worry about connectivity issues, or figuring out where to put a file or photo or movie that you flick from one device to another. Flick takes care of all that by using WiFi and Bluetooth to connect to nearby devices. That means you can easily share files, documents, photos, images, music, videos with a finger flick from one device to another.
For files that go from Mac to iOS devices they can be opened using the Open in… another app feature.
Flick can also be used to move photos, videos, notes, and even contacts between iOS devices to to the Mac and Windows PCs. The iOS version of Flick also lets you take a photo and share it to other devices. Received photos are sent to the Camera Roll automatically.
The Mac App Store version of Flick is free, but the version for the iPhone and iPad will cost you a buck. There’s a built-in option to play Tic Tac Tow with other nearby Flick users. It’s interesting that the Mac version is free while there’s a price tag for the iPhone and iPad version. It’s in the numbers. More of the latter than the former.
Apple was roundly criticized when the new Apple Maps app debuted with a few problems. Daniel Eran Dilger points out that Google has a similar problem.
Nearly a year after Apple introduced its own Maps service in iOS 6 with Flyover 3D satellite views, Google is expanding its own online Maps to support similar 3D satellite imagery, with the same sorts of buckled roads and visual distortions Apple was castigated for last summer.
The visuals are rather damning and appear to be quite similar to the Apple Maps renderings from last year.
Maps is hard work, yes, but where’s the outrage that accompanied Apple’s Maps?
Tia Ghose, LiveScience on a vision test which can predict IQ:
The test asked users to spot the direction of motion on a series of black-and-white stripes on a screen. Sometimes, the lines formed inside a small central circle, and other times, they were large stripes that took up the entire screen. Participants also completed a short IQ test.
The team noticed that people with higher IQs were good at spotting motion in the small circles, but terrible at detecting motion in the larger black-and-white stripes.
How smart are zebras?
From Chris Gayomali in The Week comes news that we are not as good as we think we are.
Scientific American reports that a new study finds that “most of us think that we are better than we actually are — not just physically, but in every way.“
How so? Research.
Participants were shown a cluster of images of themselves. One was original. The rest were digitally doctored. Some made the participant less attractive, while others made them more attractive. When asked to select the unmodified original, subjects tended to gravitate to one of the computer-enhanced images that made them look better.
In other words, we think we look better than we actually look.
If the romance in your life is less than you feel you deserve, or less than you want, or the lack of romance is causing your weight gain, migraines, and daydreams, then I have just the Mac app for you.
Here’s how to take an ordinary, everyday, mostly boring photo and turn it into a romantic photo fully worthy of starting a burning fire in the heart. Or, it’s a good way to make use of lonely afternoon slaving over a hot keyboard and wondering about the life that might have been.
Before you decide to call it quits in the romantic department, add Romantic Photo to your Mac’s growing collection of photo enhancement apps. This one is aimed solely at turning a photo into a romantic photo with dozens of photo styles.
What can Romantic Photo do to an otherwise mundane snapshot?
See? Ordinary photo with a clearly romantic style attached just by clicking a preset.
How can you get those romantic styles onto a mundane photo? Presets.
Select the style you want to impose on your photo, adjust and tweak using the sidebar controls and sliders, and the finished photo suddenly has that romantic look. Yes, it’s that easy.
Romantic Photo comes with effect brushes, photo borders, 10 filters, and a clever color filter and soft focus option. It just doesn’t take much effort to take what seems like an ordinary and not so memorable photo and turn it into a romantic look worthy of sharing.
If there’s a negative it has more to do with the trial and error time when tweaking a photo with the sidebar tools. Stick with the presets and save time.
CEO Tim Cook in AllThingsD:
We’re investing $100 million to build a Mac product line here in the U.S. The product will be assembled in Texas, include components made in Illinois and Florida, and rely on equipment produced in Kentucky and Michigan.
Apple will not do the manufacturing itself.
From MarketWatch, 12 pages of ads to see 10 truly made-in-America cars.
Spoiler Alert! These are tied for #1 and #2:
Inspiration for a new app can come from many places, but useful utilities usually combine a few features that many of us use, but enclose them within a single app. Here’s a perfect example. What do you get when you mashup a paint and drawing app with a screen capture app? You get Paint + Snap, the app that lets you capture a screenshot and edit the image. Or, just edit an image with a modest 21st century version of MacPaint.
The combination of a paint and drawing app with the option to take a screenshot is actually useful.
Paint + Snap feels a bit like Microsoft’s MS Paint, which is likely to be familiar to some Mac users. It has drawing tools– brushes, bucket, shapes, text options– so you can edit almost any typical Mac image file.
Crop, resize, add elements or annotations.
Annotations?
That’s where the screenshot option comes in. Paint + Snap can capture the Mac’s screen as an image, and make it available for all the drawing and paint tools– from annotation to cropping and editing.
There’s little in Paint + Snap that’s remotely more valuable than the combination of drawing an image combined with annotating a screenshot or image. But it’s a good value at 99-cents.
BrandZ’s list of the ‘Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands in 2013.’
Spoiler Alert!
China Mobile is #10
The Yahoo! headline linking to the Daily Beast article about ‘How Hope and Change Gave Way to Spying on the Press.‘ My thoughts?
Fox News is in more danger of reporting truth and facts than being shut down by the government.
An interesting trend has developed in the photo enhancement category of Mac apps. Nearly any photo or color effect you can think of can be had by simply by collecting a number of inexpensive apps. Why bother with the expensive and learning curve of Photoshop, when Mac users have more than enough effects merely a click away?
Alright, true photo enhancement genius doesn’t come just because an app has presets, but it’s a good place to start. The latest addition to my growing collection is called ColorEffectStudio. For about the price of a cheap lunch you’ll get more than 120 presets to start, but by mixing and matching filters, you can create even more.
ColorEffectStudio requires a bit more effort than most of the inexpensive photo enhancement apps, but the results are worth it.
Plenty of photo filters are built in to ColorEffectStudio, including a great gradient map, over 100 vignettes, and a new way of mixing tints called MultiToning (think sepia, cyanotype, grisaille, aquatint, and others).
Antique photo styles are easy with the film grain feature, and ColorEffectStudio does brush stroke splashes of color effects anywhere on a photo.
Working with ColorEffectStudio is straightforward. The tools are in the left Sidebar, while the image is displayed on the right. The tools can be a bit complicated to master, though, and blending or mixing effects from a preset can be a tiresome effort in trial and error (yes, there are that many options). I still have yet to master the infrared feature.
Still, what’s impressive here is the number of options vs. the price tag. You get a lot of capability for a few dollars.
After Yahoo! announced the purchase of micro-blogger Tumblr, WordPress saw a spike in imports to WP from Tumblr. Matt Mullenweg’s blog:
The relationship between WordPress and Tumblr has always been pretty friendly: Tumblr’s own blog used to be on WP, WordPress.com supports Tumblr as a Publicize option alongside Twitter and Facebook, our Akismet team sends them daily emails of splogs on the service, and there’s healthy import and export traffic both ways. (Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.)
It will be even more interesting to see what Yahoo! does with Tumblr.
From Nigam Arora in Forbes (a name you can trust to say untrue things about Apple):
It appears that Samsung is getting ready to leave Apple Retina displays in the dust.
Samsung plans to show off a 13.3 inch display with a resolution of 3200 x 1800. This is in contrast to 2560 x 1600 resolution on a 13 inch Apple Retina MacBook Pro. Samsung resolution amounts to an astounding 276 pixels per inch compared to 227 pixels per inch for a comparable Retina display.
Samsung says the new displays will also use less power.
Following up on my review of EasyBatchPhoto last week a number of readers asked if there are less expensive options. There are. Let me start with free and the cleverly named Photo Batcher app. That’s the name. Photo Batcher.
It’s not as comprehensive a solution of EasyBatchPhoto, of course– you do get what you pay for– but if you’re on a budget and need watermarks, file format conversion, resizing, and effects added to a few hundred photos at a time, Photo Batcher is big bang for the buck.
Considering the price tag, Photo Batcher comes with plenty of basic image features in the floating controls.
Easy Batcher is likewise easy to use. Drag a photo, photos, or folders of photos to Easy Batcher. Then, customized the processing settings.
Add a watermark logo or text, process images from rescale to crop, or rotate to mirror, or add a few effects (blur, sepia tone, edges, etc.). The app converts image files from and to most popular Mac and Windows file formats, including JPG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, PSD, PDF, and PICT.
There’s even an option to add suffix or prefix to photo names so they can be easily sorted within a folder. This is a well done Mac app with just the right features to help you chew through hundreds of photos with ease. Again, it’s a big bargain at free.
Great story in The Atlantic by Alexis C. Madrigal about how Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini passed on an opportunity to provide CPUs for Apple’s iPhone. A few tidbits:
Intel generated more revenue during his eight-year tenure as CEO than it did during the rest of the company’s 45-year history.
And:
Under his watch since 2005, it created the world’s best chips for laptops, assumed a dominant position in the server market, vanquished long-time rival AMD, retained a vertically integrated business model that’s unique in the industry, and maintained profitability throughout the global economic meltdown.
And, Otellini himself on the iPhone:
The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do… At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.
The rest is history.
From one of my favorite photography sites, DPReview, and a list of apps that edit photos that are also not Photoshop.
None of these applications is a true one-to-one ‘replacement’ for Photoshop CS6, particularly if you’re a graphic designer or video professional. But for the rest of us – people that just want to retouch images, manipulate composition, adjust colors and saturation, apply canned filters and effects, and remove that kid who wandered into the foreground of an otherwise-perfect photo – they may prove to be very useful.
Spoiler Alert!
Adobe Photoshop Elements and Lightroom make the list, as does Apple’s Aperture. Oh, and Pixelmator.
What makes us want to try out an app on our Macs? Price? Need? Favorable reviews? Those factor into our choices of course, but for many it all begins with a colorful, professional looking app icon, a descriptive or memorable name for the app, and a good description of what the app actually does.
Take the Convertr app for Mac. The clever Tumblr, Flickr-like name makes it easy to say, easy to understand (although Video Convertr might be more appropriate). The app’s icon is among the best.
A nice looking icon does not a good and useful app make. Convertr is also attractive, simple to use, and fills a need not always addressed by apps that can play movie files. Converting videos to different file formats.
For that, Convertr makes it easy. Select a movie. Select a preset (to play the movie on a specific device). Click the convert button.
That’s it. Convertr converts video files from and to in .mov, .wmv, .mpeg, .avi, and many others, or, rather most of those that can be played in Apple’s QuickTime Player on the Mac.
In most cases, the conversions are handled faster than realtime and with little need to worry about settings. The presets cover most of the conversion options.
While Convertr doesn’t cost much more than cheap coffee and is easier to use than most converter apps, it really doesn’t do much more than QuickTime Movie Player can do, and it’s included free on every Mac. The difference is that QuickTime’s conversion settings can seem arcane to many users, and Convertr converts some of that complexity to simplicity.
Clara Moskowitz in LiveScience on the 5 Greatest Scientific Blunders that turned out to be genius.
Spoiler Alert:
You still have to read the article to find out about each blunder.