Doxie has filled a gap in the market with its new Flip, an oddball flatbed scanner that has a see-through bottom so you can flip it over and scan anything, even the wallpaper or carpet. It works a lot like a book-sized piece of electronic tracing paper.
The Lollipod is a portable trips that’s meant to come along with your where other tripod couldn’t, wouldn’t or shouldn’t. It’s an ultra lightweight camera stand that works with anything from an iPhone to a GoPro to a real camera.
Booq’s new Viper hardcases are tough, zip-up versions of the regular Viper sleeve, an already very protective case to carry your MacBook or iPad. The hardcase is sized to fit an iPad, an 11-inch MacBook Air or a 13-inch MacBook Air. MacBook Pro users can suck it – it’s not like you ever leave the house with your giant computers anyway.
Drawing apps on the iPad are pretty neat, but it always seemed to me that they cleaved to strongly to the limitations of the physical world. Why, for example, should your piece of virtual paper be limited in size and shape like a piece of paper paper? It shouldn’t. And that’s the premise of Sketchology, a vector app with an almost infinite canvas.
Everpix was euthanized yesterday, and is currently in read-only mode until the developers can figure out how to let users download their archives. Everpix, for those who don’t know, was an amazing service that slurped up all of your photos from your iPhone, your Flickr, your Instagram, your Gmail (!) and more, and put them all in one place. It removed duplicates, send you a daily mail showing you pictures from the same day in the past, and was generally the best solution to the problem of digital photo overload.
I’m working on a piece about alternatives (I have been using a few other services along with Everpix for the last few months), but until then I thought I’d remind you about Photojojo’s PhotoTimeCapsule, a semi-replacement for the Everpix Flashback.
I just found out that Aviiq’s sweet portable charging station comes in a mini version, and it’s made of felt. As someone who loves felted wool so much that I have both iPad bags and slippers in the magical material, I’m stoked about this tiny portable power package.
I’m an unashamed lover of Rickshaw bags, and the new Commuter 2.1 looks as good as any of the SF-based makers other bags. I actually tested the original Commuter way back in the mists of time and found it to be excellent but a little to bulky for me.
Now, though, my daily commute actually involves a bike ride across town instead of a two second lurch from bed to desk, and I do that ride on a Brompton with a front bag. And for this, the new Commuter looks to be ideal.
Using a laptop on your lap is a pretty bad idea. Not only does it get hot, it also forces you to hunch your back or neck, and if you have any kind of carpal-tunnel problems they’ll make themselves painfully obvious pretty quick.
The Curb only fixes one of these, but it does do a pretty good job.
We’ve seen a few dongles that let you track your devices from your iPhone using Bluetooth, and we’ve seen some that let you fire your iPhone’s shutter the same way. But the Wise Button does both. I wouldn’t call it wise, but I would call it useful.
Leather gloves are useful for many things: driving, punching, jewel thieving, murdering and doing sex. But one thing they weren’t good at until now was iPhone-ing. Mujjo has totally fixed that.
The Braven 650 is one of the best portable speaker I’ve tested. It’s small, tough, light and it sounds great. It even manages to include a remote play/pause function, although you have to be in on the secret[1]. And now Braven has come out with the 710, an update which adds a whole bunch of neat extras.
Wow. Nikon has finally announced its Df DSLR after a long teaser campaign, and it looks like a winner. It’s a full-frame DSLR with a bunch of retro-style knobs and dials all over its body.
Timshel (“Time Shell”) is a pretty great looking new service that sends you prints of your own photos once a month. You know those cool apps which mail you your old photos every once in a while? It’s like that, only with real photos.
I just moved to Germany, which means that I get a lot more weather than when I lived in Spain. There, a quick once-a-week check was plenty to know whether you should get the umbrella from the attic. In Germany, I check every time I want to leave the house.
And now there’s a great app which will will let you customize your own weather notifications, right there on your iPhone.
Imagine Dropbox. That was easy, right? Now imagine that instead of having all your files stored on some NSA-bait server somewhere on the internet, those files are instead stored on a hard drive of your own. And yet they’re still as readily accessible from all your devices via the internet.
That was, admittedly, a little trickier to imagine. But it was worth it, because our collective thinking has somehow magicked the new Transporter Sync into existence.
Do you like to enjoy the bounties of your own body while you’re on an audio-only Skype call? Who doesn’t, right? And so you’ve probably also “accidentally” enabled the camera and inadvertently revealed your shame at some point, too. What you need, my pervy, flashing friend, is the iShutter, a $15 strip of steel with a hole in it.
Editorially is a web-based text editor that I wish I used. It has a gorgeous interface, lots of great collaborative features, and now it even exports to Dropbox and WordPress, which would let me write pretty much anything I ever need to write in it.
Sadly, I have no need for collaboration, and I swore of writing anything but an email address in the browser years ago after losing work to crashes.
ISkin’s Gravity collection will gather up anything and everything that wanders into its orbit and trap it in its dorktastic embrace. The range consists of two cases, the best of which is the Agent 6 Sling, a utility pack that even an infantryman would find hard to make full use of.
It was pretty clear from the beginning that the iPad was going to be great for drawing. Writing in cursive on a capacitive screen is still an exercise in frustration, but for drawing and painting the iPad is a legitimate new medium, like oils, charcoal or gouache. It even brings something genuinely new to the game: light. Unlike all other painting methods (except perhaps matte painting for the movies), the iPad’s paintings actually glow.
There are many, many painting and drawing apps in the App Store, so here I’ll write about my favorites.
Procreate is the app I use when I paint on my iPad. When I went to a life-drawing class a couple months back in Berlin, I took my iPad mini and my finger along. After getting over the disappointment of a last-minute switch from a female model to an (admittedly hot) male model, and also convincing said model that I wasn’t pointing my iPad’s camera at him, I got some pretty good results.
Procreate distinguishes itself by being easy to use yet powerful. After a brief learning curve, where you discover some of the “hidden” controls (the layers panel was something of a dark art in earlier versions), it all but disappears. The brush size and opacity controls are persistent at the screen edge, and you can long-press to bring up a color picker. Pro tip for all painting apps that have this feature: Paint a few swatches of your colors into the corner and you can quickly sample them with a ling press. This is a lot like having a palette of paints when painting in oils.
Procreate also lets you import images from the camera roll or Dropbox, to use various pressure-sensitive styluses, and to record your paintings so you can play back the creation process step-by-step.
But what really makes it my go-to app is that it’s so easy to use. Head to the settings and you can see a section explaining all the gestures available. Undo/redo, clear layer, zoom; plus a whole lot of gestures to use when doing things like managing layers. This means that you never really have to stop painting and think about the interface. Kind of like a real canvas and paint.
Brushes was one of the first drawing apps for the iPhone, and then the iPad, and it’s still one of the best. Brushes first distinguished itself by great brush feel, and it still has that. The basics of the app are similar to any other painting app, but Brushes has, well, great brushes. The textures are excellent, and the responsiveness is top-notch, and it really is an app you can lose yourself in for hours, painting away and zooming onto the details over and over. I lost many hours to the app when I first loaded it onto an iPad, although these days I prefer Procreate, as the brushes are more plentiful and, well, now I’m just plain used to Procreate, which counts for a lot.
Still, Brushes remains the only app that, as far as I know, was used to paint a New Yorker magazine cover.
All of these painting apps are bitmap apps. That is, a 1000×1000-pixel canvas has 1,000,000 pixels. And if you zoom in past a 1:1 view, those pixels will get blocky or blurry.
If you use a vector app like Inkpad or iDraw, then your strokes are described in terms of length and direction. If you sketch a straight line that is 200 pixels long and 20 pixels wide and runs at 40 degrees from the horizontal, it can be described mathematically. And when you blow the picture up to the size of the building, those same lines and shapes can be mathematically expanded too, redrawn at the new size with no pixel artifacts. This also means that file sizes are usually much smaller, as they don’t need to record every pixel’s color.
My favorite of the two is Inkpad, and it’s also the only one of the pair that has been updated for iOS 7 (iDraw’s last update was way back in February 2013). Inkpad is from Taptrix, the folks behind seminal iPad painting app Brushes (more on that in a sec).
The best thing about Inkpad is that you don’t need to know anything about vectors to use it. Anyone who has had to learn Adobe Illustrator will know how frustrating vector apps can be. Inkpad on the other hand is as intuitive as a bitmap painting app. You can paint strokes onto the canvas, and then, because they’re vectors, you can grab the little Bezier handles and adjust the length, the shape and son on. Everything you’ll need is there, including text tools, layers, blend modes, and tools for arranging all the elements by depth.
You can also import photos (although clearly you can’t do any vector voodoo on them).
But the best part of Inkpad is like the best part of Procreate: ease of use. Somehow the app seems to just know when you want to select a whole shape with a tap, or to just drag one corner of a line over a few pixels. The toolbar can be dragged anywhere, and it runs like a flash (although not like Flash, thank God) even on an underpowered iPad mini, and you can even use the camera to grab quick snaps for reference purposes.
Here’s a radical idea: what about using a pen and paper to draw, and then somehow adding that to your iPad for editing? That’s the idea behind Inkflow. Or rather, that’s one small feature of Inkflow, a note-taking app for the iPad.
Inkflow is a drawing app in its own right, although it’s really aimed more at sketching and handwriting than at full-on painting. There are several brushes, plus colors, zoom and editing features, and even a text tool. But it’s the vector import which makes the app really special.
Draw your pictures or diagrams on paper, using color if you like, and then use the “Inkport” feature to import your sketch using the iPad’s camera. It is converted into Inkflow’s vector format on import, and you can then select and resize the picture as you like. You can’t edit and adjust the lines like you could in an actual vector app, but it’s a pretty great way to mix paper and pixels.
It’s also free, although you’ll have to pay to get brushes, colors and Inkport.
Tayasui Sketches is a minimal sketching app, although that doesn’t mean that it’s missing features. Rather, it offers the usual set of tools, only it does it in a very unobtrusive manner.
The tools are standard – pens, pencils, brushes – but in the same way that Penultimate offered the best iPad ink for a long time, so Sketches has a fantastic painting engine. The airbrush is especially good.
The IAP adds a color-picker tool (long press to bring up the loupe), more brushes and brush controls (wet vs. dry, different tip sizes). Whatever the paid status of your copy, you can export pictures by flicking them into an envelope (it’s pretty cute) and zoom/undo/redo/move with pinches and swipes.
Like many of these apps, Tayasui Sketches is free, and the extras come in the form if an in-app purchase. Many people moan about this, and I would prefer it if I didn’t have to restore my damn purchases every time I reinstall it, but IAPs are the modern equivalent of demo periods, so we should just quit our whining already.
So you have your iPad and your apps, and you even arranged a bowl of fruit/nude model (delete as applicable). But what about hardware? After all, only stupid babies fingerpaint, right?
If you’re doing a lot of iPad painting, you should pick some kind or drawing tool. But what kind? Styluses can be had as dumb pencils, as brushes or even in Bluetooth pressure-sensitive versions.
And then there are the other accessories that’ll make painting a little easier.
Wacom makes the best graphics tablets for Mac and PC and now it wants to do the same for the iPad. The Bamboo stylus is already my favorite iPad stylus, but the ICS, or Intuos Creative Stylus goes one better with pressure sensitivity.
The iPad’s screen is binary in terms of touches: It might detect multiple fingers, but they’re either touching or not. So the pen itself has to measure how hard you’re pressing and send that info to the iPad. In the case of the ICS, this is done via a low-power Bluetooth 4 connection, with the pen communicating 2048 levels of pressure. This wireless connection also means you can use the button on the side to control various functions: undo/redo for example, or to pop up a color picker.
The ICS uses a single AAA battery, has a replaceable nib, and comes in a natty box which carries extra batteries and nibs.
This, as they say, is the Rolls Royce of styluses.
Wacom
Price $100
You have your pens and pencil, but what about somewhere to keep them? A pencil case is traditional, and the Wacom comes with one. But Adonit’s Jot Tote case is made to hold your iPad and also let you clip on a stylus. And while it’s designed for Adonit’s own Jot, you can use it with pretty much any pen-shaped object.
The case is a rear shell with a grippy finish, and on the back is a steel strip which slides out of the side and grabs onto the pen, holding it both safe and handy until you need it. This might not be strictly necessary, but for serial pen-losers it’ll be sure to save you some cash.
Adonit
Price: $50
While a pen is nice and all, nothing quite beats the feel of a good hogs-hair brush when you’re smearing on the oils. When I first saw a Nomad capacitive brush years ago, I thought it was just a gimmick. Then I tried one, and I loved it. You can’t really scrub and stipple the paint of course – the iPad sees the brush as just another pink digit – but that doesn’t mean that the action of stippling, scrubbing or stabbing isn’t more pleasing to the brain. It really does feel like you’re painting on canvas. Well, not canvas, as canvas has a stretch and give that the glass screen lacks, but it is like painting on wood or card.
Now nomad has a range of brushes, but my advice would be to go for a set of whole brushes. The kits with the single handle and screw-on tip look good in theory, but these things take up so little space it’s nicer to have the convenience of quickly grabbing the brush you want without dicking around changing the tips.
Nomad
Price: From $20
One thing that was essential to me when I painted in oils was a palette. I went the traditional route with a thin plywood board in the familiar shape, which is easy to hold in one hand, but I know people who just mixed their paint on tabletops or any nearby flat surface (including one of my own paintings).
Remote Palette is an app which lets you use your iPhone as a palette to mix paints. You can swoosh your colors around until you have the exact hue you need and the color will be automatically loaded into your brush in the iPad app. It works via Bluetooth so you can use it anywhere.
The only downside is that you have to paint using the Remote Palette app on the iPad, which is pretty limited. It’s not MS Paint, but neither does it come anywhere close to something like Procreate. Still, it’s cheap and fun.
Remote Palette
Price: $1
The NeoLucida isn’t really an iPad accessory, but it can certainly be used as one. It’s a modern version of the camera lucida, an optical device used by artists throughout history (well, since the mid–1800s anyway) to make their drawings more accurate.
The principle is simple: the unit has a prism on the end of a flexible arm, and this lets you see both your paper and your subject at the same time. This allows you to “trace” the image from real life as if it were projected onto your paper.
And of course when I say “paper” I also mean “iPad.”
The NeoLucida was made by university art professors Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin because antique versions are too expensive for working artists and students to afford. Their Kickstarter was super successful, raising almost half a million on a target of just $15,000, and they’ll be back in 2014 with a retail version. Until then you might want to speak to your bank manager before hitting Ebay.
NeoLucida
Price: Around $40
Somehow, Adonit and Evernote have together managed to solve the biggest problem in iPad styluses: the size of the tip. Instead of a big fat pinkie-sized blob of rubber, the new Jot Script has a point that’s more or less the size of a regular rollerball ball.
And best of all, the latest version of Penultimate, Evernote’s note-taking app – has been developed in tandem with the pen to work like, well, to work like an Apple product.
I’ll be honest: I’m writing about Olympus’ new Stylus camera mostly based on its look. Because frankly, I usually hate superzoom cameras for the ugly non-compromises that they are. They want to give you everything, and usually they deliver nothing.
At first look, the new Olloclip 4-In–1 isn’t something you’d buy if you already own the original. After all, it only has an extra macro lens to add to the existing macro lens, the fisheye and the wideangle.
But if you’re the kind of person who already bought an Olloclip, you clearly value the iPhone as more than a snapshot camera. And the optical improvements to the Olloclip might just tempt you to upgrade.
IPhoto 2.0 for iOS has two amazing new features that no other photo editing has, nor will have for the foreseeable future: It can write its edits directly back to the iOS Camera Roll, and it can delete photos from the Camera Roll. This pretty much means you can now do all your photo organizing right from the app.
Federico Viticci, the sleepy-eyed sexpot founder of Mac Stories, made this discovery by the unusual means of actually reading the release notes of the app. And thank God he did, because it makes iPhoto around a zillion times more useful.
I wonder just what effect the new iPad Air will have on keyboard covers? The iPads one to four were all big enough that you could pretty much squeeze a full-sized keyboard into a matching cover, but all the keyboard cases I have so far tried for the iPad mini have been unusable, like a netbook keyboard.
Belkin’s new keyboards for the iPad Air hope that physics will continue to favor the former situation.