There’s one feature in Adobe’s new Photoshop Elements 12 which demonstrates exactly the market that the app is aimed at: Pet Eye Correction. That’s right: if you’re the kind of person who takes flash photos of their pets with a shitty compact camera, and yet is willing to spend around $100 on an application which will help organize and edit your photos, then Elements 12 is for you.
Maybe I’m a big dummy, but I always thought that the whole point of “read later” apps was that you could shunt long-form articles off the desktop and onto a device that was better suited for reading for extended periods. After all, on the desktop a combination of bookmarks and Safari’s Reader view takes care of things.
But what do I know? Clearly there’s a place for reader apps on the Mac, and the $10 Words looks to be a very nice example.
I thought that iOS 7 was ready to go on the iPad, but today I’m actually trying to do some work, and my cloud of optimism has been quickly dispelled. It’s a combination of OS-level bugginess and apps which have been too-hastily updated, and it’s causing all sorts of trouble.
The biggest problem? Using an external Bluetooth keyboard. So it’s pretty ironic that this post is about the excellent new keyboard shortcuts in iOS 7. Especially in Safari.
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The Tao of Mac blog points us to three great new shortcuts, lifted straight from OS X:
Cmd+L to move the focus to the location bar
Cmd+T to open a new tab
Cmd+W to close a tab
This is surprisingly useful, although I’m ungrateful enough to wonder why there’s no way to navigate between tabs. I’ve rattled away at my Logitech K811 and no combo of arrow key or square brackets and modifiers seems to work.
Another great side-effect of that Cmd+L shortcut is that you can now trigger an in-page search from the keyboard: just hit Cmd+L and type your query. At the bottom of the list that pops up are the in-page results, and because you’re using an external keyboard, there’s no on-screen keyboard to get in the way.
Also, double-tapping the Logitech’s home button takes you into the app-switcher view, and in iOS 7 that means that the previous app’s screen thumbnail pops into view. Combine this with the fact that any keystrokes are passed to the current app (even though you can’t see it), and you can now copy-type from one app to the next. Very nice indeed. Sadly, you need to reach up and tap the screen to actually switch to the app.
Source: Tao Of Mac
It’s a bittersweet irony that while The Lady looks as stunning in photographs as she does in real life, in fully 80% of those photographs she has her eyes closed, or half closed. That’s right – she’s a blinker.
Usually I get around this by snapping way more photos that I actually need, but inevitably the one picture that has her opened-eyed and not making some weird expression is the same photo that has captured somebody else mid-blink.
And that’s whre Perfect Shot comes in.
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Perfect Shot is a new iOS 7-only app (universal) which has smile and blink detection. You toggle either one or both of these and then point the camera at your group. The app looks for their eyes (using face-recognition) and watches everyone. The moment they are all bright-eyed and (optionally) smiling, the shutter fires.
It’s a little disconcerting as the app just takes the picture without you even tapping the shutter button to activate it. There’s also no shutter sound, so you have to rely on animations to let you know the picture has been taken – a real problem if you’re also in the shot and the iPhone/iPas is sitting unmanned.
The app is somewhat obviated by the burst mode in the new iPhone 5S, but as almost nobody actually has a 5S yet then this is still pretty useful. Available now.
Source: Perfect Shot
Thanks: John!
Just like the filters in the iOS 7 camera app, the super slo-mo mode in the iPhone 5S is somewhat confusing when it comes to exporting your work. In fact, it’s almost impossible to get your slowed down masterpieces out of the iPhone and onto sharing services without some rather janky workarounds. But thanks to Macworld’s Serenity Caldwell, we now at least know about these tricks.
There were so many app updates tumbling out into the new iOS7 app store on Wednesday that we didn’t have time to cover them all, but the update to the iOS Kindle app is definitely worth a look. I do most of my reading on an actual Kindle device, but I love the fact that I can pick up on any device thanks to Whispersync. And now the iOS Kindle experience is way less ugly than before.
The new Google Translate is ready for the iPhone and iPad, and it’s a fantastic update. While other apps are better at giving you context and points of grammar, Google’s app is hard to beat for fast translations of single words or phrases.
And now it adds a third way to input words: handwriting.
Triggertrap Mobile has just released v2 of its camera-controlling software, allowing you to hook it up to any of 300 camera models by wire, and fire the shutter remotely.
Of course, that’s not all it does: Triggertrap can use any and every sensor in your iPhone to trigger the camera, along with timers.
Kids: Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re here to stay (unless they stop being born in some kind of Children of Men nightmare world). And one of the things we love and hate most about kids is that they are drawn to our iDevices like a hooker is drawn to dangerous situations.
Now, these monsters get their own section in the app store, which means that you should probably consider visiting the Restrictions section in your iPhone’s settings and switching off the store.
One of the things that makes typing long-form text on the iPad bearable is TextExpander Touch, the iOS version of Smile Software’s amazing snippet-substitution app for the Mac. Sadly, iOS7 has broken the clever hack Smile was using to let it share its snippets with any app on your iDevice.
But happily, there’ a new hack, and it just requires third-party developers to make some tweaks to their own apps.
With iOS7, Apple has upped the cap for app downloads over cellular to 100MB, meaning that if you carelessly hit “update all” for your apps when you’re out of the house, and you have a bunch of game updates pending for your iPhone, then you could potentially burn through your entire month’s bandwidth allowance in one go.
Simplenote was one of the first iOS note-taking apps that could sync with apps on the Mac or the web. And despite tweaks and added complexity over the years, it really didn’t change.
Unfortunately, what passed for simple and minimal five years ago looks like a Linux spreadsheet app today, and this – along with some weird bugs – ended with me removing Simplenote from my iOS devices.
But now Simplenote is back. It’s simpler, it’s fast, and it also comes on the Mac.
iOS 7 is out, and all of your favorite apps are being updated with new designs and features. We’ve been posting about big updates as they come out, but it’s impossible to keep up with everything.
We’ve collected big app updates for iOS 7 worth mentioning in a handy roundup. Take a look at how some of your favorite apps have changed:
Evernote has updated its essential mobile app for iOS 7, adding a completely redesigned home screen that puts everything in front of you, right away, including all your notes, notebooks, tags, shortcuts and announcements. Of course, that’s not all, as the developer says on its blog:
The new iOS 7 is exactly the sort of thing that makes being an app developer so thrilling. We’ve spent months getting to know every minute detail, design and interaction of the new operating system. The experience has been eye-opening, inspiring and freeing. IOS 7 is so new that it allowed us to let go, restart and build in a way that we haven’t been able to do in years. The result: a completely, unbelievably, unexpectedly new Evernote.
Before making iOS 7 available to the public, Apple is updating some of its apps with the new iOS 7 look and feel. The Apple Store app and AirPort Utility just got new icons this morning, along with iOS 7 optimization and a refined user interface. As far as new features go, there aren’t any that we’ve spotted yet, and nothing in the release notes indicate these are anything more than a fresh coat of paint.
Source: iTunes
Ready for another weather app for your iPhone? Me too! I love WeatherPro on the iPad, but the iPhone version (despite today’s new iOS7 update) is almost impossible to read on the smaller screen. So I’m excited for Perfect Weather, which promises to make all the info I need available in a neat card view. Or rather, I would be excited if it was available outside the U.S.
iOS7 has a ton of tiny touches that make life easier (like automatically zooming pixel-doubled iPhone apps on the iPad, and using the retina iPhone assets even on the iPad mini), but it looks like users of older versions of iOS aren’t being left out. Or maybe Apple really, really wants developers to go iOS7-only.
iOS 7 is launching on Wednesday September 18th, and with it will come a whole slew of neat (and sometimes eye-searing) features. But what will there be for us poor bloggers and developers who have (maybe) been running the beta for so long now it doesn’t even seem new anymore? The answer is app updates. Lovely updates to some of our favorite apps to make them play nice with the new, clean OS. And the one of these will be Instapaper.
Photogene has long been one of the top photo-editing apps on iOS, beating out Photoshop Touch in so many ways it’s not funny (not funny for Adobe anyway – it’s still pretty funny for me, and I laugh about it every time I use something by Adobe and am forced to wonder if they hired chimps to write their installers).
Anyhow, now Photogene 4 is out, and it’s a big update. To begin with, it’s now universal (previously there were separate apps for iPhone and iPad), and it works with full-res RAW images.
Is there any end to the awesomeness of Drafts? The write-once-send-anywhere app for iOS has added a great new sharing feature for those using iOS 7, without developer Greg Pierce having to do anything. If you use AirDrop, you can send a chunk of text to anyone else with an AirDrop-capable device, even if they don’t have Drafts.
Another week has sped by and we’ve had a ton of great offers that have made their way onto the Cult of Mac Deals page. Before we head into another week, we’re going to shine a spotlight on two of the offers that you may have missed.
Readdle’s new iOS calendaring app, Calendars 5, launched yesterday, and after a day of use I can confidently state that I can find nothing wrong with it. In fact, I like it a whole lot. Why? Because it combines your calendars and reminders in one iOS7-style app, and folds in Fantastical-style natural-language entry.
It’s pretty great.
If you never downloaded the free Snapseed app for OS X before Google axed it, then you have a second chance – as long as you;re using Google’s Chrome browser anyway. Google+ added a browser-based version of Snapseed to its flailing social network.
Basil, still hands-down my favorite recipe app for the iPad, is going 2.0 just in time for iOS 7. And man, if you thought the original was clean, slick and easy to use, then you’re going to be blown away by v2.0, which developer Kyle Baxter tells me is “basically an entire new app.”
Blur is a universal iOS app which does one thing: blurs your pictures for use as wallpapers. But it’s single-function design doesn’t mean that it can only be used for one thing.