tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89015593138249888822024-03-05T19:28:31.617+11:00ReviewMeFor all things digital and non-digitalOZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.comBlogger262125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-68420838816737356602018-02-15T17:05:00.001+11:002018-02-15T17:05:56.146+11:00What are your alternatives if you can't use a HomePodThe Apple HomePod is an expensive and a very high end solution for those that can afford or require that level of interactions. However not everyone is happy or needs the HomePod, so what are the alternatives? The alternatives in simple terms are Alexa and Google Home. In terms of Wireless Speakers, there are offerings from Sonos, Bose and then starts to slip downwards to budget options with Philips, Sony, UE amongst several others.<a name='more'></a><br />
If you think you are an audiophile and require the best and have the budget to support that, then I would reccommend that you can stop reading this any further, you already have your option quite explicitly laid out.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Connectivity</h2>The Homepod connects to only Apple devices, Mac Sierra or iOS 11.2.5 and later. If you have any other device you are out of luck. However, rewind a couple of years, I had a wonderful wireless music system setup with my existing Home Hi-Fi system. It had an iPaq that connected to the internet and played an internet stream using the Windows Mobile Media Player, the headphone out of this device was connected to the Hi-Fi system and acted as the AUX input - Instant Wireless Streaming system. If you have an older iPod Touch or iPhone, you can simply use that.<br />
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There are times when you do not want the music playing in the middle of the house and the phone speakers are only as good as they are. In such scenarios there are options like the UE range of speakers that connect via BT and they can also work in chain mode (with upto 2). I have a much simpler and cheaper option that works quite well with the Plox Siren. These are amazing little speakers that somehow are not very well known or popular. They are an Australian product that I beleive originated in Melbourne) the novelty is the way you switch the speakers on and off. They are simple to operate and are the best companion for bathroom audio - I believe they are not waterproof, so think twice before you take them into the shower. There are other Waterproof options like the UE.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhenefarOWDfC0SnPgcidPguRPztAaNij7MqaGdXHVuBJ27OyHJtppCGc81XXqjUVQokHGz4rKCTpjbYOdfZszD3P-klxkqCllheiguILtjqhHq6XYf8Lu2IvGoRv1CVHZYavLRFzqZ2i0/s1600/PloxSirens.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhenefarOWDfC0SnPgcidPguRPztAaNij7MqaGdXHVuBJ27OyHJtppCGc81XXqjUVQokHGz4rKCTpjbYOdfZszD3P-klxkqCllheiguILtjqhHq6XYf8Lu2IvGoRv1CVHZYavLRFzqZ2i0/s400/PloxSirens.jpg" width="400" height="188" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="752" /></a></div>These little beauties are/were available for around $40 (AUD) and if you search a Harvey Norman bargain bin, you could even find these for around $10. <br />
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<h2 align="left">Manageability</h2>The new speakers with Alexa, Google or Siri are voice controlled, they rely on specifics to work. Apple Siri works with Apple Music, however I had spend a lot of money to buy CD's and source my music that I find it quite criminal to buy a subscription to the music I already own or that I cannot play the music that I own that cannot be sourced from Apple Music. So I prefer using other options, one of which is WinAmp and/or VLC. These can be controlled via the standard Apple Keyboards and apps on the iOS devices. In addition to all of that many of the tracks might not benefit from voice commands either.<br />
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<h2 align="left">In summary</h2>I shall get an Alexa and Google Home for comparison in an upcoming review. Till then I can say that AUD $499 can get you the Bose QC35 II which you can use more often and it has the Google Voice Control built-in. These are noise cancelling and light, you can carry them everywhere. In the past I have had desktop speakers from Logitech but haven't used them for the simple reason that they needed to be either kept on all the time or plugin and switch on as required. The wireless speakers are an advantage as they are always on and do away with the hassle of connecting physically. I can change the source between my devices in under 5 seconds. The HomePod software is a bit buggy and loses connection or does not display - that's for another review. It would have been nice to be able to plug in (aux input) but it seems that Apple has really cut the 3.5 Headphone Jack connector and also the USB connector. <br />
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A walled garden shall definitely keep visitors out, which might not be such a good idea in this case of HomePods, this shall therefore provide an opportunity to other manufacturers to step in and claim the segments left out. At this time, there is no speaker that can match the Apple HomePod 1 to 1 in quality, however if all you need is an extension of your music in the garden or on the patio, then the HomePod might not be the ideal solution (as yet) However 5 of the Cheaper $50-$100 Bluetooth speakers might work much better.OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-68601865075893970052018-02-10T21:40:00.000+11:002018-02-10T21:40:12.936+11:00HomePod - Love and Hate it<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4pvzPFfvICTixmW0g8gnFx2B9noNupfAiyGZdEi9qCcEOhGzpNTfCmGK60cYCS9hLlqwpXWHL7sONhueUkdglW36h3GmYKVpmDXEvPfAahip3P-AVKuao_M-Cxu6nGnWsR0deGGEaLmw/s1600/homepod.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4pvzPFfvICTixmW0g8gnFx2B9noNupfAiyGZdEi9qCcEOhGzpNTfCmGK60cYCS9hLlqwpXWHL7sONhueUkdglW36h3GmYKVpmDXEvPfAahip3P-AVKuao_M-Cxu6nGnWsR0deGGEaLmw/s400/homepod.jpg" width="298" height="400" data-original-width="1193" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br />
Apple released the HomePod and here's a first look and review. It is an expensive and an equally heavy device with an amazing sound. Let's look at it in detail.<a name='more'></a><br />
<h2 align="left">What is it?</h2>The HomePod is the latest audio offering from Apple. In a very short and simple way, it is the Apple's expensive version of Google Home or Amazon's Alexa. Unlike the looks of an Air Freshner (Google Home), the Pringles can (Alexa), the HomePod looks like the smaller meshed version of the thrash can (Mac Pro) and weighs a solid 2.5 kilos so accidentally knocking it over would hardly be an issue.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Unboxing the HomePod</h2>The HomePod speaker has a rather long cable that connects to the mains. It would have been nice if the HomePod worked on a battery but given the power requirements to run the HomePod, it might be a bit difficult. The cable is quite long, about a meter long. This allows you to place the HomePod conveniently and accessible.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Setting up</h2>A HomePod is an Apple device and it requires you to have Apple devices to be able to do anything with a HomePod. Setting it up requires you to have an iOS Device running iOS 11.2.5. My phone is yet not upgraded to iOS 11, so it is practically useless in either setting up or using as a speaker. Luckily I could set it up on the iPad that was running the required version. The popup card to setup devices is the new UI feature from Apple similar to how the Airpods show up on the phones. Apple is now quite keen on setting up devices and settings by bringing a device in close proximity. Like the network settings in iOS 11. On setting up, the iCloud and iTunes settings are transferred over to the HomePod. At the end of the setup, Siri does a quick tutorial with a couple of things that you could do or rather ask Siri to do. The HomePod is named as per the location you choose while setting it up.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Using the HomePod</h2>The specs on the Apple HomePod mention that it has Bluetooth 5.0 but it does not show up in the search for Bluetooth devices. So that eliminates most of the devices that are Non Apple. Since it is connected via the iCloud account, it will work only on your devices that are connected to the same iCloud account. <br />
On the iMac (running Mac Sierra 10.12) simply change the sound source to the HomePod and now the HomePod acts like the wireless speaker.<br />
Simply say "Hey Siri, play me some music" and Siri tunes into beats1 and starts playing the music.<br />
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Managing the volume is as simple as tapping on the + or the - button to increase or decrease the volume, or simply ask Siri to manage the same by asking it to increase the volume or reduce the volume. Tap the HomePod in the middle and it switches it on or off.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Resetting the HomePod</h2>If you have to setup the HomePod with another account or sell your device, return it or anything that might want you to remove your settings, it does not seem very simple or direct. However it is. Pull the plug, and while you plug it in again, keep the button in the middle pressed and don't let go. The while spinning circle turns red and Siri informs you to keep it pressed to reset your HomePod. Once it resets, you have to unplug it again and plug it back in. This is a little inconvenient and tiresome. Half the times the iPhone did not bring up the HomePod setup till I realised that you have to switch it off and then start it up again and authenticate yourself, only then it shows the popup. Plus you have to have the device in close proximity of the HomePod. Otherwise it drops out and you have to start again.<br />
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Trying to set it up with an iPhone 6S with iOS 11.2.5 it worked intermittently and it also failed the setup. It failed on the iPad too, it came close to the point where I was going to pack it up and take it back to the Apple Store.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Connectivity</h2>So far, as of today 10th February 2018, the HomePod can don only what is mentioned above. It is locked into the Apple Ecosystem does not connect to other device via Bluetooth and definitely not via iCloud. While the introductory video for HomePod mentioned connecting multiple HomePods to function as a single unit, or use two HomePods for Stereo using one for the Left channel and one for the Right, both of these functionalities are still not available. All of that hinges on the next gen of Airplay called Airplay2 (WWDC17 Session 509), which is still not released in production. However some users have tried using the beta versions to connect and use the HomePod as required but haven't heard success stories so far.<br />
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If you are looking to connect the HomePod with the Apple TV, there are chances that unless you have the latest (4th Gen 4K Apple TV) you are out of luck, which kind of sucks that the new Apple TV released in 2015/16 which is what works for me as I don't want to move to a newer 4K TV as yet, my 65" HD TV is good enough given the lack of High Quality streams and Internet speeds. Once the NBN reaches everyone and all streams like NetFlix, etc are avaialble commonly in 4K, it might be worth the upgrade.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Some other observations</h2>There are some interesting things that you can do with the HomePod, like use it as a conference machine instead of the Polycom devices in most offices. Make a call on the phone (running iOS 11.2.5 or higher) and then from the list of sources, select the HomePod and that will push the call on the HomePod. It has superior mic and speaker array to act as an excellent conferencing device.<br />
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Another thing you can do with it is set up alarms (which is not anything new) but helpful in comparison to the alarms on the device.<br />
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You can also control/set it up with the Home App where it shows up as a HomeKit device<br />
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The HomePod is quite sensitive, whisper "Hey Siri" and say nothing, it lights up and responds with "Hmm hmm" which is quite creepy in the night.<br />
When you are playing music which is quite loud, the HomePod can still hear your say Hey Siri, which is quite amazing, it kind of cancels the speaker sound and monitors what you are saying.<br />
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The only negative is it does not recognize the different voices and anyone can say Hey Siri to get it to respond. So if your family or colleagues try to prank you, you are at the mercy of Siri listening to everyone trying to ask it to do something. I was subjected to such a prank and all I had to do was keep tapping the middle button to cancel Siri. You can turn the Spoken Hey Siri entirely, but then it is not as much fun.<br />
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<h2 align="left">In Summary</h2>The HomePod is definitely like any Apple Device - Expensive and Amazing. However it would have been much better if it could be setup without using an iOS device and if it came with a free music subscription - after all Apple can afford to help push the sales of the HomePod. Like it did with the iWork suite which used to be a paid option and now is part of the free suite on the Mac and iOS.<br />
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I feel a bit uncomfortable with the HomePod connected to my account and Siri listening continuously.<br />
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Most of all, I would love to use it as a conferencing or talking to family together than on speaker phone. The problem with that is I don't have iOS 11.2.5 on my main phone so I cannot transfer from another phone or use other phones to transfer the call to the HomePod. It is a wonderful and amazing product but it just feels limited as soon as you start using it. Plus it's the first cut, so in 3-6 months there could be another hardware upgrade where this first generation HomePod would be outdated.<br />
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So like the new iMac Pro, a proper setup for using HomePod might cost in the range of $3000-3500<br />
$ 499 x 2 - HomePod = 998<br />
$ 279 x 1 - Apple TV (4K) = 279<br />
$2000 x 1 - Sony 70" 4K TV = 2000<br />
So that is an approximate total of 3,277<br />
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So there we are, any new Apple hardware is not cheap, but it is definitely an amazing product.OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-26046150204451994012017-02-07T23:57:00.000+11:002017-02-07T23:57:31.379+11:00Can the iPad be used like a digital paper? - Let's try Linea<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://is2.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Purple111/v4/57/fe/fb/57fefba9-18b4-61eb-8deb-594c725d3fd8/source/175x175bb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://is2.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Purple111/v4/57/fe/fb/57fefba9-18b4-61eb-8deb-594c725d3fd8/source/175x175bb.jpg" width="320" height="320" /></a></div>Apple released the iPad Pro and the Pencil, it was such an amazing progress from Apple. Though initially positioned at the Artists, the iPad Pro and the pencil was not something that the average Joe would require. I was a user of Bamboo One, the little digitizer and it worked fine with my Mac (iMac, MBP) but it was missing something, it was a grey square and you had to look at the screen while moving the pen on the surface. This seemed a little unnatural, specially since I love writing or drawing on paper; I just love ink pens. I was wanting to invest in a Wacom Cintiq or an alternative device. The iPad seemed like an alluring device specially since my iPad 2 was slowing down and was non-retina. I bit the bullet and got myself an iPad Pro with the pencil (that's another story that Apple had a pencil shortage at that time, it was difficult to get an pencil). <br />
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All good with the shiny big iPad pro and the pencil. But what do you do with it? What software do you use? Apple Notes had some amazing stuff built into it, but that was that. Other software did not do much for note-taking. You can look back at some other software we have reviewed earlier for Drawing/Painting and for image manipulation like Photoshop, we also reviewed a vector drawing app. However there was no app for note-taking or general visual thinking. The one that has resonated with me was Bamboo Paper, I loved it over all other apps as it had some lovely colors and tools. It was a visual pleasure but there were plenty of issues that made it difficult to work with it. The palm would accidentally touch the screen leaving a trail of dots and smears, if you were trying to draw details, i.e. closer pixels, the software thought that it was a long press and it would display the color palette to change color, which was quite frustrating at times.<a name='more'></a><br />
After a year of the iPad establishing itself, end of January 2017, I saw a tweet in my twitter feed of someone praising a new iPad app. It was worth a look and I saw it was an app by iConfactory and it was called Linea. It was yet another note taking app, however the features sounded quite interesting and my first impulse told me to buy it. So I purchased Linea and set upon a journey to use it, the bar was set quite high by Bamboo Paper App, it had some issues, but among the apps available, it was the best app.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9RY4nRe-WhTDN5Xvyc-9RII4NkRXWA6fnPyHACbrFcAbNW3-NjPrULRMwTzFwE25xCw586Araeq5t_X_x3D1GBwEk_D6X7_3AHcQviBDxOR55eQrqrbpq8IRLCvDyR6Tj5itYDQpiaiE/s1600/LineaDrawing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9RY4nRe-WhTDN5Xvyc-9RII4NkRXWA6fnPyHACbrFcAbNW3-NjPrULRMwTzFwE25xCw586Araeq5t_X_x3D1GBwEk_D6X7_3AHcQviBDxOR55eQrqrbpq8IRLCvDyR6Tj5itYDQpiaiE/s400/LineaDrawing.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></a></div><br />
<H2>Linea</H2>The Icon is orange, it reminded me of the Todo app Clear, however it is an icon that you cannot miss, it can be spotted even if you place the app in a group.<br />
On starting the app, you are presented with a Starter Project and a tab called My Sketches. It was a bit unclear, but this is the equivalent of a Notebook. Each group is a notebook and each notebook can have multiple pages. The lack of clarity was a problem because I added new pages to a notebook and at this moment, pages cannot be moved between notebooks.<br />
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Upon selecting a new page, you are greeted with a minimal interface that is easy to understand and nothing complicated. On the left is a palette of colors and on the right are two palettes, the bottom palette has 5 tools, a pencil, a crayon (which also looked like a pencil), a marker, a highlighter and an eraser. The palette on the top had 5 squares and two icons, which admittedly at first glance were a bit unclear. However, on tapping the icon, it was clear that the 5 boxes were layers, so you can have 5 layers of drawing (you can technically have more, but then you will have to merge them to make way for more as you can have only 5 at one time). The layers can be switched on or off, the opacity of the layers can be manipulated to an alpha between 0 to 100%. The other icon is to set a grid/template, this allows you to create a guideline for drawing, you can choose between grids, isometric, dots and the interesting thing is you can even choose icons and app screens along with Storyboards (for comics and/or movies). Then you also have the choice of paper, which can be normal paper, butcher's paper (slightly yellowish brown), black construction paper or a blueprint. If you do not want any paper, simply click on the eye icon to make it hidden. <br />
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The color palette is also an interesting bit as each color further has 6 more variations, 3 lighter and 3 darker, this is quite handy when trying to get a range of shades for a color. There are 14 slots of predefined colors and another 14 pastel/muted variations of the first 14 and also has 12 user defined colors.<br />
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<h2>So what's new?</h2>If you feel that the features so far are 'meh, so what?' then let me tell you about my experience using the app. I am not an artist and if I wanted to make some amazing art, then I would use procreate it has brushes and a lot of control. However, from a visual note-taking perspective, Linea is amazing, you can simply rotate the canvas (paper) without having to move the iPad, which you have to in most of the other apps. You can simple pinch to zoom in or out, rotate to angle the paper and draw with the pencil. If you have a pencil (this is the best part, and I am surprised that apple did not think about it, for those that are developers, this is so easy to implement in theory) you can draw with the pencil and if you touch the screen with your fingers, it acts as an eraser. There is nothing more natural to an artist or someone taking notes than using a finger as an eraser. It is so intuitive and in fact facilitates whatever you are working on. If your palm does touch the screen, it does not end up with accidental marks. It does a very good job of palm rejection. You can hide the palettes and have a distraction free canvas to work on by simply clicking the little arrow that toggles the palettes.<br />
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The tools are also quite interesting, they all have 3 thickness levels, fine, medium and thick. In addition it also has two modes, overwrite or blend. This is particularly useful in creating effects where the cross over strokes are darker (if of the same color) or blend to a new color. <br />
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The app has some amazing shortcuts like two finger tap for undo, three for redo. To really gauge the power of these single finder eraser, two finger undo and three finger redo, hold a pen or pencil in your hand the way you would, imaging you are writing something and now use your finger to erase, draw some more imaginary strokes and try to undo and redo. You will realize that your entire workflow is now in that single hand. Your middle finger (at least for me) works as the eraser while still holding the pencil. It is so natural to me that it does not disrupt my chain of thought, I tried to think if say there was an eraser at the back of the pencil, single handedly rotating the pencil to position it for the eraser and then rotating it back for writing, involved readjusting the pencil in hand, where as using the finger to erase simply meant angling the pencil of the surface.<br />
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It also recognizes the pressure sensitivity of the pencil but not the tilt. This was of lower importance to me as I required the marker for writing. Linea also allows for saving your work in PNG or JPG format. You can export the entire page or you can export portions of the screen. One thing that was of concern to me was where are the drawing saved apart from the device. I had my iPad stolen and all of the work that I had done in Bamboo Paper was lost. It had the functionality to save to DropBox as PDF or to it's own program called Inkspace but for some reason it was not and I lost it all with the device. This is my greatest concern. Omni Graffle and Pixelmator make use of the Cloud Drive and I am fine if Linea can use that.<br />
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<h2>Templates</h2>This is another good feature and perhaps the best feature for UI/UX designers, If you use a vector based tool like sketch, then you cannot move away from that perhaps you could try Omni Graffle if you were looking for alternatives or Adobe has a couple of options however, if you wanted to draw or sketch your interface like many do (including what I prefer) then you can simply change the template to App design and choose from phone screen 2 large or 8 small or app icon single, small matrix or medium matrix (for icon ideas). There is no reason why you would want to go to any other app. Given that the multi-tasking on iPads is still not evolved and has its moments, it is still quite useful to have quick information on the side. In one particular instance I required a calculator to calculate and jot down the numbers. The iPad has no in-built calculator, the best option is to open safari in the multi-tasking bar, and google provides a web based full fledged calculator. Nothing to do with the app Linea, but in case you ever need, this is a great tip for quick access to a calculator.<br />
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<h2>Issues</h2>Sometimes the canvas simply goes blank (which probably would mean a memory issue) and if you kill the app entirely and com back, you can continue working on your drawing, if you don't, you simply see a blank and not sure but I feel you might end up losing your image. This could also come to pass as I like working zoomed in greater than 500% for writing.<br />
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Lastly a wish list item is to be able to lasso an area and duplicate it or re-position it on the canvas. It would be nice to also have masks, but those can wait.<br />
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<H2>Summary</H2>This is an app that has me hooked on instantly, It makes me want to write, use the app more, draw on it, write on it, just doodle my thought. To add to that, this is an app that we did not even get a promo code for to review, nor did we have any financial transaction for reviews or anything. The app is so good that you cannot but praise it. It could be a a little bit expensive for the casual user, however if you have an iPad and an Pencil, then this is an investment you must make. If you want to get your kids to use paper or writing, this seems like a good option.<br />
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SUMMARY<br />
Software : Linea<br />
Version : 1.0.1<br />
Publisher : IconFactory<br />
Website : <a href="http://linea-app.com/">http://linea-app.com/</a><br />
Twitter : @linea_app<br />
Platform : iOS 10.x<br />
Price : $14.99 AUD ($9.99 USD)<br />
App Store : https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/linea-sketch-simply/id1094770251?mt=8<br />
OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-67329329004050663652017-02-03T17:13:00.001+11:002017-02-03T17:29:39.665+11:00Is it Sparkling or Flat? Review of Bamboo Spark<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUEKuvfbGuiWZUKR5CxcvQZgrWLycDJ0Dmf6lamdGnkoRTmfVIluYfgtaeFGAtsOun9vhgg5xhZ6_k_RWTXPg2WMZx5IWPZpvb11-EXi6aGVdun2m5Ft0WnMY6PDUyiLCJF6_mLg3tyfU/s1600/BambooSpark.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUEKuvfbGuiWZUKR5CxcvQZgrWLycDJ0Dmf6lamdGnkoRTmfVIluYfgtaeFGAtsOun9vhgg5xhZ6_k_RWTXPg2WMZx5IWPZpvb11-EXi6aGVdun2m5Ft0WnMY6PDUyiLCJF6_mLg3tyfU/s320/BambooSpark.jpg" width="320" height="240" /></a></div><br />
There is a strong possibility and a very high probability that you need to take notes in your day to day. It does not matter what field and what role you are in, the chances are that you need to jot down something. The converse is also true that practically each one of us carry a mobile phone, one capable of a lot more than a phone. It is a digital assistant with multi-faceted functionalities like a camera, phone, browser. Still for a very strange reason, very few use the smartphone for jotting notes. It just doesn't fit in the cognitive behavior pattern of note-taking. We call it a phone and we treat it as such. However, this review is about the Spark product from Bamboo. Which is a decent sized notepad with digital capabilities<a name='more'></a><br />
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The Bamboo Spark is a 25cmx20cm folio, which holds an A5 writing pad. Below this pad is the digitizer surface that works in conjunction to the digital pen. The on/of switch is quite smartly positioned at the bottom of the pad and the micro-USB charging slot on the top. The Switch at first seemed like a plastic port protector waiting to be pulled off.<br />
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The pen is slightly weighted at the top and tends to tilt over if you are habituated to rocking a pen between your fingers. The pen has a quite rugged feel and works quite fine. It comes with spare refills but I could not figure out how to open and replace the same or even batteries. The pen has to function on batteries of some kind would be the normal reaction, however it does not require batteries in the pen. The magic is via Electro-magnetic resonance. The kit that comes with the device includes a metallic ring, which is I believe the nib removal tool.<br />
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After being used to Apple products, the Microsoft Marketing options seemed in-excessive, similarly the Bamboo Spark comes in a couple of configurations which at first seems in-excessive. There are three offerings, namely<br />
<br />
* Bamboo Spark with Gadget Pocket<br />
* Bamboo Spark with Tablet sleeve<br />
* Bamboo Spark with snap-fit<br />
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Each catering to the size of the companion device, the Gadget Pocket holds a smartphone, the Tablet sleeve holds a 8-10" tablet, Technically a 9.7" tablet. The snap-fit for AirPad2. After using my Spark with tablet sleeve model (without the tablet, as I could not possible fit my iPad Pro in that sleeve) my personal finding is that this is the best option, the pocket can be used to hold other stuff like business cards, folder documents. The sleeve is as big as one side of the folio itself. The flaps on the pocket is magnetic so it snaps close quite well.<br />
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Overall the construction and the feel of the unit is impressive and can look like a folio. In fact it could well replace a diary or other writing pads/folios one may carry.<br />
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The companion software is available on the app store for free, it's called Inkspace. After downloading the software, connecting the device to a smart phone or tablet is easy and painless slightly as easy as connecting the new Apple Magic Trackpad or the new Apple Magic Keyboard. The only difference is that this does not involve any cables. The software guides you to connect to the Spark and once connected, it keeps syncing the notes at a regular interval or when you press the button on the spark.<br />
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Start writing and the led near the sync button on the device glows between green and blue. The good parts of this are that you can draw where you want and you can use whatever paper you want. Writing or drawing is natural like you would with a real pen and since the pen uses real ink, you can see what you have done on the paper and at the touch of the button, it is transferred to the device. It even tracks the strokes and you could use the strokes to create a step-by-step process. One could see you draw or write and follow the same step by step.<br />
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<a href="http://bamboo.wacom.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/bamboo-spark-pen-blog-post6.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://bamboo.wacom.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/bamboo-spark-pen-blog-post6.jpg" width="320" height="240" /></a><br />
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However the only catch is that while it handles 1024 levels of pressure, I personally did not find it a very good tool for sketching where you would draw several strokes atop each to create a drawing, many of the lighter strokes are not captured. This is handy for inking and then transferring the same to a computer to color. It is handy for students and executives alike to take notes in classes or meetings. Again, it works fins if you use print, however it kind of falters on running or cursive writing. It does not have a lag, however you need to write slowly to have the best results, which could be an issue at times while taking notes.<br />
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Over the past 20 odd years I have tried several options, starting from the DaVinci PDA, Palm Pilot, Sharp Zarus and the iPaq. These were good however a 320x240 screen in a 3-4" factor did not offer a lot of resolution. To give you an ides, (at least in Australia) when you get a parcel, you sign on a device for receipt, these are the industrial versions (bulky and thick) of these early devices and you know that your signature using that flimsy plastic stub is quite non-responsive. Then about 10 years ago I tried the Livescribe Pulse pens, I loved it and I believe I could have made a living if I count the number of people I influenced and convinced to buy it. It was amazing, but for two major issues; It required special paper, so if you forgot or ran out of paper, tough luck. The other was the pens were not very hardy, not the construction, but the technology. The LCD panel would darken and die, the pens would also stop responding and the support from Livescribe was good but unhelpful. A replacement pen was an uphill struggle and when it arrived, it was a used pen in a bad condition and died within a couple of weeks. Add to these the cost of the base pen and stationery, it was an expensive option.<br />
However your notes were quite organized as each notebook and page was identifiable. The added advantage was that if you could not get all of the details during the meeting, you could associate an audio recording to the point where you are. You could later go to that page and play back portions from any line on any page by simply tapping the pen on that spot. The real party trick with the pen was the draw your own piano and translation tools. You could draw a piano and simply tap at the keys and it would play the corresponding note. You could write a work in a couple of languages and it could translate it for you in English and read it aloud.<br />
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<a href="http://bamboo.wacom.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/bamboo-spark-pen-blog-post1.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://bamboo.wacom.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/bamboo-spark-pen-blog-post1.jpg" width="320" height="240" /></a><br />
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The price point for the Spark is quite affordable and if it does not work for you, it still serves as a rather expensive folio pad as against other devices that are unusable entirely. Having said that, it is useful and usable. The only little problem is that your paper has to be in the space where the digitizer is. While visually you can rotate paper and start drawing from a visual connection point, if you move the paper, your points can be offset by that movement. Thereby using a A5 notepad would be recommended. It is also advised by Bamboo to use a pad with 10-15 sheets and a not so thick backing sheet to the notepad.<br />
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Bamboo also have variant of the device and they are available as<br />
* Bamboo Slate<br />
* Bamboo Folio<br />
both of which come in A5 (small) and A4(large) format, the Slate is just the back without a folding cover, where as the folio is similar to the Spark with a folding cover. These seem to be the next version models from the Spark as the pen is no longer aluminum but dark grey/black.<br />
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In summary, the Bamboo spark is quite useful if you have the habit of writing in a notepad or a notebook. I have tried note taking on a tablet (review in a separate post) which has not worked at least for me. This is a recommended option as it does not have a lot of external dependencies. The only risk is running out of battery on the digitizer (you can charge using the powerbanks via Micro USB port) or running out of ink on the pen (which should still work but you would be unable to see the notes on paper).<br />
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Note: Bamboo did not supply us with a test unit device or software of any kind nor did they pay us for this review.<br />
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OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-569356218306106092017-01-21T23:36:00.000+11:002017-01-21T23:36:42.663+11:00Fast as Lightning, USB-C or Thunderbolt 3Amongst all of the discussion about the new MacBookPro with the touchBar, it is like most of Apple technologies, you do not want it but then you get used to it and soon cannot live without it. When the first ipad was released, I did not want it but soon I found that I had the iPad 1, the Keyboard Dock and the Apple iPad Case. However, one thing that I was always aware of when I purchased an Apple Mac, that it was the best hardware available that that time.<a name='more'></a><br />
When I got broken into and the cretin stole my MacBookPro, iPad Pro and a couple of phones amongst other things, I had to buy replacements. The question I was faced with was should I get the new MacBookPro with USB-C or a new iMac or an older MacBookPro with USB-A? I had decided and prepared myself to get a 15" MacBookpro however Apple stores were out of all MacBookPro, be it 13" or 15" and what was available was only the older 13" 128GB. So a trip to JB Hi-Fi next to the Apple Store secured me a <a href="https://www.jbhifi.com.au/computers-tablets/laptops/apple/apple-macbook-pro-13-with-touch-bar-256gb-space-grey/314325/">Space Grey 13" MacBookPro with 256 GB</a> (the only ones available at JB that evening). The next week, My office offered me the opportunity to buy the <a href="https://www.jbhifi.com.au/computers-tablets/desktops/apple/apple-imac-with-retina-5k-display-27-3-2ghz/452747/">iMac 5K</a> that I was using at work so I got an upgrade to my MBP and the iMac. <br />
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While for the past year I had moved to Melbourne ahead of shifting completely lot stock and barrel, I did not have my entire setup with me. This included a juiced up iMac 27" with boosted RAM, however the bottleneck was always the HDD and replacing a HDD in an iMac is a cringe worthy task. So with the new setup, I wanted to install my VM's and setup my development environments. Including Windows 10 running Visual Studio and Unix Ubuntu 16.0. The first issue that raised its head was <a href="http://www.parallels.com/au/products/desktop/">Parallels</a> - The OS running was 10.12 Sierra and to run Parallels you need the latest update of version 12. Luckily or proactively I had taken advantage of an earlier offer to upgrade that included 1-password (1 year subscription) and some other stuff that was not really very useful. I was using VMFusion earier but if I have to upgrade every year and with every new OS that Apple releases, I am force to upgrade or bail out, I chose to continue with Parallels. Though there are some good free VM options (look for another article detailing those).<br />
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I wanted to use an external drive and keep the VM's separate, so I chose to use the <a href="http://www.samsung.com/au/memory-storage/portable-ssd-t3/MU-PT500BWW/">Samsung T3 SSD 500GB</a> external drive. While I was wanting to use a 250 GB SSD drives, one each for an OS, but wasn't sure of how well they will perform. I had been looking for some good deals on the 250 GB drives for a while but when I was at Harvey Norman getting my wife a new HP Envy Laptop, the salesman made a very interesting offer and bundled the 500GB drive, so that was it, got a 500GB drive instead of the 250 I was contemplating. While I was trying to google reading others opinions on the T3 drives, the common consensus was it is FAST, my point was how fast is FAST? Having over a dozen external USB drives I have waited hours for file transfers while the boxes claimed fast, USB3 interface, etc.<br />
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Even with spinning 7200 rpm HDD on the 5K iMac 27", a Mid-2015 model is perhaps the slowest of them all iMac 27". Despite that, the experience on the iMac is a fair one, not one that I would complain about. Since Apple have started to make the RAM and the HDD non-serviceable, the question that remains to be asked is what advantage does that bring to the table? So this set out as a small experiment to test the speed of the drives and see if I can get an external drive that is good enought to boot from and not struggle with slow speeds. After all we are so used to instant on devices with our Phones and tablets. So why should we suffer the boot times and spinning indicators on the desktops or laptops.<br />
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For the purpose of this test, I chose the freely available app on Mac App Store called <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/blackmagic-disk-speed-test/id425264550?mt=12">"BlackMagic Speed Test"</a>. Running this on the iMac yielded speeds of 111.8 MB/s Write and 168.2 MB/s read speeds. This is for a 7200 RPM 1TB drive on a SATA/SATA Express bus. This set the baseline, that if you can have read/write speeds around this mark then you can run a VM without an issue. Another thing to note is that the external drives would connect on USB or Thunderbolt-2 (iMac Mid 2015) worse if you connect drives to USB ports or connectors that are USB2 or *shudder* USB1. Surprisingly while you do not think of it, there are plenty of these around, for example due to the design of the iMac, I have an extension cable (the one that comes with the Apple wired Keyboard) and the two ports on either side of the keyboard. While the T3 is a fast drive, it's speed and performance varies depending on the post where it is connected. Connecting it via the extension cable that came from Apple with the wired Keyboard yielded results of 37.7 MB/s Write and 41.1 MB/s Read. Now removing that cable and plugging the drive directly to the back of the iMac yielded speeds of 367.9 MB/s Write and 421.9 MB/s Read. Which is what Samsung promised on the box via the USB 3.x interface. Now plugging in a <a href="http://www.seagate.com/au/en/consumer/backup/backup-plus/">Seagate 2TB USB 3.0 Backup Slim</a> external HDD directly to the back of the iMac resulted in 113.7 MB/s Write and 116.3 MB/s Read approximately similar to the on-board HDD. Adding another <a href="http://www.olshop.com.au/toshiba-2tb-canvio-usb3-0-portable-hard-drive">Toshiba External USB 3.0</a> drive provided speeds of ~20/31 which was unexpected since both were 2TB drives and on USB 3.0 interface.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhVENuLGBOLpoJLGJRqXRyTEPjql0Sz_XqrHi2es1RH2SeXRzZHlsPYR1dquwZm_nzfsyW_Aw49zQIwnBc_f2ZQHfM-81Jtbu3dB4McDJfx8NjT_DsHDdhBOPaFwWowdbayR6l7gFlfd0/s1600/USBCables.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhVENuLGBOLpoJLGJRqXRyTEPjql0Sz_XqrHi2es1RH2SeXRzZHlsPYR1dquwZm_nzfsyW_Aw49zQIwnBc_f2ZQHfM-81Jtbu3dB4McDJfx8NjT_DsHDdhBOPaFwWowdbayR6l7gFlfd0/s320/USBCables.jpg" width="320" height="180" /></a></div><br />
So the curiosity got the better as to what would be the speeds on the MacBookPro? What kind of speeds would that offer given that it has a much faster USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 bus. The first issue was the ports are all USB-C and to connect most of these USB2/USB3 devices you need a USB-A port. Like all that purchased the new MacBookPro, I ended up with a host of cables. Strangely when I think of it, I might have purchased a high end laptop worth of cables and external drives so far in the past couple of years and the life span of those cables are exactly a couple of years only (Leave that story for another article). I purchased an <a href="http://www.apple.com/au/shop/product/MJ1M2AM/A/usb-c-to-usb-adapter">Apple USB-C to USB-A cable</a> and a <a href="https://www.jbhifi.com.au/computers-tablets/accessories/targus/targus-4-port-usb-c-bus-powered-hub/975540/">Targus 4Port Hub</a> with 3xUSB-A and 1xUSB-C port. First connected the Samsung T3 to a USB port on the Targus USB port, this resulted in 389/411 speeds. Then connecting it via the Apple USB-C to USB-A cable, it yielded speeds of 384/421 and then via the <a href="http://www.apple.com/au/shop/product/HKK12ZM/A/belkin-thunderbolt-3-cable-05m">Belkin Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C to USB-C)</a> cable which resulted in speeds of 386/420. Now I tried the Apple USB-C cable that they provide with the MacBookPro for charging, this was the point of discussion by many users, any guesses at the speeds? Connecting the Samsung T3 SDD drive using the apple charging cable USB-C to USB-C resulted in speeds of 36/40 MB/s. <br />
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This was the most appaling of them all, Apple should at least provide a cable that can be used as an alternative if you ever forget taking an adaptor along. Finally, the question was what is the speed of the on-board SSD that apple has on the MacBookPro? So running the same app on the local drive of a MacBookPro 13" 256GB yielded results as 1247.6/2000 MB/s. This is nearly 4-5x faster than the external Samsung T3 SSD which is so far the fastest external drive available on USB (that I have come across).<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-_g-D90j0CNqEUAc3seluiWZvPzSFRQsDXzIpMypw9D2xaO44YpXIRw4hs7VUFTqyFjdVcNH11A581wNQjWFJakVMTWepjFbadOeC0_r2I5L-KSevb8hCA9Zgy9xnS_yScatiQtatqKA/s1600/MacBookPro.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-_g-D90j0CNqEUAc3seluiWZvPzSFRQsDXzIpMypw9D2xaO44YpXIRw4hs7VUFTqyFjdVcNH11A581wNQjWFJakVMTWepjFbadOeC0_r2I5L-KSevb8hCA9Zgy9xnS_yScatiQtatqKA/s320/MacBookPro.jpg" width="320" height="149" /></a></div><br />
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Summary of Speeds and Devices<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnJ1gEpEgicelaZKM77pEvWlzPxMgKDO6cSdc1yzBtvplLsT0NKT6b92-kOoXPavB8jT5eQQvFuky6SowXgbDC3pFLrcQFCo3Nm_ws6d2LgvEyVOAqMt7FTTjq1ErvZ7ljiWtD6oEFB-M/s1600/Screen+Shot+2017-01-21+at+10.55.26+pm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnJ1gEpEgicelaZKM77pEvWlzPxMgKDO6cSdc1yzBtvplLsT0NKT6b92-kOoXPavB8jT5eQQvFuky6SowXgbDC3pFLrcQFCo3Nm_ws6d2LgvEyVOAqMt7FTTjq1ErvZ7ljiWtD6oEFB-M/s400/Screen+Shot+2017-01-21+at+10.55.26+pm.png" width="400" height="225" /></a></div> <br />
<h2>Take away</h2>Older External drives were not usable as bootable devices and therefore most bootable external drives were usually thunderbolt. The baseline of acceptable drive speed could be considered as a drive that has a read/write speed above 110 MB/s which is what a 7200 rpm drive on the iMac offers. The second factor is the interface, you can have the fastest drive but connected to a slow interface will only offer you the maximum speed that the interface offers. It is a no-brainer; if you are driving a Ferrari in a traffic jam, the Ferrari despite the best speeds can only be driven at speeds of 10-20 kmph.<br />
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The Samsung T3 SSD are an amazing line of SSD drives worth if you want a fast external drive on the USB interface. Since the drive has a USB-C interface and has a USB-C to USB-A Cable you can connect it to other devices with that do not have a USB-C port. Since the interface on the drive is a USB 3.1, it can offer a maximum speed of 5Gb/s therefore using a thunderbolt 3 cable did not increase the speed any further. Thunderbolt 3 also uses the same USB-C form factor for its ports but offers speeds upto 40 Gb/s. Though USB 3.1 can offer speeds upto 10Gb/s, USB 3.1 Gen 1 which is available on the T3 supports only 5Gb/s.<br />
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<h2>Speeds on various ports</h2><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://thunderbolttechnology.net/sites/default/files/more%20speed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://thunderbolttechnology.net/sites/default/files/more%20speed.jpg" width="400" height="335" /></a></div>Source: <a href="https://thunderbolttechnology.net/blog/thunderbolt-3-usb-c-does-it-all">Thunderbolt Technologies</a><br />
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Disclaimer: Generally we get software provided to us by the developers or manufacturer when reviewed, for the purpose of this article none of the hardware or software was provided by any manufacturer or developer and nor did we receive any financial incentive to write this article/review.OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-14622059555833317272016-02-20T00:16:00.000+11:002016-02-20T00:16:15.036+11:00Be faster and more productive - Text Expander<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo8iD614mxoYCzXoP96J-jcwhGlU4inLjw-9rVyCXhQMCNPHzjYq4Yu0DAATs2bvxN_7nF17F0RMyLKVowRuUOJOp_oe_Gm84e9KRI2E94CuVtTjoYSxU17Qzbr_pYv3rdMrn__djBPyM/s1600/textexpander.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo8iD614mxoYCzXoP96J-jcwhGlU4inLjw-9rVyCXhQMCNPHzjYq4Yu0DAATs2bvxN_7nF17F0RMyLKVowRuUOJOp_oe_Gm84e9KRI2E94CuVtTjoYSxU17Qzbr_pYv3rdMrn__djBPyM/s320/textexpander.jpg" /></a></div>iOS devices rely heavily on touches and working with the on-screen keyboards are something we are used to but is not exactly very convenient. There are several users that can type like hundreds of words per minutes. However many of us cannot type very fast or well on these on-screen keyboards. In addition to this the hilarious or embarrassing text that Auto-correct replaces in our messages, is no laughing matter. What if we could have some control over what we do?<br />
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<h2 align="left">Text Expansion</h2>We are reviewing the app Text Expander, it is a simple app that does one thing -> Text Expansion. So you might ask the question what is Text Expansion, it is a simple concept. You might be writing emails daily, the mail client adds an automatic signature, that contains your email, url, designation, etc. If you were to type this regularly, you could have errors, spelling mistakes, missing out some text, etc. Text Expansion replaces some text with a pre-determined text like "Be right back" when you type "brb" or "http://www.oz-apps.com" when I type "myurl".<br />
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<h2 align="left">Why should Text Expansion be useful?</h2>As mentioned above, it saves you additional and excessive keystrokes. So when you are writing your emails, or text you can quickly get productive and save time. In an attempt to save repeating myself about how text expansion is useful, lets look at it from the perspective of a developer. You might write the same code everytime you create an UITableView. After all you have to create a class of type UITableView and conform to the UITableViewDataSource and UITableViewDelegate and therefore also write the functions required to satisfy the delegates. What if you could boost your workflow with simply typing "cdeTableView" which would expand into all of the lines of code that you would have to type otherwise. Xcode has user code snippets that can be drag-dropped or replaced while typing some trigger text.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Relevance with iOS devices</h2>You would not be typing code or working with Xcode (as yet) on the iOS devices but you would be using it for all of the other stuff like emails, word, PowerPoint, lists, notes, etc. In all of those applications you would require text expansion. In addition to simple text, you can also add replacement text like date, time, etc.<br />
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<h2 align="left">What can Text Expander do?</h2>Firstly, each and every iOS device has the ability to text expand using the auto-correct feature, just like you could add your own auto-correct text in the Microsoft suite of products. The only issue with that is that is is a simple expansion, it looks at the text and simply replaces it with the fixed text. Where as with Text Expander, the text can be dynamic, i.e. have custom fields that can use variables, move cursor positions, etc. In addition to this, you can also have formatted text with colors, bold, italics, etc. <br />
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<h2 align="left">What more can it do?</h2>There is a Desktop version of Text Expander, so that you can have text expansion options on the desktop too. Over a period of time, many users create large repositories of code snippets and then when you consider replacing your devices like the iPadPro for the Mac desktop, it is a task to move your snippets. Text Expander has a feature that allows you to sync your snippets across the local network between your devices, both the OSX and iOS. <br />
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In addition to this, Text Expander is also available as an SDK to integrate into your own applications. This allows your applications to take advantage of the text expansion from right within. One good example of this is Textastic, the text editor for iPads. This allows you to edit your code and even write your code, upload it to a WebDAV server or Dropbox and if you can have your workflow right, have it available the moment you save the file. <br />
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<h2 align="left">Summary</h2>There are quite a few text expansion software available that do similar things as Text Expander. Some of the advantages that Text Expander has over the other applications are that it has both an OSX and an iOS applications. These synchronize with each other sharing the snippets created in either. It has a SDK that integrates with your own application (if you code it) to provide the functionality from within the app. Lastly, it has matured and proven itself as an application. It even adds a custom keyboard for use in other applications. It also allows you to set up data to autofill forms.<br />
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SUMMARY<br />
Software : Text Expander<br />
Version : 3<br />
Publisher : SmileOnMyMac <br />
Website : https://smilesoftware.com/textexpander-ios<br />
Twitter : @smilesoftware<br />
Platform : iOS 8.0+<br />
Price : $4.99<br />
iTunes Store : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/textexpander-3-+-custom-keyboard/id917416298?mt=8<br />
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OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-65356735479521602402015-12-21T22:25:00.000+11:002015-12-21T22:28:59.652+11:00Drawing like a Pro - Create on the iPad ProDo you doodle or simply like to draw? Better still, are you a professional artist or a student learning art? The iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil is one of the best options created. Specially when you compare it to the stylus and fingers. Some amazing art has been created with just using the finger and smaller screens. For this review, we are looking at the application Procreate from Savage Interactive Pty Ltd. <a name='more'></a><br />
<h2 align="left">What is it?</h2>Procreate is a drawing software that runs on your iOS devices. It basically allows you to draw on the tablet. <br />
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<h2 align="left">What is special about this?</h2>There are so many apps that allow you to draw on an iPad or an iPhone. It has been created specifically for the iPad. So what is special or different about Procreate that sets it apart from other apps?<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1c3hqtxXxiyNXCtCNISwh5PGrdo5DFAflyExhs7vzx9KBWB-qoCfG-_SGg-aPTZQsjNoyBuvR9lQkiwNYoLGa8AK0cpMttGhrSLdCz3nLTueaki1zCKLfsTp1ABr-uAsRH7wlwLYrCEo/s1600/IMG_0014.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1c3hqtxXxiyNXCtCNISwh5PGrdo5DFAflyExhs7vzx9KBWB-qoCfG-_SGg-aPTZQsjNoyBuvR9lQkiwNYoLGa8AK0cpMttGhrSLdCz3nLTueaki1zCKLfsTp1ABr-uAsRH7wlwLYrCEo/s320/IMG_0014.PNG" /></a></div><br />
The first thing that you see is the minimalist interface, almost as much UI as that found on a piece of paper. Then when you start a new document, you get to see a couple of additional options. These let you select the various types of brushes etc. However the real beauty of Procreate are the two sliders on the left that allow you to size the brush and adjust the opacity of the brush. You can set this up for a Right Handed Interface or a Left Handed Interface.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Working with the app</h2>When you draw on paper, you can turn the paper in any direction to be able to draw and paint, Procreate provides the same functionality. This is not something that is available on many other apps. When you draw lines, Procreate can straighten them for you. If you are a student of Architecture or draw with perspective lines as a guide, Procreate creates guidelines (available via the Early Access for now, would be standard with the next release.<br />
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The silica drawing engine is the most advanced 64-bit drawing engine available. This custom engine powers Procreate allowing the users to create amazing pictures and images.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Brushes</h2>There are several brushes available on Procreate, these are all neatly categorized for easy selection. You have a full range from ink, pencil, airbrushes, etc. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://procreate.si/ipad/Procreate-sketch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://procreate.si/ipad/Procreate-sketch.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<h2 align="left">What it means on an iPadPro?</h2>The iPad Pro is a high resolution tablet with a screen larger than even the retina MacBook Pro 15". If you compare this with a Wacom Cintiq type drawing tablet the 13" has a resolution of 1920x1080 and a weight of approximately 1.2 Kgs and then requires you to hook up a mac or a PC. The other two options are the 22" and the 27" where the 27" comes close with a 2560 x 1440 and can weigh between 9 to 25 Kgs. In that sense, the iPad Pro is a good option with a 2372 x 2048 screen weighing less than a kg and paired with the Apple Pencil, pixel perfect lines. With all of that, Procreate and it's suite of tools are simply something that any budding to pro artist would look for.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Advanced Features</h2>These are not really advanced features but features that are not apparent at first glance. These are not simply available to you without knowing about them. The stroke straightening is a wonderful feature, that allows you to draw straight lines, infact almost like in a vector drawing application. Draw a stroke and at the end, just keep holding, the stroke transforms into a straight line and if you move the point without releasing the touch, it behaves like a string, pinned at the start and moves with the point. This offers some very fine control on straight lines. However, if you want to create a box and want the next stroke to start from the last point, you have to start again from the last point, which can leave gaps for untrained artists like me.<br />
Drawing with perspective is something that is coming soon, if you want to access these features right now, you can unlock them via an in-app purchase. If you are patient and can wait, then these are literally round the corner, in the next release.<br />
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The tilt and the pressure of the pencil does allow you to create some amazing artwork, but it seems that the next release would have greater control and integration with the Apple Pencil.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Summary</h2>The app has not received Apple awards and accolades for nothing, it is the simple to use yet quite powerful and has been specifically designed for the iPad. The other good thing about Procreate is not just for learning, but also teaching. Procreate keeps recording your strokes, you can then play it back or export it as a video. There is however one small issue with the Apple Code, when writing with the pencil, you can notice it almost instantly, the strokes are re-sampled or whatever the app does, it simply does not look very smooth, this is more of an Apple issue than it is a Procreate as the same behavior has been noticed in the notes application.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZkKYCMdjAU2poiVuomELPokQqfBLwQKRKs_7pBpl7kva4YWM8YmNE7YETJOzBIyiW5tYawQ8IVRPfg1Kbmrq7pgS4JY1AfNNmx4rtzSzplNaM_2sIrKc3nz6tKxu_6ccuD6Sa_oVPNGg/s1600/IMG_0013.m4v" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZkKYCMdjAU2poiVuomELPokQqfBLwQKRKs_7pBpl7kva4YWM8YmNE7YETJOzBIyiW5tYawQ8IVRPfg1Kbmrq7pgS4JY1AfNNmx4rtzSzplNaM_2sIrKc3nz6tKxu_6ccuD6Sa_oVPNGg/s320/IMG_0013.m4v" /></a></div><br />
Since childhood, I had an interest in drawing and cartooning, but somehow I did realise that I should not quit my day job (I wasn't that bad, but I had a lot to improve). You can see my first attempt at it with the pencil, I was showing someone how natural it felt drawing with an apple pencil. The strokes are captured and can be seen in the video above.<br />
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<br />
SUMMARY<br />
Software : Procreate<br />
Version : 3.0.3<br />
Publisher : Savage Interactive Pty Ltd <br />
Website : http://procreate.si/<br />
Platform : iOS 9.1 or later<br />
Price : $5.99 USD<br />
iTunes App Store : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/procreate-sketch-paint-create./id425073498?mt=8<br />
OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-14580029151992886732015-12-20T22:11:00.000+11:002015-12-21T07:14:50.691+11:00Grappling with drawing charts - Omni Graffle to the rescue<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyniKCATM6G6yYxKTvJvndSkRuqFIt8GzYPqMsOcqrA29M4cxIYstc9OgWvS0xPz3djRc-j9oPj2GFyQKEUB2iSJZKIqV2SkOTzFXJ_qYpLRamP6rURRKOuaUwDmXtS1ARc4c_4sJfM_Y/s1600/OmniGraffle.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyniKCATM6G6yYxKTvJvndSkRuqFIt8GzYPqMsOcqrA29M4cxIYstc9OgWvS0xPz3djRc-j9oPj2GFyQKEUB2iSJZKIqV2SkOTzFXJ_qYpLRamP6rURRKOuaUwDmXtS1ARc4c_4sJfM_Y/s320/OmniGraffle.png" /></a><br />
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Do you create / develop software? There comes a point when you end up trying to create diagrams to illustrate the architecture of your solution, or you could be a designer creating a wireframe to illustrate the layout and the elements. You could be from an entirely non-IT field like architecture or public service where you want to create plans of houses, interiors, pavement assets, maps, etc. If you were using a Windows machine, you had the options of using Visio. If you are using a Mac, there is no Microsoft Visio.<a name='more'></a><br />
<h1 align="left">What is Omni Graffle</h1>This is where Omni Graffle steps in and provides the options for Mac users. I was first introduced to Omni Graffle in 2007 and have seen the updates adding features from the Pro version 4 to 5 and then to a paid upgrade to 6. This was on the desktop, however Omni created the application for the iOS and as it currently stands, it runs on both the iPhones and the iPads.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijW0ALs8SQVrKIWWpkGqkpU0Tc72dHGxHSFG-sr_pDebeICn8W8RcQzXimG-pZuvP3pcszVm89H4oPPFH75ZwJoWHU4zaXWVSygAdRr3KUDtaPjgzDAdo_8Odh9o9KrAsITCtGnqFgVyQ/s1600/IMG_0009.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijW0ALs8SQVrKIWWpkGqkpU0Tc72dHGxHSFG-sr_pDebeICn8W8RcQzXimG-pZuvP3pcszVm89H4oPPFH75ZwJoWHU4zaXWVSygAdRr3KUDtaPjgzDAdo_8Odh9o9KrAsITCtGnqFgVyQ/s320/IMG_0009.PNG" /></a></div><br />
<h1 align="left">Testing Setup</h1>We got a promo code for Omni Graffle iOS version and have reviewed it is running it on an iPad Pro and iPhone 6+. While the iPhone or the iPad (2, Air, Air2) versions do allow you to work with Omni Graffle, there is an added dimension or an experience trying to use the iOS version on iPad Pro. It has a larger screen resolution of 2732 x 2048, much larger than that on a MacBook Pro 15" which is just 2880 x 1800.<br />
So an iPad Pro can make more sense as a desktop replacement. Add to this the Apple Pencil, that is an added dimension to the user experience as compared to a finger touch interface and a Keyboard completes it as a Desktop Replacement. However, the question remains, can the softwares provide a similar or better experience?<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHBrCOZ3Pbhcm8U3bgR1lduGS-IvH2XLv_TLUvt8TgUD9-0cFhyphenhyphenJ_Ngvv60tC2qTPBpuzZJQgSnvEYtW033AU8Itbs0COThQJwaafL8HxueawIuggqUfP-OW7UyUwWi0ODhszs_5hKn74/s1600/IMG_4877.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHBrCOZ3Pbhcm8U3bgR1lduGS-IvH2XLv_TLUvt8TgUD9-0cFhyphenhyphenJ_Ngvv60tC2qTPBpuzZJQgSnvEYtW033AU8Itbs0COThQJwaafL8HxueawIuggqUfP-OW7UyUwWi0ODhszs_5hKn74/s320/IMG_4877.JPG" /></a></div><br />
<h1 align="left">Basic Functionality</h1>There are a lot of new users to a Mac and it is possible that many are unaware of what is Omni Graffle. Unlike many other software, the iOS version of Omni Graffle is not a helper or a sidekick application, it is a fully featured application with all the functionality (that can be duplicated on an iOS application) from the Desktop version.<br />
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The first and foremost functionality in Omni Graffle is the ability to draw basic (primitive) shapes like rectangles, circles and lines. This is expected from any charting software, however from the many other softwares that I have used over the years on Windows and Macs, Omni Graffle manages that quite intuitively. When you resize or move the shapes, it displays smart guides to show co-relations like matching widths, heights or even mid-points. Then there are the options to set the fills, strokes and shadow, geometry on the shapes. Surprisingly, though it sounds like somethings that should be expected from an app from this genre, you would be astonished to find that many others do not manage this well.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Using Omni Graffle</h2>The way each person uses any app depends on the day to day activities that one is involved in. In my case I started with Omni Graffle for creating diagrams, designing the architecture of our Software Projects. This went on as the software to create high resolution diagrams for Presentations, Books, etc. In fact many of the diagrams to explain concepts, etc (other than screenshots) were created using Omni Graffle (desktop version). <br />
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Getting started with using Omni Graffle is quite easy. Add to that the simplified interface with just a couple of icons that make up the UI giving you maximum space to work with and create diagrams. The UI is split into three sections, Canvas, Stencils and the Items.<br />
The Canvas inspector displays canvases and layers, the items or groups added to the canvas/layer and the styles.<br />
The Stencils display the stencils already added to the system and also provide the functionality to add new stencils from the online repository (StencilTown)<br />
The items popup bar has 5 items, <br />
the first allows for selecting items. <br />
The Shape tool allows adding shapes to the drawing<br />
The Freehand shape tool allows you to draw the shapes on the canvas, the coolest part is if you have shape recognition set to on, then the hand drawn shapes are converted to vector equivalents of the squares, rectangles, triangles and circles. <br />
The Line tool allows you to create lines on the canvases. You can add/delete points on the line. While on the desktop version you can easily change the lines from straight to curved, on the iOS version you can easily change the settings using the info button, which provides context specific details. From here you can change the line type, line start and ends to add arrow heads or circles, change the stroke, shadow, line color, geometry and connections. <br />
The Text tool allows you to add text on the canvas. You can also add a shape to the text and wrap to the shape apart from customizing all of the other parameters, like fill, stroke, shadow, etc.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Using Gestures</h2>The advantage of a touch enabled device over the desktop version is being able to do many of the tasks easily than achieving the same via a series of clicks. The standard gestures are almost intuitive that allow you to tap and select objects, pan the canvas, pinch and zoom to zoom the canvas. <br />
You can quickly rotate the shapes by selecting and holding it with two fingers, the rotation angle shows up and you can then simply rotate the shape to the angle you want.<br />
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I chanced across the manuals under the support section that has a very detailed description listing all of the gestures.<br />
This can be found here (https://support.omnigroup.com/documentation/omnigraffle/ios/2.5/en/)<br />
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<h2 align="left">Keyboard Shortcuts</h2>While this might sound a bit odd given that desktops have keyboard shortcuts and tablets generally have touches and gestures alone. With iOS 9, apple added the ability to have keyboard shortcuts with Bluetooth Keyboards. If you are looking at an iPad Pro, you have to have a Keyboard and an Apple Pencil. (It is nearly similar as working on the desktop version if you have had any experience with the desktop version)<br />
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<h2 align="left">Customizing the selected items</h2>Pressing the info button is the context specific method to interact with the selected object/objects. This allows you to interact with the canvas and the selected object.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Synchronizing</h2>You can synchronize your diagrams with the Omni Presence server to have them available across your devices (though connecting and synchronizing on the Desktop was not an issue but listing the .graffle documents on the iOS devices was).<br />
The reason was the fact that I tried to add the OmniPresence account via the WebDAV servers, however adding it from the Locations screen worked smoothly. All documents from the Omni Sync Server allows you to save your changes back to the server by simply clicking on the sync icon.<br />
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You can also add other online sources like iCloud, OneDrive, GoogleDrive, Box, etc to get (import) diagrams from.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrIgK_YdCby1MmG0jcQol8cLxHkNThyphenhyphenOoXuJLfSAVk1i17Y3N72moOAYL4I6oQZv0DImP0JJJh1SPduLaxH65L4NcDz92v_HHhhsYaKVMIzog_I47g2cwQ0w_pRcIS6kyMhyphenhyphenAUr6ZtfTk/s1600/IMG_0012.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrIgK_YdCby1MmG0jcQol8cLxHkNThyphenhyphenOoXuJLfSAVk1i17Y3N72moOAYL4I6oQZv0DImP0JJJh1SPduLaxH65L4NcDz92v_HHhhsYaKVMIzog_I47g2cwQ0w_pRcIS6kyMhyphenhyphenAUr6ZtfTk/s320/IMG_0012.PNG" /></a></div><h2 align="left">Stencils</h2>While you can create complex shapes by adding other shapes and reuse them, it might not be something that everyone can do. For those there are stencils, a collection of shapes like Maps of countries, counties or simply elements used on maps. In fact there is a site from where you can download stencils and use them in your drawings. <br />
StencilTown (https://stenciltown.omnigroup.com/)<br />
Graffletopia (https://www.graffletopia.com/)<br />
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<h2 align="left">Verdict</h2>As a user of the desktop version running Omni Graffle on the MacBook (13" white polycarbonate) and then the MacBookPro (15" Aluminium) and then the iMac (27" both pre-retina and the 5K retina), there is an expectation of familiarity. A familiarity with the floating palettes, the icons toolbar etc, however the iOS version be it on the larger iPhone 6+ or the iPad Pro does not disappoint. The canvas bar can be pinned to the left where as the context inspector is a popup. If this could also be pinned like the Xcode bars on both the sides, it would make for a great experience.<br />
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Creating or editing drawings on the iPad pro is easy and quite handy (no puns intended given that it works better with touch). As mentioned earlier, you can quickly draw shapes on the screen to automatically create basic shapes.<br />
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Specifically, when running Omni Graffle on the iPad Pro it is an experience that is as good as the Desktop experience. <br />
It is a must have software on your springboard for times when you want to quickly draw up a new screen or add a new class diagram for your development team all while you are on a plane or a train.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZcp-BK_f9MDdjkj_klCfJ8gtfS6KnfNstwCMfIWwjFKIKRVWhoIYT0CZXyWtQdrzAmLGMA0XpXPxWbzSyDzE-C6hHToe8qGZBb3kLnUUcZtYQSfcakt3o0SiPSj6o6loUTetyg6KRGFI/s1600/IMG_4878.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZcp-BK_f9MDdjkj_klCfJ8gtfS6KnfNstwCMfIWwjFKIKRVWhoIYT0CZXyWtQdrzAmLGMA0XpXPxWbzSyDzE-C6hHToe8qGZBb3kLnUUcZtYQSfcakt3o0SiPSj6o6loUTetyg6KRGFI/s320/IMG_4878.PNG" /></a></div><br />
<h4 align="left">Pro features were not accessible to review</h4>Some of the Pro features that could be handy to many looking at a diagramming software are things like combining or subtracting multiple shapes to create a single composite shape. <br />
The other that could be very interesting for developers is the ability to import your XCode project and generate Class diagrams from the project.<br />
Another feature that could be very helpful is the ability to import/export Visio files.<br />
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<br />
SUMMARY<br />
Software : Omni Graffle<br />
Version : 2.5.2<br />
Publisher : OmniGroup <br />
Website : https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle<br />
Twitter : @omnigroup<br />
Platform : iOS 9.0 or later<br />
Price : $49.99 USD<br />
iTunes Store : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/omnigraffle-2/id899656932<br />
OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-48496074719086394252015-12-15T22:40:00.000+11:002015-12-15T22:40:33.808+11:00Christmas Shopping? Thinking of an iPad Pro?Are you thinking of getting an iPad Pro for Christmas? Do you have the question in your mind about "Can the iPad Pro be a replacement for your MacBook Pro"? Over the next few reviews we shall look at some software that transform your iPad Pro with amazing features that can help you use it as a desktop replacement.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy78O2x2_BnoU93TZRlcwiSUih3m4dCnwdhPCRuMvqMC9fjmFtyWUGVcI2k-i-Sqs5esC5W1YVqObsSN3peASIeUlXotaA2QKkDjZLsHx2wb-i9c2L8qt-VZhjTrYvA-CU2IsjP34xcBs/s1600/iPadPro.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy78O2x2_BnoU93TZRlcwiSUih3m4dCnwdhPCRuMvqMC9fjmFtyWUGVcI2k-i-Sqs5esC5W1YVqObsSN3peASIeUlXotaA2QKkDjZLsHx2wb-i9c2L8qt-VZhjTrYvA-CU2IsjP34xcBs/s320/iPadPro.png" /></a></div><br />
Here's the setup, An iPad Pro with a Logitech Keyboard rather than an Apple Keyboard and not only is it a replacement for mobile computing but also doubles as a High resolution extended screen (to the 5K iMac as you can see in the picture above). All of the specs shall be revealed and reviewed. Your Christmas stockings will surely be filled and will keep you happy for the holidays.OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-46826738104836597102015-05-23T16:37:00.001+10:002015-05-23T16:40:55.398+10:00Meet A Dev - Christopho maker of Solarus - Zelda like Lua based Open Source RPG EngineAre you a gamer? Do you like to play, make games? You must have heard of a green character (not the Christmas elves) who is often referred to as Zelda, but in reality his name is Link while Zelda is the princess. That was the fun fact of the day. If that went on a tangent, then you are probably unaware of the Legend of Zelda series made popular by Nintendo. This was what a lot of kids played before Pokemon and in 8-bit monochrome. Today we are in conversation with Christopho, a French developer that has created an open source RPG engine that can run Zelda like games and uses Lua as the language to script your own adventures<a name='more'></a><br />
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Personally, I love everything Lua and Swift, I had not been aware of this game engine called Solarus. It was written in C++ and uses Lu as the scripting language. I recollect from many game forums, developers were trying to create RPG like games writing their own engines and at the end struggling as it would run on mainly iOS and Android. Solarus works on practically anything you can run it on, Desktops (PC, Mac, Linux) Mobiles (iOS, Android, Windows) anything that supports SDL and you can compile for that platform.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgawCQ2yHnkBKB7f6mIRDkUXhYPmAQEFKS8jDJMr5XbIxKv9s48G3d9QXU_WCZkC6bzXwYx5er3AlodaxVO-Q-ofkVyZcxzIIxZ6ABYokTQGCHeirirnExEZo6LOibTFCy5vf8p-zob0WI/s1600/solarus-logo-black-on-transparent1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgawCQ2yHnkBKB7f6mIRDkUXhYPmAQEFKS8jDJMr5XbIxKv9s48G3d9QXU_WCZkC6bzXwYx5er3AlodaxVO-Q-ofkVyZcxzIIxZ6ABYokTQGCHeirirnExEZo6LOibTFCy5vf8p-zob0WI/s320/solarus-logo-black-on-transparent1.png" /></a></div><br />
Let us hear from Christopho about the inspirations and aspirations for the Solarus engine.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.solarus-games.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/map-editor-1024x619.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.solarus-games.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/map-editor-1024x619.png" /></a></div><br />
<i>Q: When did you start on the Solarus project?</i><br />
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The Solarus engine (<a href="http://www.solarus-games.org/">http://www.solarus-games.org/</a>) and quest editor were started in 2006. I decided to write my own 2D Zelda-like game engine from scratch because before that, I was making Zelda fangames with game creation software that do not include programming, like RPG Maker and Multimedia Fusion, and at some point there were too many limitations for what I wanted. Still, a full version of Zelda Mystery of Solarus was already released in 2002 with RPG Maker.<br />
And before all that, when I was 10, I was making a Zelda game on paper. <br />
You can find scans of this paper version here: <a href="http://www.zelda-solarus.com/zs/article/zmos-images/">http://www.zelda-solarus.com/zs/article/zmos-images/</a> (tab "Esquisses").<br />
Wow, I now realize that making Zelda games has been my hobby for 20 years!<br />
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<i>Q: What language do you use for the core?</i><br />
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The engine is in C++11 with SDL2, as well as the latest version of the quest editor (C++11 with Qt5). Games created with Solarus are scripted in Lua.<br />
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<i>Q: What are the platforms that you support at this time? What about the near future?</i><br />
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Currently, Solarus is officially supported on Windows, Mac OS X, Debian, Unbuntu, Archlinux, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, OpenBSD, GCW-Zero, AmigaOS4 and Android. Since the project is open-source, there are a lot of other ports and probably some I am not aware of. For example it works on OpenPandora, a free-software handheld gaming console.<br />
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The Android port uses virtual buttons. I am not an expert in mobile devices but what would be better is a touchscreen gameplay system. It would be great to play games this way on Android and iPhone. I know that people also managed to make an experimental Wii port!<br />
<br />
<i>Q: Why did you choose to make it an OpenSource project?</i><br />
<br />
One day I would love to form a community with a lot of people making games and sharing them, like Zelda Classic which is great for that. Solarus is open-source so that more people can easily contribute. Without the help of the community, we would never support so many systems.<br />
I receive a lot of help, translations, bug fixes, ideas and new features thanks to the openness. Including improvements that we would never have done ourselves.<br />
<br />
The GPL license protects users. With non-free software, users are prisoner of the author's good will.<br />
This is a problem with Zelda Classic: the latest release has several years (I believe), no new version is planned and no one can continue to improve it, not even to fix bugs or make ports to modern systems. And they have a huge community!<br />
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Even the format of data files is documented in Solarus. There are people who make procedural map generation for Solarus thanks to that openness.<br />
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People can also make their own modifications to the engine and they don't need my permission to do that.<br />
The GPL license protects me: if they publish this one day, it has to remain open-source.<br />
See for example this video of a modified Solarus engine that supports shaders to add amazing visual effects: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cpJ6q9ppuE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cpJ6q9ppuE</a><br />
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<i>Q: Why choose Lua as the scripting engine? Could you have tried JS or Python?</i><br />
<br />
JavaScript of Python would also be okay. Lua is used by a lot of games including commercial ones (like WoW). Lua is light, minimal, well designed, powerful, extensible and very fast especially with LuaJIT. Calling Lua from C/C++ and calling C/C++ from Lua is easy.<br />
<br />
<i>Q: How many people have worked on this project?</i><br />
<br />
Three people help me a lot and regularly on either games, the engine or the quest editor.<br />
If you include all people who contributed at least once, I would say 30 people!<br />
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<i>Q: You have made a lot of tutorials, almost about 10 hours worth in English and about the same in French, that is a lot of commitment to an Open Source project.</i><br />
<br />
More and more people ask questions about how to create their own game with Solarus. I want to help them the best I can! I love making these tutorials. I receive a lot of encouragement for them so I try to keep active with one new tutorial every week. They also improve my English ;)<br />
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<i>Q: The documentation is one of the best that I have seen even from commercial software, what do you use and how much time do you spend on documentation.<br />
</i><br />
Thanks! But it still needs to be improved. There are some subtle notions related to collisions and sprite coordinates, we should take some time to make some detailed diagrams to make things more clear.<br />
<br />
The documentation is generated with Doxygen, including the C++ code documentation and the Solarus Lua API scripting reference.<br />
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In Solarus 1.0, the Lua API has completely changed. I spent a month to only write its documentation.<br />
But except the first time you write it, it does not takes a lot of time to maintain the documentation.<br />
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<i>Q: Like any super hero, what is your alter ego? When you are not working on Solarus.<br />
</i><br />
If you watch my live-streaming coding sessions, you will see that when I am developing something, I am actually human and I struggle a lot to make things work :)<br />
<br />
When I am not working on Solarus, my alter-ego is someone with a lot of addictions. Addictions to chess, TV shows, seeing my friends and my family!<br />
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<i>Q: When you started you had a vision about Solarus, where do you think you are with that vision.<br />
</i><br />
The vision was people playing my own Zelda fangames.<br />
<br />
But we actually only made two games so far: Zelda Mystery of Solarus DX and Zelda Mystery of Solarus XD, the parodic April 1st game. This is because the vision has shifted, now the vision is people making their own games!<br />
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<i>Q: What do you have on the Roadmap that was not there earlier.</i><br />
<br />
To allow people to make their own games, the roadmap includes multiple projects: a user-friendly quest editor, a very customizable engine, a lot of documentation and tutorials. All of this is new: in the first release of Zelda Mystery of Solarus DX, there was no real separation between the engine and the data. It was a game written in C++ and Lua.<br />
<br />
Anyway, now that the new quest editor is finished, I will work more on our new game (Zelda Mercuris' Chest) and less on improving the engine and the editor. <br />
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<i>Q: You also spend time on IRC talking to your users, how is the community around Solarus<br />
</i><br />
The community is growing slowly: Solarus as a tool to make your own game is very young. Nothing comparable to Zelda Classic for example! But we now have more than 20 video tutorials in English and 55 in French, so more and more people are asking questions on IRC and every day on the forum. Some are also starting to share their scripts and their sprites!<br />
<br />
<i>Q: Are there any quests that are going to amaze you? some users work that you are amazed by<br />
</i><br />
There are not a lot of known projects yet, but I can cite Zelda: Book of Mudora, by wrightmat. He is working on this project since the very early stages of Solarus. Back at the time, the engine was not even clearly separated from my games. So he enjoyed all the improvements and customization possibilities of each release. His game is very promising. <br />
It is huge and seems very neat, with a lot of details and some new graphics.<br />
<br />
<i>Q: Are there any tips that you would want to give our readers on Game Development and Documentation.<br />
</i><br />
- Don't start with a too ambitious project. If you decide to write your own game engine, then you are not working on the game. Creating Zelda Mystery of Solarus with RPG Maker in 2002 took 14 months. Recreating it in C++ later took 5 years! Because it was 3 projects: an engine, a quest editor and a game.<br />
- Keep things open, this will only be a benefit. Contributors will bring improvements you never imagined.<br />
- Document your code like crazy. Contributions will come if the code is a pleasure to read. (I mean this for both a game engine or game scripts).<br />
- Take the time to refactor code when needed, in order to keep it super clean, modular and extensible. You don't have the time pressure of commercial companies when you are writing a fangame. Better organized code is also more pleasant to read and can be extended and reused later.<br />
- Make a first incomplete release of your game with the first one or two dungeons: people will play it and encourage you.<br />
<br />
<i>Q: About the choice of language / platform?</i><br />
<br />
Solarus can be a choice if you like programming. Otherwise, there exists a lot of tools to make games without programming, like RPG Maker, Multimedia Fusion, Game Maker and Zelda Classic.<br />
<br />
Creating your own adventure game is a huge project, no matter the choice of language or platform. It takes years (or months if you are very fast). The hardest part, by far, is to keep the motivation during all that time!<br />
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<i>Thank you for sharing some of your time with us.</i><br />
<br />
Thank You!<br />
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Video of using Shaders in Solarus<br />
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OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-45216409698000354532015-05-16T17:19:00.002+10:002015-05-16T17:22:53.170+10:00Monodraw - Super accelerated ASCII Art Editor for Mac OS XA picture is worth a thousand words and a good one worth a million dollars. Anyways, this is not going to be about Art 101. We come across the need to draw a quick picture to help explain something in text as it helps with visual cognitive learning. To do so, the most commonly used option that I am aware and have seen people use is MS Word, mostly to add a circle to an image to highlight the area of interest. If you are an Enterprise developer, you are already aware of the UML plagued ER diagrams or perhaps class diagrams in Visual Studio or even MindMaps using FreeNode, MindNode etc. These representations help understand the relationships better.<a name='more'></a><br />
<h2 align="left">Drawing?</h2>Developers are not artists. So it is not about drawing but creating a visual representation of the abstract concept. This is mainly in the form of relationship diagrams or boxes and circles like sets, Venn that explain the relationship. If you are serious about this, then you must have used MS Visio on Windows or Omni Graffle on the Mac like I have for years. However, (being old school and as a person that sends out my emails in Plain Text as a Rich Text email adds extra KB's for no reason) I personally prefer to quickly draw a diagram using the keyboard with the ASCII characters, like ---------- or =========== or +--------+ <br />
<br />
<h2 align="left">Why ASCII</h2>There are a couple of reasons as to why I prefer ASCII drawings. <br />
1. PORTABLE, you do not require to open them in a separate program or viewer<br />
2. FILE SIZE, they take up as much space as the characters in the drawing unlike images that take up 4 bytes(characters) for every pixel. So a small ASCII box of 5x3 like here below <br />
<pre>+---+
| |
+---+
</pre>would be 15 characters in ASCII and quite large and visible, however with an Image, that wouldn't even be enough for the header, and could only represent 4 pixels. A screen capture of this very box at 39x39 pixels is 6,878 bytes or approximately 8K as a file on the mac.<br />
3. MINIMALISTIC, they are basic and convey what they require without the additional fluff<br />
4. PRETTY, though this can be a matter of personal choice, ASCII diagrams can be prettier than plain line diagrams<br />
<br />
<h2 align="left">OK, So what?</h2>The only thing that you ever really need for making ASCII art is ASCII characters and they are all available on the keyboard and in fact you use them on a daily basis whenever you type. You can simply open Notepad and start with adding spaces and then replacing a space with a character to see how they all sit together. The only issue with this is it can get tedious and painful.<br />
<br />
What IF.... <br />
* there was something like an Editor that allowed you to draw with ASCII characters?<br />
* the editor allowed you to work with the elements like they were layers?<br />
* the character art used Unicode to smoothen the drawing and look more like lines than chunky blocks of characters?<br />
* the editor offered most of the main features available in packages focused on creating line diagrams?<br />
<br />
<h2 align="left">What would it look like?</h2><br />
<pre>+-------------------------+
| |
| |
+---------------->| Character Format |
| | |
| | |
+-------------------------+ | +-------------------------+
| | |
| | |
| Monodraw Diagram |-----Export-----+
| | |
| | |
+-------------------------+ |
|
| +-------------------------+
| | |
| | |
+--------------->| PNG/SVG Format |
| |
| |
+-------------------------+
</pre><br />
A short answer to the questions above in a picture (worth more than a thousand words) is Monodraw. It is an Editor that allows you to create text based diagrams that can be included in your source code or emails and take lesser space and most importantly are part of that document, not an external one. If you want to include a class diagram or workflow in the comments, you can simply draw the diagram, export and select the comment style.<br />
<br />
<h2 align="left">What about smart editing?</h2>One of the problems with drawing with text is adjusting the diagrams across rows and columns. With Monodraw that is a breeze. Here is a quick GIF to show you how easy it is to adjust the same.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdMfU3e_BIEHkdlxTPjiF2tIOc9n0G-iiD4VE1RmJgnrC0hfytMJ3IHgfRunSuvJJucOP7q-niYaWTu64Wrfz9RB1YZez7ZVR12-EL4oZFZRnWSFgmAQXIYZSt_4DZe0JiLLEX5FvrLD4/s1600/AdjustElements.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdMfU3e_BIEHkdlxTPjiF2tIOc9n0G-iiD4VE1RmJgnrC0hfytMJ3IHgfRunSuvJJucOP7q-niYaWTu64Wrfz9RB1YZez7ZVR12-EL4oZFZRnWSFgmAQXIYZSt_4DZe0JiLLEX5FvrLD4/s1600/AdjustElements.gif" /></a></div><br />
You can do many of the things that you can with most softwares that provide diagramming support.<br />
<br />
<h2 align="left">The diagrams look choppy</h2>Hmmmm, I would not put that to a matter of preference as diagrams made with ASCII characters do tend to be choppy, after all they can only use the shapes of the characters available. Which is why the text smileys are :) ;) :D :P etc, where as there are super large animated stickers and emoji available these days. It is the unicode characters that come to the rescue. You might have seen plenty of signatures with upside down characters, Japanese characters to create cute characters and so on. Similarly, Mododraw uses Unicode to create better diagrams that are more line drawing than series of ---- and + <br />
<br />
Even with pure ASCII characters, you can achieve so much more. For those that started using computers years ago (pre Y2K) might even recollect the blue screens with white/red text used by installers of most games. The text below is not an image, but created using text characters. <br />
<br />
<pre>╒═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╕
│ │▓▓
│ ____ ___ __ __ ____ ___ __ __ ___ ___ ___ │▓▓
│ | \ / _] T |l j / _] T__T T| T T / _] │▓▓
│ | D ) / [_| | | | T / [_| | | || _ _ | / [_ │▓▓
│ | / Y _] | | | | Y _] | | || \_/ |Y _] │▓▓
│ | \ | [_l : ! | | | [_l ` ' !| | || [_ │▓▓
│ | . Y| T\ / j l | T\ / | | || T │▓▓
│ l__j\_jl_____j \_/ |____jl_____j \_/\_/ l___j___jl_____j │▓▓
│ │▓▓
│ http://reviewme.oz-apps.com │▓▓
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘▓▓
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓
Created with Monodraw</pre><br />
On a personal recollection it reminded me of the time when drawing text box frames on screen was the rage, either via C using the curses library or in FoxPro using the Box command. On Unix systems there was a utility called Banner that allowed you to create large text like a banner, then there was Figlet a utility that allowed you to create fancy text using ASCII characters and include them in email signatures, BBS headers, etc. I definitely recollect using since 93.<br />
<br />
<h2 align="left">What else</h2>Monodraw advertises itself as a "Powerful ASCII art editor designed for the Mac" and that is what it does. It does so like a professional editor with layers and selections that are easy to move, layer, edit and delete. It offers a palette of ASCII and Unicode characters to choose from while using the various tools. The thing to note about Monodraw its that it is an early r at ver 1.0(83) which means that there are a lot many things to be expected to be added to Monodraw.<br />
<br />
There is special emphasis on smart lines and shapes, that retain their connectivity while you can move the boxes around. As you can see in the animation above. The lines themselves can be altered to behave in different ways, like Automatic diagram connection, stepped lines. The end points can also be customised to have arrows, circles in fact any ASCII/Unicode character that you want.<br />
<br />
From a user experience, if you are used to using Mac applications, Monodraw is seamless and intuitive, there is not much to think about while working with it. As a user that has been using ASCII art for over 2 decades and has used several tools, the only other tool that comes close to what Monodraw offers is Jave. With which there are a feature or two that Jave does better but Monodraw wins hands-down on most other features. Personally I am impressed with the ability to work with layers and modify them individually. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilHr_1HaG8leG7ylLPXtWcVVBET1iCdzic2JOO2cGtR3Ysw-AouDdt5wqJJxzmXOcjpHVIKjYp_DH1EG18U-fUqc5mPb_-dxM6v3x7GKT6tz684IA1IykdYtPOI1plQPpKLaZNGtS6S3s/s1600/CreateBox.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilHr_1HaG8leG7ylLPXtWcVVBET1iCdzic2JOO2cGtR3Ysw-AouDdt5wqJJxzmXOcjpHVIKjYp_DH1EG18U-fUqc5mPb_-dxM6v3x7GKT6tz684IA1IykdYtPOI1plQPpKLaZNGtS6S3s/s1600/CreateBox.gif" /></a></div><br />
<br />
The couple of things that I feel could be added (I am sure might be on the roadmap)<br />
1. A Circle shape, at this time Monodraw does not create a Circle/Oval shape. <br />
<br />
2. The pencil tools needs to be better, it currently uses a fixed character. This could be varied to use different characters to provide a more realistic line, like this example here<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF3Ds63Z8kDuNqUIY-A2qVZdc9EjvliKduDtIV6xvG0_gk55xVYX3eMnZtPdhz8hZFte0tbnZ7mF0TpiyQ1j2Sd-85rt4Mws5Ly2xPFm0T1GjvyiERQaaG-maf8MQFd8Nr-yeFdGIeDFQ/s1600/DrawASCII.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhF3Ds63Z8kDuNqUIY-A2qVZdc9EjvliKduDtIV6xvG0_gk55xVYX3eMnZtPdhz8hZFte0tbnZ7mF0TpiyQ1j2Sd-85rt4Mws5Ly2xPFm0T1GjvyiERQaaG-maf8MQFd8Nr-yeFdGIeDFQ/s1600/DrawASCII.gif" /></a></div><br />
3. If a selection could be moved. When you select a couple of character in a diagram, if you press a key, the entire selection is replaced with that character. However if there was a way to select and move that row or column of characters, it would be so much more helpful.<br />
<br />
4. Recording and Playback. This is a wishlist, a lot of ASCII artists prefer to be able to record the keystrokes and then play them back thereby allowing for ASCII animations.<br />
<br />
These wish list features do not detract from the usability of Monodraw and might be added soon in the upcoming features.<br />
<br />
<h2 align="left">Summary</h2>Monodraw is a very useful tool in the arsenal of a developer, specially when it takes away the process of dealing with actual ASCII and helps layer the same to easily create stunning ASCII art and diagrams.<br />
<br />
Monodraw is now available from the Helftone website as a trial version, you can purchase a license and activate your copy.<br />
<br />
<br />
SUMMARY<br />
Software : Monodraw<br />
Version : 1.0 (83)<br />
Publisher : Helftone<br />
Website : <a href="http://monodraw.helftone.com/">http://monodraw.helftone.com/</a><br />
Twitter : @monodraw<br />
Platform : Mac OS X (10.9.x or higher) <br />
Demo : Available <br />
Price : $49.99 (USD) <br />
<br />
Note: We do not have a giveaway for Monodraw at the moment, follow us on Twitter at @whatsin4me, if we might have a giveaway, you would be informed about it.<br />
OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-31877499189816818632015-04-26T22:34:00.001+10:002015-04-26T22:34:21.259+10:00Make your own Publications easily on an Apple Mac with Publisher PlusThe Mac is known as the best option for creating graphics and brochures, etc. These were packages like Illustrator, Photoshop, Quark Xpress, Pagemaker and some of them disappeared, some upgraded. Then there were windows versions of the same packages, however one thing remained that was these were cannons when all that the user wanted was a hammer. You had to pay for the whole lot of features that you did not need, when all you wanted was to place some text and images.<a name='more'></a><br />
Following the Mac App Store, one application that has shown that it is not just the big corporations that make amazing tools was Pixelmator. It rivaled Photoshop and offers most of the features that an average home user would require and for windows users, there is Paint.Net.<br />
<br />
Today we are looking at Publisher Plus from Pearl Mountain Software, which is a Mac only software for creating Publications, Magazines, Brochures, etc. If you have been using computers when they used to be 8-bit and ran off TV's as monitors, then you would know of a Brodurbund package called Print Master, this ran on the CGA/EGA resolution and allowed you to create brochures and print then to a Dot Matrix printer. This is not as lo-res and limited as that would be today. The beauty of this package is its simplicity. It is made for one task and one task only - To allow you to create a publication.<br />
<br />
When you start the application, it looks like what Office or Apple Works products would look like, it offers a list of templates that you can choose from to base your publication from.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjET8_aQPA09tUcGJkA3RRP_BeHFuSRhIMYV1tU4F4wa2mq2gRUZdIA2vxzMuzTVvuho6egGH3-71bhmonDN6ZOzqZF_B0HNTI1ZLteApR5feAtxmzUvfzIpWRhRkRPurTExGFpE724_gY/s1600/%5B2015-04-25030229%5D++Publisher+Plus-Templates.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjET8_aQPA09tUcGJkA3RRP_BeHFuSRhIMYV1tU4F4wa2mq2gRUZdIA2vxzMuzTVvuho6egGH3-71bhmonDN6ZOzqZF_B0HNTI1ZLteApR5feAtxmzUvfzIpWRhRkRPurTExGFpE724_gY/s320/%5B2015-04-25030229%5D++Publisher+Plus-Templates.png" /></a></div><br />
Then choose a type of publication you want to create, and you have the options to change or add elements to it. There are 5 major elements, they are Text, Shape, Free Hand, Calendar and Background. The calendar is a new type, which displays a calendar. You can choose from the 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12 month format which is handy to include a calendar on your publication. You do not have to manually set up cells and align the boxes, and lay them out. The colors, alignment, display can all be tweaked by selecting a couple of options.<br />
<br />
The Background allows you to change the dull white background to a solid color or a pattern or a custom image. Though using a pattern is a prettier option (there are plenty of subtle and lovely patterns to choose from).<br />
<br />
The shapes and text are what you would expect in most applications, and have all the attributes presented in the inspector to change.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGy5UcCiWoHHOo1S2u2OlIY_moqzLtVFPLMKJ9_1IV6506Kw1tHXDXONw0Sg054ivbITeHO_PzKaO8_-U3GCkLcAiQFbAsN5DQeyqTj9bWflhovd-oBN02vYPcyBtCxYpJtITO0VWAk2s/s1600/%5B2015-04-26103356%5D++Publisher+Plus-Untitled+2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGy5UcCiWoHHOo1S2u2OlIY_moqzLtVFPLMKJ9_1IV6506Kw1tHXDXONw0Sg054ivbITeHO_PzKaO8_-U3GCkLcAiQFbAsN5DQeyqTj9bWflhovd-oBN02vYPcyBtCxYpJtITO0VWAk2s/s320/%5B2015-04-26103356%5D++Publisher+Plus-Untitled+2.png" /></a></div><br />
There are a whole lot of features that are under the surface and not apparent, you can lock layers, rotate, add gradients, etc. You can also export your design at the end to a variety of image formats and also as PSD or PDF formats.<br />
<br />
The app is quite moderately priced, it is quite simple and intuitive to use that even kids can use it. There is a large collection of templates that are available so you would not have to spend a lot of time creating your own, you could simply use one of the pre-exisiting templates. Having worked with Quark, PageMaker and Print Master, You have time to get a coffee because you are done, not because it is still processing and creating the outputs.<br />
<br />
There is one thing that stumps me, which is the Publisher Lite available on the Mac App Store with 45 templates is available for free. The 6 In-App purchase options (Template Packs) are $0.99 each which add up to $6.00. The Full pack with 170 templates is $19.99 which does not justify the $39.90 price to buy from the website.<br />
<br />
SUMMARY<br />
Software : Publisher Plus<br />
Version : 1.5.0<br />
Publisher : Pearl Mountain <br />
Website : <a href="http://www.pearlmountainsoft.com/publisherplus">http://www.pearlmountainsoft.com/publisherplus</a><br />
Platform : Mac OS X (10.6.8 or higher) <br />
Price : $39.90<br />
Mac App Store : <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/publisher-plus/id862880554?mt=12">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/publisher-plus/id862880554?mt=12</a><br />
OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-69816752138846035452015-04-01T23:28:00.000+11:002015-04-01T23:28:52.476+11:00Mark your images - Watermark plus them<a href="http://www.pearlmountainsoft.com/n_img/product/watermarkplus/f_02.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://www.pearlmountainsoft.com/n_img/product/watermarkplus/f_02.jpg" /></a><br />
This is one software that was so simple to use that it was a bit difficult to find words to describe how it works. The simplicity of this is probably so self evident that everyone would get it. However before you use the software, there is one question that pops in your mind, what is a watermark or what is watermark plus?<a name='more'></a><br />
A watermark is simply a text or an image that is placed on another image to protect it or to authenticate it. Billions of people around the world have seen watermarks and some amazingly beautiful watermarks on currencies. In majority of the currency notes the watermarks are used to identify or rather help identify between a fake and the real deal. The other is for all computer users that have every searched for an image on Google or any other search engine, would have found a series of images with the copyright or the name across the image. This is to deter the use of the image without purchasing the image.<br />
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So now that we know what a watermark is, what is watermark plus? This is not the new version of watermark, but a software from Pearl Mountain that allows you to create watermarks on your image or images interactively. Call it a design editor for Watermarking your images. You can drag drop an Image and/or text onto the image and save it with the watermark. There are a couple of available images like wax seals, shields, ribbons, decos, etc that you can use to overlay your images. You can also add your own image.<br />
Text can be added and either be used as simply text or as a script that is repeated across the image.<br />
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That’s all there is to it. There were a few things that could have made the experience even better like<br />
1. The text is repeated uniformly. It's like the first rule of making walls in drawing, in Lego or even in real life, you stagger the bricks to have a more pleasing and stronger looking wall. When drawn, the wall looks like a matrix (if not staggered), With Legos or real bricks the walls could be knocked down easily in strips.<br />
2. The Shadow and Glow effects did not render and if they were available with a particular style then that wasn't very evident.<br />
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These as mentioned earlier are not major issues and do not hamper the use of the software. For the lack of another image, here's an image of the cover of my new book with a couple of watermark elements applied across it.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4wfkxvHXxdCFILGSvJ6t0kBdtaYsJZYJbSoX3WLXFWqNHwVhd0iePkmrJy1AwxQagecumYTq_G1eOfGTVvFYSu7ztnstUdyDewsMXF6pSE4NHDyVW6E6I-8mITlnes18YR3vCgl3hT8Y/s1600/%5B2015-04-01103204%5D++Watermark+Plus-Watermark+Plus.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4wfkxvHXxdCFILGSvJ6t0kBdtaYsJZYJbSoX3WLXFWqNHwVhd0iePkmrJy1AwxQagecumYTq_G1eOfGTVvFYSu7ztnstUdyDewsMXF6pSE4NHDyVW6E6I-8mITlnes18YR3vCgl3hT8Y/s320/%5B2015-04-01103204%5D++Watermark+Plus-Watermark+Plus.png" /></a><br />
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SUMMARY<br />
Software : Watermark Plus<br />
Version : 1.5.0<br />
Publisher : Pearl Mountain <br />
Website : <a href="http://www.pearlmountainsoft.com/watermarkplus/">http://www.pearlmountainsoft.com/watermarkplus/</a><br />
Platform : Mac OS X (10.7.x [Lion] or higher) <br />
Price : $19.90<br />
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Note: We were approached by the publishers offering a copy for review. They are offering you the reader a free copy if you write a good review for them on your site. You could enter directly to have the chance to win a free copy of this software, alternatively you can let us know and we can try to get some giveaway copies for you in case you do not want to write a review.OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-57185847088610447482015-03-27T03:51:00.001+11:002015-03-27T03:51:17.519+11:00Believe the Hype - It is amazing!!Believe it or not, the Hype does live up to its name, it is true - the new version is amazing. That would be the shortest review we have had for a very long time. However, there's more to say about it, there is no BUT attached to that, it's totally unconditionally amazing and here's why<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
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We have had previous review of Hype from Tumult <a href="http://reviewme.oz-apps.com/2012/03/hype-whats-it-all-about.html">here</a>. At the time it was a wondrous new product that could change the way we work with HTML and WYSIWYG. In a short summary, Hype has a Flash like interface for creating animation, UI and Pages in HTML. <br />
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While the basic functionality of Hype remains the same to offer an easy way to create HTML Aniation with transitions and easing all from a visual interface by modifying the attributes on a timeline.<br />
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The compiled results from Hype can be used as is to serve as websites, it can also be used as a component in your websites, eBooks, presentations, etc. This is especially a very interesting and useful feature that can be used to embed precise and controlled animations in iBooks. This takes away most of the twiddling with jQuery and other scripts. The favourite or recommended framework or wrapper that is suggested by Tumult is a framework called <a href="http://www.bakerframework.com/">Baker</a> which is open source and available on GitHub in version 4.3.<br />
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Here is a video that introduces the features in Hype in addition to those that were already present.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='720' height='532' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/aZVfXXOoDNY?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
Working with Hype immediately brings to mind similarities it has to some other softwares like Flash, Director from Adobe in the early to mid 2000's and now to SpriteBuilder that creates a compiled file using the Cocos2D framework that is essentially a wrapper on this. These compiled files would not have worked without the wrapped with most of the other software while the Hype files are standalone and could also be used with a wrapper like Cordova/PhoneGap. These are also responsive and would adapt to different sizes (unless you have specific fixed sizes). These would render perfectly across a variety of web browsers. The best part is if you can create the animation as you want it with all the audio-visual elements, wrap it with a wrapper and compile it for Android and/or iOS tablets and you have an interactive application. All of it with practically no coding involved. If you want to script some elements, Hype also lets you write simple or complex scripts (in JavaScript) to manipulate these elements. That's the reason it reminds me of Adobe Director that used Lingo but then added the ability to use JavaScript as well as an alternative to script the elements.
A couple of new features that have been added to Hype3 are
Responsive Layouts
Physics
Create reusable elements using symbols
Interface themes
Rearrangable/customizable interface
Templates
Behaviours
Many new timing functions
<h2 align="left">UI Changes</h2>The new Inspectors are now embedded in the main UI than floating as they were in earlier versions. There are more new elements that you could insert onto the canvas. You do not have to create Circles or rounded rectangles anymore by changing the corner radius of the squares.
<h2 align="left">Previews</h2>Your compositions can now also be previewed (actually introduced in version 2) on a device, not just the web browsers installed on your system.
<h2 align="left">Summary</h2>Software : Hype<br>
Version : 3.0<br>
Publisher : Tumult <br>
Website : <a href="http://tumult.com/hype/">http://tumult.com/hype/</a><br>
Twitter : <a href="http://www.twitter.com/hypeapp">@hypeapp</a><br>
Platform : Mac OS X (10.8.x or higher) <br>
Demo : 14 days <br>
Price : $49.99 USD/ $99.99 USD <br>
Mac App Store : <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hype-2/id685096913">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hype-2/id685096913</a><br>
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OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-49333726858615262692014-12-14T17:20:00.000+11:002014-12-15T15:22:36.255+11:00Drawing your Animation in Code<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZkoQU2Z6aFVg3PboLiKZzOvlSbEEQHDeZE6PAdokvUugDCR_iab3AUJZ7GFCiApa0n0JENpz1xswTBiV369yuHTBzX_rOpItEA0mcd7hi5fAGI8Yb6BqCJ9M5ZMq5tLWXbVGwACvotI0/s1600/QuartzCode.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZkoQU2Z6aFVg3PboLiKZzOvlSbEEQHDeZE6PAdokvUugDCR_iab3AUJZ7GFCiApa0n0JENpz1xswTBiV369yuHTBzX_rOpItEA0mcd7hi5fAGI8Yb6BqCJ9M5ZMq5tLWXbVGwACvotI0/s320/QuartzCode.png" height="200" width="200" /></a>You are a developer and there are so many options to choose from to develop. However the biggest factor that differentiates between Apple Mobile apps and other apps is the ease and amazing effects offered. However most of this is generated via code. What if there was some way to create these animations visually? <br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Starting from the days of Adobe Flash, the canvas with a timeline was made popular. You could simply drag drop items onto the canvas and you could set the properties for these items and then when run, it would animate accordingly. <br />
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<h2 align="left">QuartzCode</h2>As a Mobile App developer, we know how QuartzCore library provides all of the amazing drawing and animation functionality. With a similar sounding name, QuartzCode provides you an Editor based option to draw and test out all of your animations and drawings.<br />
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<h2 align="left">The Cool</h2>From the samples and the videos on YouTube that demonstrate the use of QuartzCode, it is amazing. The effects are smooth and the best part is that they are self-contained. In plain words that means that you can export the animations and/or the art into code and use it in your own application. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/X6rCM0DFVxA?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br />
<h2 align="left">Why would you need this?</h2>There are a couple of reasons why someone would want this. If you are a developer and have created at least an app for the iOS; you are then aware about the images, the @2x and now the @3x. When the iPhone4 was released, developers had to now create two set of graphics, one for the lower resolution devices and one for the higher resolution. The only problem with this is that memory on mobile devices are limited. Uncompressed, the size of a graphic image at iPhone 5 screen size (1136x640) is approximately 1136x640x4 = 2,908,160 or about 2.7 MB. In a game where you have a couple of backdrops and animations, etc you graphics assets can easily reach the 20-30 MB mark. For that there were techniques like spriteSheets or Textures. We have covered a couple of applications that help you achieve that. The problem remains, now that we have a newer @3x resolution. Our existing graphics would not scale well and hence the graphic artist or you would create a newer set of graphics that suit/fit this new resolution. This is where the industry introduced vector art. This was an alternative for raster (or bitmapped images). In the earlier days of vector art, it was nothing to talk about. if you have ever worked with MS Office prior to a 2000 version, you must know ClipArt and WMF files. These were the early attempts of vector art, then there are the more current SVG formats. In all fairness, your holiday picture cannot be (as yet) captured as a SVG file, a stunning 14-15 megapixel JPEG/RAW file would be best suited for that. But for Icons, you could consider a vector drawing as it could scale down for tab bar elements and scale up for the splash screen. Even as they scale up or down, they retain the crispness and best of all, they are part of your code not images that can be nicked by others. Apart from the Vector VS Raster comparison, the other advantage is that it allows you to handcraft your animations and test them in QuartzCode tweaking the little bits that you want before exporting the results in Obj-C or Swift as source code that can be included in your application. <h2 align="left">Does it do what it Advertises?</h2>QuartzCode is at version 1.12.9 and in its current form is quite an exciting application that can provide you with most of what you would need. The objects, vectors and hand-drawn points can all be added to the canvas and edited, moved, etc. Each of the object can animations added to them. All animations are time based and the ode is generated on the fly adapted to be generated for iOS/Mac in Obj-C or Swift. <h2 align="left">Code? Tell me more...</h2>This is becoming quite popular and is seen with PaintCode, Stencyl, and a whole lot of other softwares. This Visual programming paradigm might one day take over. This is not something new, in the past there have been many software packages that have provided abstraction between the code generated and the visual editor. A lot of Web Editors provide you with something similar. Back on the topic, if we drew a circle on the screen, we would get something like <pre lang="ObjC">import UIKit
class CustomView:UIView {
var oval:CAShapeLayer!
override init(frame:CGRect) {
super.init(frame: frame)
setupLayers()
}
required init(coder: aDecoder) {
super.init(coder: aDecoder)
setupLayers()
}
func setupLayers() {
oval = CAShapeLayer()
oval.frame = CGRectMake(67. 130, 46, 45)
oval.fillColor = UIColor(red:0.922, green: 0.922, blue:0.922, alpha:1).CGColor
oval.strokeColor = UIColor(red:0.329, green: 0.329, blue:0.329, alpha:1).CGColor
var ovalPath = UIBezierPath(ovalInRect: CGRectMake(0, 0, 45.785, 44.699))
oval.path = ovalPath.CGPath;
self.layer.addSublayer(oval)
}
@IBAction func startAllAnimations(sender: AnyObject!){
}
}</pre>Pretty much the same code that you would write as a coder in Xcode or any other editor of your choice. The only difference is that this is generated visually by placing a circle on the on-screen canvas and you can update your code as you reposition the item on screen visually!! When you are satisfied and good to go, just export and include the code files into your application. You could also tweak this to separate the code for Bezier Drawing. Of course there is a custom file full of utility functions that assist this code (nothing in the sample above uses any of that code). This file called QCMethod is also exported with your work. <h2 align="left">Show me the results</h2>The developer has created several videos and they can be found here <a href="http://www.quartzcodeapp.com/examples/">http://www.quartzcodeapp.com/examples/</a>. Custom Views and custom animated views are now much easier. In addition to these videos, the developer has a wonderful repository of notes, explaining what most of the functions and terms are. <br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSQBQusHU6XdFfYqJZyZqWZFodpdAVLPehXUeynPxSt8HVSb-TnGALD1uGmun9sGOFSc_3TZJZHrj-aT1sNZPg5IXGxi9A9HUA2vKExxUsVzUTmCNthLOSYfVyQSdv4zGanswMmnq_Ugk/s1600/%5B2014-12-14040843%5D++QuartzCode-Untitled+2.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSQBQusHU6XdFfYqJZyZqWZFodpdAVLPehXUeynPxSt8HVSb-TnGALD1uGmun9sGOFSc_3TZJZHrj-aT1sNZPg5IXGxi9A9HUA2vKExxUsVzUTmCNthLOSYfVyQSdv4zGanswMmnq_Ugk/s320/%5B2014-12-14040843%5D++QuartzCode-Untitled+2.png" /></a> <br />
However there are two things that one must note, <br />
1. You need to either have a good understanding of CoreAnimation and QuartzCore or have good clear concepts about animation. <br />
2. If you have neither, you can still create amazing stuff but you might have to visit the videos a few times to see what was done to achieve that particular effect. The videos do not have voice or text overlays so it could be a bit difficult for the beginner. <br />
<h2 align="left">The Hits and the Misses</h2><b>First the Hits</b> <br />
Some of the things that I loved with QuartzCore are the Timing Functions, you can visually set these by altering a graph. This is quite handy to create animations. Specially if you do not understand maths. <br />
Till date, majority of the animations were based on moving the x, y co-ordinates of a sprite/object. If you have read the principles of Animation (the Disney version) you would know that dynamism in animation comes from a lot more than just displacing an object. It involves squashing and stretching. Watch any old Tom & Jerry or Warner Bros cartoons, even some old Disney ones for a visual understanding. When animation became digital, cell animation was fine, but these techniques would being alive basic objects like circles and rectangles without the need of cell animation. Then recently, someone came up with the animated Hamburger menu, where the three hamburger lines morphed into a cancel button and vice-versa. There is an open source project that has a couple of these providing a set of buttons that can morph into the other. <br />
Long story short, creating that for the beginner is a bit too involved. However with QuartzCode, this is like staging any other animation. The results are nothing short of amazement. It was right there, these properties were all animatable and not many developers used the strokeEnd or the strokeStart to animate. With QuartzCode, you can explore a lot more properties and achieve amazing effects added to your apps. There are some other interesting components that need a mention too. The CAReplicatorLayer, now I have not seen a lot of reference to this or samples that use this, worse still that Apple has no code samples for all of their API's. Something that Microsoft had covered since their Windows 3.1 API 5 volume set. Each API had some code to show how things worked or were used. Personally after seeing the video, I can visualise so many more uses for this. I have not used this in the past, but now intend to use this in the future. Look at the Spinning Indicator using Replicator sample/video for details on this component. <br />
The Other is the Effect Layer, this is more like a Group Animation, where all the elements are applied the same transforms. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/TU0TrgKRTY0?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
My personal favourite is the Text Animation, where you can split text into curves and then animate the stroke and fill on each to animate the construction of the text. Simple effects generated via code and can take over a lot of cell/frame based animation AND would scale and remain crisp on an iPhone4 to a iPad Air or even the newer iMac Retina.
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI0m8FuFGo6uzwIPs-VQb5xSpQRUO7vrkZImFxCd3ZZ45R47f5dPFSMNGEgmBT8eScR3g7P7EVZZpNBktzrbtYbowqaSKEx8-zuH5mhv2Vke-ZbUrr_NsLWzP8JX1fQQY_Mhb2CqdevNM/s1600/%5B2014-12-14040859%5D++QuartzCode-Code+Generator.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI0m8FuFGo6uzwIPs-VQb5xSpQRUO7vrkZImFxCd3ZZ45R47f5dPFSMNGEgmBT8eScR3g7P7EVZZpNBktzrbtYbowqaSKEx8-zuH5mhv2Vke-ZbUrr_NsLWzP8JX1fQQY_Mhb2CqdevNM/s320/%5B2014-12-14040859%5D++QuartzCode-Code+Generator.png" /></a>
<!-- >
<b>The Misses</b>
There are a couple of issues that the developer would definitely look into in the coming versions
1. The project navigation bar could be slightly better with the transforms as sub-items, a bit confusing when they disappear or appear on selection.
2. In most drawing packages, using the Shift key signals either to retain the aspect ratio or keep the line straight horizontally or vertically. With QC, if you are drawing a vector and press shift, it just stops. No idea on what happened or is happening.
3. You cannot draw a vector line, you have to draw a closed path. If in the middle you tap any other type, you can draw that and if you click vector again, the vector points already drawn are persisted.
4. There should be a better way to set the anchor point on the objects.
5. The one that I feel is most important, if there is a transform, one would require the toValue and the fromValue. However, the toValue is enabled where as you have to explicitly enable the fromValue and set it to zero. If this could be automatic, it saves so many unnecessary clicks.
6. Related to the transforms, if you insert keyframes, the markers are updated arbitrarily. For example, if I set a marker a 0.2 and 0.4 on an animation of 0.6 seconds, if I specify this to be a 1.0 or 2.0 duration animation, the markers do not stay at 0.2 r 0.4, nor do they scale up in the same ratio/proportion. This is frustrating to set the key frames again as there is no easy y to drag manage the same. These are minor irritants and not a show stopper
<!- -->
<h2 align="left">Summary</h2>All in all, firstly, there is no other software that helps you create animations visually. Secondly, these are all generated by using what Apple has offered in their own API, not using a 3rd party library. The included QCMethod file are helper functions than anything else. In my opinion, this is not only for non-developers to create animations, but for developers as well to better understand and use these in their own applications. <br />
<h2 align="left">Competition</h2>Are there other contenders? Is there anything else that comes close or does something similar? The first thing that many would say on first sight is Oh, PaintCode! However this is not PaintCode. PaintCode is a different piece of software that caters to generating UI's from the drawn elements. QuartzCore uses the QuartzCore library to provide and visually draw animations. The developer has something similar in the genre of PaintCode called BezierCode (review coming soon). There are some other competitors to PaintCode and BezierCode like Qwarkeee, CGSnippets, QBlocks and many more. The major point of difference is that this generates both Objective-C and Swift code, where as some generate only Objective-C code. <br />
<h2 align="left">App Details</h2>Software : QuartzCode <br />
Version : 1.12.9 <br />
Publisher : Wan Ahmad Lutfi <br />
Website : www.quartzcodeapp.com <br />
Twitter : @<a href="http://www.twitter.com/quartzcode">quartzcode</a> <br />
Platform : Mac OS X (10.9.x or higher) <br />
Demo : <a href="http://www.quartzcodeapp.com/?smd_process_download=1&download_id=791">Free Trial Version</a> <br />
Price : $89.99 USD or ($114.99 AUD) <br />
Mac App Store : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quartzcode-vector-animation/id913523893?ls=1&mt=12 <br />
<br />
And we have the developer providing a couple of licenses (3 - Three) of QuartzCode for some lucky winners, all you need to do <br />
<br />
1. Follow @whatsin4me <br />
2. Retweet the message "Read reviewme.oz-apps.com, follow @whatsin4me and RT this msg. Might win a copy of #QuartzCode from @quartzcode" <br />
<br />
<b>NOTE:</b> To be eligible it should include both @reviewme and @quartzcode and the lucky winners will be determined and the licenses issued directly from the developer. The cut off for this is 24th December 2014. Do not miss this chance.<br />
<br />
and you could also Follow us on Facebook by liking our page at <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/ReviewMe/137640632964588">http://www.facebook.com/pages/ReviewMe/137640632964588</a>
OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-3238752280574727332014-12-10T03:49:00.000+11:002014-12-10T03:49:55.353+11:00Xojo it makes you feel like XOXO - New Features<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7Lrah3eculGcUvWH88byr1VTEsp9xd_nuFys7sKHjqZ7blGKPHcXt_C5oBUvDA7xVBgvnDaQI81Qxku2ZfbGdQjC5pCUL9c4NMt665X8l5NgHcW7EHiauI0wr-jxE0feMbPzxhO6pqus/s1600/xojo_ide_128.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7Lrah3eculGcUvWH88byr1VTEsp9xd_nuFys7sKHjqZ7blGKPHcXt_C5oBUvDA7xVBgvnDaQI81Qxku2ZfbGdQjC5pCUL9c4NMt665X8l5NgHcW7EHiauI0wr-jxE0feMbPzxhO6pqus/s320/xojo_ide_128.png" /></a></div>Want to create applications for the desktop and mobile devices? Many developers are looking at that but the problem is that there isn't one language and framework that makes this task easy. The reason for suggesting that Xojo should be renamed as XOXO is that it actually makes you feel that way. The only language that can offer both Mobile and Desktop with an easy to use language is Swift.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Let's look at how much work is needed with Xojo in building an iOS application?<br />
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<h2 align="left">Step 1</h2>Start a new Xojo Project of type iOS<br />
<br />
<h2 align="left">Step 2</h2>Click on the View section to see the device<br />
<br />
<h2 align="left">Step 3</h2>Drag a Label, a TextField, a Button and a Table onto the device. Tap the edit (pencil icon) to change the text of the Label to 'Name :', edit the text of the Button to Add. Refer to th image for more details.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwuxMzFfl0nD2oxadopKTugyckawRcaIiRFw8C9ezpMTRo-YPjbOmBiIeQrGIDbikVYO0t4lmQrzrCSTkDFn4S5fokapT0PDH2mEL68Cc2938LQfde0TpR63LgIiNosHlXcgDTVdJ7FDw/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-12-10+at+2.41.37+am.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwuxMzFfl0nD2oxadopKTugyckawRcaIiRFw8C9ezpMTRo-YPjbOmBiIeQrGIDbikVYO0t4lmQrzrCSTkDFn4S5fokapT0PDH2mEL68Cc2938LQfde0TpR63LgIiNosHlXcgDTVdJ7FDw/s320/Screen+Shot+2014-12-10+at+2.41.37+am.png" /></a><br />
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<h2 align="left">Step 4</h2>Double Tap the Button. Choose Action from the list of options for EventHandlers. Type in the code<br />
<pre lang="vb">Table1.Addow(0, TextField1.Text)
TextField1.Text = ""
</pre><br />
Double tap the device and select Open from the EventHandler options and in the editor, type the code<br />
<pre lang="vb">Table1.AddSection("Names")
</pre><br />
That's all, now if you run the application, you can type a name in the textfield and press the Add button and it gets added into the TableView. No creating Delegates, DataSources, etc. You have actually written just three lines of code.<br />
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You can also add another label at the bottom of the table and edit the text to "0 Record(s)". In the Action code of Button1, after the <code>TextField1.Text = "" </code> you can type <br />
<pre lang = "vb"> Label2.Text = Table1.RowCount(0).ToText + " Record(s)"
</pre><br />
That simple and easy. While majority of the iOS classes are available via Xojo. Not all the iOS SDK classes are available in the same fashion as you would expect (if you have worked with the iOS SDK).<br />
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Press run and your code is run in the iOS Simulator. This can be set via the iOS Settings option. InclInclude like iOS Team, Entitlements, Bundle Identifier and other details like is this build for the App Store.<br />
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<h2 align="left">In Summary</h2>It has been a long wait, there was talk about adding iOS functionality to Xojo. It is finally here and it works quite well. Building non-game applications are surprisingly easy and fast. It is worth giving it a try. Admittedly it does not support cross platform at this time. This is the first release, so definitely there will be more iterations which could bring more features to Xojo.<br />
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More details on Xojo can be found at http://www.xojo.com/ and you can download it to try for free. You can get a Xojo license that develops iOS apps for $299 or if you have the Pro license, you can add iOS for $199. If you have an Enterprise license, then iOS is already included in that.<br />
OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-69633512775690710902014-11-28T17:14:00.000+11:002014-11-28T21:59:38.873+11:00SOS - Save Our Phones<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCAm5MliCHRzfveSQbpGBFrhGl_zVL0hHWPJvUgL0t-YwdoKZ8l-7ZapL6wXJjG7KY3HGNHybUoebcXVDK4vvKt3pa9vIIVQW99I49kTwTj1LuElb-c0EaJ7xu0jq6mVbby313i1cf6ok/s1600/UAG_Case.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCAm5MliCHRzfveSQbpGBFrhGl_zVL0hHWPJvUgL0t-YwdoKZ8l-7ZapL6wXJjG7KY3HGNHybUoebcXVDK4vvKt3pa9vIIVQW99I49kTwTj1LuElb-c0EaJ7xu0jq6mVbby313i1cf6ok/s320/UAG_Case.jpg" /></a>I love my mobile devices, not just aesthetically, but also as in not wanting them to have a scratch. In the past there were phones like the Ericsson's that had the antenna in the middle and I have personally heard stories from Aircraft Engineers that have sworn that that was the only phone that has plummeted down from the top of the bridge while working on a plane and survived. Things have changed, phones are no longer sturdy, they are delicate, large screens, etc. The most common feature that I have seen with people is a Chipped or a broken screen.<a name='more'></a><br />
So how do you save your phone. It's just a phone, yes but then it is an expensive one for that matter. It helps to have some protection to safeguard the same. They are nearly as expensive or in many cases dearer than Laptops.<br />
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I got my iPhone 6+ a couple of weeks ago. The first impressions of the phone were that it was a bit too large to hold in the hand. Add to that the slender and sleek body of the phone, it almost feels like it's going to pop out of your hand any time. I looked for some cases and most of the cases were silicon sleeves for the back of the phone. The other issue with the new iPhones is that the camera is not flush with the back so every time you place it on the table or a surface, the camera comes in contact with that surface first. worst still is if someone pushes it aside or drags it, the chances of the camera lens/glass gathering scratches is very high.<br />
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So the quest for some good covers led me to a couple of manufacturers websites. Today we are looking at one from UAG (Urban Armour Gear). A case adds a whole lot of weight and size to a phone, so one of my expectations from a case it to then allow me to carry some cards, etc with the phone. The product that stool out ticking the boxes was the Scout Folio (in Black) or the Rouge Folio (in Red). <br />
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<h2 align="left">First Impressions</h2>Here are the first impressions for the Scout Folio (black) UAG case for the iPhone 6+<br />
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I got a package in the mail and had a slip for collecting an oversized package. Oversized as per the definition of the Post department since it could not fit in my Post Box. The box is slightly large sitting at 23cm x 14cm. I can stack about 4 Phones in that space. The case has a slot at the rear to feel the material the case is made of.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilKNanBKBfUn_DALDDmUAzCcKRAsKmDYxow43rRcAy8nsvNun-WwTv8oWvLRXMLJyZLzUbSv6jxyQEEUSts3AvuMFLywR6KKCcO9s489lcPpLs0xNvvlhnmNojh2cB98KAbNhTz_VRZSY/s1600/UAG_CaseInsde.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilKNanBKBfUn_DALDDmUAzCcKRAsKmDYxow43rRcAy8nsvNun-WwTv8oWvLRXMLJyZLzUbSv6jxyQEEUSts3AvuMFLywR6KKCcO9s489lcPpLs0xNvvlhnmNojh2cB98KAbNhTz_VRZSY/s320/UAG_CaseInsde.jpg" /></a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCXGADVF0qp7ZACVOuG3YP6y3del84d9mA0Bq8IYqkel658TWYtpRZ7MRgd3gbe5-w6viIJyFbGwLaIcyZJZU56tKfV05qSMLYeBg4JDMw14GsaqVtGnYFK-4aR7BnmLc18hpaM0n5_3k/s1600/UAG_Box.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCXGADVF0qp7ZACVOuG3YP6y3del84d9mA0Bq8IYqkel658TWYtpRZ7MRgd3gbe5-w6viIJyFbGwLaIcyZJZU56tKfV05qSMLYeBg4JDMw14GsaqVtGnYFK-4aR7BnmLc18hpaM0n5_3k/s320/UAG_Box.jpg" /></a><br />
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Upon opening the package, the case has a special feeling, it is a combination of Hardened Silicone Rubber and rubberized Snake Skin. UAG call it their trademarked Water Resistant Frog Skin. The feel of the case is amazing and the phone fits inside snugly. The Volume buttons and the On/Off switch have a rubber button on top protecting it, it is the Mute button that is left alone. There is a slot on the cover for the speaker, so you can speak with the cover closed, which is good. Specially for those that have a higher rate of perspiration or are in areas of higher humidity/heat. The cover is Water Proof so it should handle the sweat without breaking any sweat (pun intended) where as I have seen several leather covers that have been spoiled due to sweat.<br />
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The headphone slot, the charging slot and the speaker are available at the bottom through hardened rubber and the top has a similar banding for the Camera. Apart from this safety facet, the back of the case has a lovely grill that displays the UAG logo and also allows for dissipating the heat (if the phone gets too hot for any reason)<br />
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All in all, The case is lighter than the iPhone, but when put together, the phone in the case seems a little heavy. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Yes if your criteria is weight, then you would be better off with a silicon skin that does nothing other than protect it from scratches. The encased phone seems very sturdy in your hand. It seems like a slightly larger wallet. This particular case is Military Grade drop tested (MIL STD 810G 516.6) In all honesty, I am not yet game to consciously drop my phone to test the durability of this case. Since this are the First Impressions, it seems that it would work and protect the phone. I have tried to bounce the case off the floor prior to placing the phone in it and that seemed to give me some confidence that in the event that my phone might want to sky dive off my hands onto the pavement below, the case would cushion that.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdD7RqfWeEfTJRd0b4Tr64k57HkIE52rI15G9NFeNK8BPW86Fd41aEuV2ccYxNnjrmYzCf6Al7o9UZvbSu0s9lrEFw8vbz-JfYcv42nW6reaHo2gPSbSiq2BIWcZOZqJK9lSKWSkKF57U/s1600/Cards.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdD7RqfWeEfTJRd0b4Tr64k57HkIE52rI15G9NFeNK8BPW86Fd41aEuV2ccYxNnjrmYzCf6Al7o9UZvbSu0s9lrEFw8vbz-JfYcv42nW6reaHo2gPSbSiq2BIWcZOZqJK9lSKWSkKF57U/s320/Cards.jpg" /></a><br />
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The ability to hold upto 3 credit cards is good, but it might seem not enough When you would want it to be a replacement. It would have been nice to also hold a few currency notes. Here in Australia, since we have polymer notes, its ok to leave them in the board shorts, but if you wanted to keep them together, it just falls short. Though instead of a card you can also roll and place some cash. The card slot has a groove for easily sliding a card out, however you will have to remove the top card to access the one below it.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Pricing</h2>With all of those features and functionality, you would expect that the price of this case to be in the range of about AUD $45-75 as most of the cases are, including silicone sleeves. Surprisingly, this lovely action packed case is available for $39.95 USD and includes FREE Worldwide Shipping. The case was shipped by UAG the very next day from placing the order (the postmark on the package confirms that), however it took about 3 weeks for it to physically reach me, which is an issue with the time taken by both US Post and Australia Post.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Summary</h2>These are only first impressions, a followup would make sense after a couple of weeks of usage on the long term durability and quality of the case. There is one place that has stitching on which the cover of the case literally hinges upon. If the stitching starts to come apart, the cover would fail. However the remaining part of the case is a single mold and would continue to protect your phone from all sides. The phone sits about 0.5cm inset into the case, so if it does fall face down without a cover, the screen would not impact with the surface below, however if there are pebbles or rocks that are larger than 0.5 cm it could have a point of impact on the screen. The phone inside the case gives you confidence that the iPhone by itself does not. It does cover up the phone but it makes it look and feel invincible.<br />
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Given the price, the weight, the features of the case, this is a must buy for those with an iPhone 6+ for sure. The iPhone gets transformed into your own Armoured phone against accidentally dropping it.<br />
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<br />
SUMMARY<br />
Product : Folio<br />
Version : Scout<br />
Manufacturer : Urban Armour Gear<br />
Website : <a href="http://www.urbanarmorgear.com/products/scout-folio-iphone-6-plus-case">http://www.urbanarmorgear.com/products/scout-folio-iphone-6-plus-case</a><br />
Twitter : @UrbanArmourGear<br />
Device : Apple iPhone 6+<br />
Price : $39.95<br />
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UPDATE: UAG have a promotion running for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Use the code CYBERWEEK14 at checkout. Buy one case and get the second one for 50% off.<br />
OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-17426368288139347302014-11-21T15:18:00.002+11:002014-11-21T15:18:11.934+11:00Buying a Skype Gift Card from a Supermarket? You could get Shafted!!In many places, including Australia, there are a huge number of cards available on the shelves, Google Play, Skype, iTunes, Facebook, etc. People generally buy these in numbers sometimes for individual use or sometimes for even as gifts specially around birthdays and holidays. Now you or someone you gifted the card to tries to redeem it, you are presented with a screen that says "This card is already redeemed". Before you go WHAT!! or the person you gifted it to thinks what a cheapo you are to give them a used card. Please note that the concealing paint has not been removed and you might have just scratched it off now. The cards have no value till they are paid for and activated. However the concealed PIN numbers are not really concealed (as I discovered today).<br />
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This is the main reason why I am suggesting - DO NOT BUY Skype Gift cards from the supermarkets. Here's how the PIN is skimmed off your skype card without ever scratching the paint. Please do not so this to other people, This information is to inform you of how bad or how easy it is. Skype pushes you off to manage with third parties and does not take the onus of this crappy system.<br />
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If you have an iPhone, download NeoReader (one of the best BarCode readers on iOS and Free). Now scan the barcode below the protected PIN number, it is a longish 30 digit number with 11 digits that identify the physical card and the rest is your PIN.<br />
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I am sure there are many that have been prey to this Skype Gift Card, where despite purchasing these from the store, some work and some don't. No one retains the store reciepts and once you scratch to reveal the pin, the store cannot do much with the card in terms of refunds, etc.<br />
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The amounts on these are small, so people sometimes let go, however add up these $10+ for several hundreds that get scammed, that is mega dollars. Maybe someone can shed light on how this is legally a Scam and should be liable for stolen funds and hassle.OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-16259763981684729582014-11-01T00:33:00.001+11:002014-11-01T03:01:58.727+11:00Alternatives to the Apple iPhone<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B00LsnaCQAAJt_P.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B00LsnaCQAAJt_P.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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You have read articles that talk about alternatives to Word, Excel or other popular products There have not been many articles like these because it is very difficult to have a comparison between Apple and Oranges (no pun intended).<a name='more'></a><br />
However this was the week of new phones for me, first my iPhone6+ turned up and then I saw this great deal for a Nokia Lumia 530 for less than $40 (though locked to a particular carrier, which is hardly an issue as I can use the device minus the phone features on a WiFi). The reason I was excited about the new iPhone was it is something that I need to test/develop (My iPhone 5 is in pristine condition and still running iOS 6.0) It was not being used for development at all. Playing catch up was getting difficult so I needed a phone with grunt to start with the bar up high. However with all that grunt and super wide-screen, etc it is a phone that is not comfortable to carry. I cannot imagine holding it up to my ear, so I have the headphones dangling off the iPhone 6+ (that makes it even more difficult to carry around)<br />
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So when I got the little Nokia Lumia 530, I was equally excited because this is the price range that is a good range for developers to spend for test phones. Plus since most of the phones do not last more than a year or two they should not be prices in the > $500 mark. It reminds me of the Huawei IDEOS 8150 that I had purchased as it came with Android 2.2 while most other android phones had 1.6 or 2.0. Honestly at the time I had no idea about the Android codenames and versions but the Ansca website said that you need an Android 2.2 phone to run a corona app. I learned one more thing about Androids and phones in general, they can suck. This was a phone that cost me about $200 unlocked from Dick Smith and it was slooowww and crappy. Not something that you can use for testing and worse still at the time, an Android app and made with Corona. That was a complete waste of money.<br />
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Then I got the HTC Mozart, a Windows Mobile Phone running WP7. However Microsoft had issues with the technologies one could use to develop and upload an app. You couldn't even developer unlock the phone until you had an app on the app store. So the only testing could have been on the simulator. This you could not run from a virtual machine and not off a 32-bit windows OS. Glad that Microsoft have changed a lot of things.<br />
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Androids on the other hand have gone in all directions and while the SDK is kind of singular, the devices are scattered all over the place. The one thing that Google should take from Apple's book is the way the apps scale on the new iPhone 6+. One of my app was created for the iPhone3 320x480 resolution, I know because at that time assets were fixed to that size and many positions were fixed too. That app runs as it on the iPhone4 (retina 640x960) on the 5 (640x1136) and the 6 and the 6+ (1920x1080) However if there was an app on the Android (Google Play Store) it would not work on another similar resolution android phone. Worse still if an app was run on the HTC 540x960 resolution to the Galaxy 1920x1080. However I must complement the hardware manufacturers, they are really packing the grunt into their hardware and pushing the envelope, where even Apple had to buckle and make a really big phone. Had apple made the 6 and 6+ with all the same features (Including image stabilization) then that would have truly given people the choice between a large handed and a normal/small handed phone.<br />
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So coming to the point and the title of this article, Microsoft/Nokia posted an infographic suggesting that there are choices for less (https://twitter.com/NokiaUS/status/526089593192341504) Where they have compared a $700 iPhone vs a suite of Nokia products for less than $300.<br />
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I love my iPhones legacy and I love my new Nokia Lumia 530 and given the price even more. However in my opinion this graphic is a bit flawed. Or atleast when they do compare apples and oranges, they should include all Apples. While Nokia comes with Office, One Drive, XBox Tile, Mix Radio, Lync Apple also offers its own set of tools for Free; iWorks including Keynote, Pages and Numbers, GarageBand, iMovie, Game Centre, iCloud, Messenger, Facetime and iTunes Radio. So it all comes down to the actual hardware comparison. Apple has its own set of amazing Headphones and some even more awesome (read as Expensive) beats headset options.<br />
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If we compare any > $500 phone with a < $100 phone there is really no comparison. They are entirely different products, The plastic-y cheap feel of the Lumia vs the metallic sleek feel of the iPhone. The screens, the lack of a front facing camera etc etc. The camera is a 5MP camera but I tried using the RedLaser and QR Code reader apps to read a barcode, it failed miserably; The camera is crappy. Taking pictures of people and landscapes were ok with nothing much to talk about them. It would not be harsh if I felt that the 5MP camera on the Lumia took similar pictures as the iPhone 3 did.
However the simple point is that a majority want a smartphone, one that has a camera (most want that it should be in a large number of MegaPixels) It should have a gyroscope and a touch screen and it should have loads of memory for apps and... The most important bit about phones is lost somewhere, that it is used to make a call. In that sense the Nokia Lumia 530 phone fulfills the ability to call, has a handy camera (no front facing one) has the ability to increase the phone capacity from 4GB onward with a micro SD card. It has loads of apps (The windows store is yet to mature and come of age, in comparison to the Apple and Google stores) The phone has a quad-core 1.2 CPU which is quite good for a lot many applications. It even has a GPS and an accelerometer. It has replaceable covers (not that I am a fan of that, but you can and also the fact that the battery is replaceable) My personal favourite is the Siri Alternative - Cortana. The first thing that I love about it is that it actually recognizes a non-American accent perfectly. However the results returned from the search is a big let down. If I say "Install Whatsapp" I expect the app store to start and give me the choice to install the app as requested. Instead I get a listing (I guess the results of a bing search). That is absolutely not what I wanted. The other favourite is the presence of FM Radio, which Apple could have added to the Phone (as it was already there in the iPods).
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhycHogcpFkBC5xnS5X2oahWO37xuzx9ChidWeSV7ideJIdL9BbOKMKhaBpMMrmIjR21ZMgmbqUteBMKXiaImSqhnccuFwZG2rPGUmAQwbA0mGpvrDkP476vFSwkklz9acJmG6rCxvCLTc/s1600/VoiceSearch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhycHogcpFkBC5xnS5X2oahWO37xuzx9ChidWeSV7ideJIdL9BbOKMKhaBpMMrmIjR21ZMgmbqUteBMKXiaImSqhnccuFwZG2rPGUmAQwbA0mGpvrDkP476vFSwkklz9acJmG6rCxvCLTc/s320/VoiceSearch.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Note: Maybe this is not the feature called Cortana, this could be a simple voice search instead.<br />
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The other cool thing with Windows Phones is the Project My Phone feature, something similar to the new Quicktime recording from an iOS device connected with a Lightning cable and running iOS 8. This is similar to the functionality offered via apps like Air Server or reflexions, etc. Which is quite nice to take device videos or screenshots.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2e6TOwkPyI9_87vs6zRdnPIwmM6CDxxxF9MJnqD1A6H4ovkHFUYuq3BjCLePmxvFirbnbOYUuvI-jCXGumqUgq-aZe1uH3SDA8i0bPwy561zVWyhpphQyNGfBo80Wc5LlYMN06EWE8Ns/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-11-01+at+12.54.34+am.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2e6TOwkPyI9_87vs6zRdnPIwmM6CDxxxF9MJnqD1A6H4ovkHFUYuq3BjCLePmxvFirbnbOYUuvI-jCXGumqUgq-aZe1uH3SDA8i0bPwy561zVWyhpphQyNGfBo80Wc5LlYMN06EWE8Ns/s320/Screen+Shot+2014-11-01+at+12.54.34+am.png" /></a></div><br />
Another hidden gem in the WP8.1 is the Kids corner. It might be a bit misleading when it is called the Kids Corner, think of it as a guest account for your phone. You could set the apps you want for that profile and give your phone to someone, they can only use the apps that you have set for that profile. It's called Kids corner, because you might want the kids to use those apps only. The irony of this is that there aren't enough apps on the WP to really use this feature and there are several apps on the Apple store but Apple does not offer such functionality. They did have something in the form of Guided Access but it is no where close to the Kids corner feature. I believe this was also spoken about in reference to Samsung Galaxy 5. However the WP8.1 implementation is quite well done.<br />
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From the perspective of a developer, there are three major platforms that one might want to support namely the Apple iOS, Google Android and Microsoft Windows Phone. While there are others they are either part of Androids or are not worth considering as yet. For supporting iOS you have to get the latest and greatest, for example to test out Handoff, phone calls, etc you cannot do that with an older Mac Desktop and nor can you simply add a BT 4.0 dongle, similarly the iPad 2 could not support Air Drop. With Androids, there are a lot of options available and surprisingly for an affordable price. I am personally impressed with the new range of options from LG with the 2560x1440 WQHD displays and the near zero bezel on the sides. All of these options available for < $500 however as a developer I am not as yet impressed with the Androids. The cross-platform ability of Corona, Gideros, Moai etc was useful to develop for one and deploy on both the iOS and Android. Microsoft was the only child sitting in the corner, refusing to play nice with the developers. This has changed but there are still portions that prevent true adoption of the Windows Phone system and entice developers to make apps. For example, the list of apps are a long list and to get to settings (for example) you have to keep scrolling till you get to S and then start settings. You could add it to the live tiles, but if you have just installed a new app called Zebra (for example) and want to access it, you have to keep scrolling till the end and then invoke it. <br />
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In all honesty, the Apple iPhones are an amazing piece of hardware. It is the BMW of the Phones and some of the other phones are a Toyota, Nissan or a Hyundai. Which means that they are not bad, but they are a different class and also means that they are not the Great Wall, Cherry or the Tata Nano. So to summarize, there is no real alternative to the iPhone, as those that love the iPhones cannot love the androids as much. However there are some amazing android options in a more affordable range. I have snapped pictures for a lot of people at tourist spots when they hand over their huge Phablet, now I am also one of those with the iPhone 6+. I loved the big screen when taking pictures with the Samsung's and hope that I would enjoy better with the iPhone 6+. From a smartphone perspective, a more affordable option like the Lumia 530 works equally well. <br />
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Keep a look out for how good is the Nokia Lumia for testing applications from a developers perspective using different options like Visual Studio/Visual Blend and other frameworks like Corona.<br />
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Image Source: Nokia USAOZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-66569949954540427712014-10-29T00:53:00.000+11:002014-10-29T00:53:40.844+11:00iPhone 6+ - First ImpressionsThere are already a lot of first impressions that one can read on the new iPhone and iPhone6+ online. Since the new iPhones have been released, I too have had the chance to see them first hand, but not really up close and personal to write about it. My contract was up for renewal and due to the worldwide shortage (the fact that Apple could not supply as many handsets as people purchased) They had not expected all of the handsets to have sold out immediately.<a name='more'></a><br />
To be honest and to be fair, I went to see if I needed an iPhone6 or a 6+. The closest shop to the elevator I took was JB-HiFi (http://jbhifi.com.au/) and on display were the two iPhone 6 along with an iPhone 5S next to it. The first impressions of size were pretty evident. However that was of little concern as I needed to upgrade and get a new phone and the difference between getting a 5S and a 6 was about $3 a month extra (on my telco plan). So putting them all in landscape, I played the same movie on all of them (they had the Lego movie installed on it) and stepping back I could see that the iPhone6 was a true winner for entertainment. <br />
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So to have a think, while I went shopping to the other stores, I was thinking about the same. The maximum on a 5S is 64GB, I already have an iPhone 5 64GB (though the 5S is nearly twice as fast and powerful and has the touch ID) I have to either get a 6 or stay with my 5. The other issue is that I am still running 6.0 on my iPhone 5 and am quite happy with that. I did not like and did not upgrade to iOS 7 (other than on my iPad2 which barely manages to work with iOS7) So 6 it definitely is and it would also help to test my apps and also help with testing and coding for clients and for the book I am currently authoring on Xcode and Swift.<br />
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So I made up my mind and went to the Telco shop with whom I have a contract, and they were all out of iPhone 6 128 GB models. I went to an alternative shop and there they had the 128GB but I had to wait for my telco contract than change. The short of the long story is that everyone ran out of stocks and from the start of this month till date, the telcos are struggling to fulfill orders. I am lucky to have gotten my phone today and after setting, updating, I have this to share.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxDLCyVGObQubgg5NdcOev2V0GPR5B_mvhY5KbD_xTE-Kb7B00EcpNn_OCKocvoNG_MRtEbDGABMspUbr4ZIwLb4cX26sCVFm7Tbtvwesjn48q6jvAxKK1_izxbvlTvBk_9S70Qn7TYBI/s1600/iPhoneInBox.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxDLCyVGObQubgg5NdcOev2V0GPR5B_mvhY5KbD_xTE-Kb7B00EcpNn_OCKocvoNG_MRtEbDGABMspUbr4ZIwLb4cX26sCVFm7Tbtvwesjn48q6jvAxKK1_izxbvlTvBk_9S70Qn7TYBI/s320/iPhoneInBox.jpg" /></a></div><br />
The first thing to do was to backup my iPhone 5 and then restore this phone from that backup. Since the apps are on the other phone and iPad, the iPhone 5 was quite light and empty so the backup finished rather fast and so did the restore. Only to find that the apps were not all installed. This could have been due to a couple of reasons, one being that I had cleaned up the iTunes directory and removed all of the apps to an external drive to make space on the main HDD. I faced some issues with iCloud namely because I could not remember the password and in earlier versions I could simply delete the account, now it is called Sign Off and you have to have the password to sign off from Find my Phone, etc services. Even after resetting the password, I could not get that to work, I could log-in on the mac but not on the iPhone. <br />
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Then the next hurdle was installing some of the apps and ensuring that the data was there from the restore. That went smooth though I had to dig up the passwords for the emails and set them up as the account were restored but not the password information. Since I have about 7-8 email accounts setup it is not easy remembering the passwords, add to that the issues that Google had made it difficult to even use them while I was away and everytime I reached an airport and checked my email, google thought it was suspicious and blocked access until I reset the password. It came to a stage where I had no idea on what the passwords were as I could not use an earlier used password and could not continue to use it unless I changed the password.<br />
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After all of the setup out of the way, it came back to the basic comparisons, the sizes and orientations. The iPhone 6 is nearly as big as the screen on the iPhone 6+, and the entire iPhone 5 fits in to the screen of the iPhone 6+ like a widescreen (35mm movie; if you know what that is. with black bars on the top and bottom).<br />
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Handling the iPhone 6+ is not a very plesant experience, specially since I have normal sized hands. I am sure that for those with larger hands, this fits right. The width of the iPhone 6 and the iphone 5 are more or less similar and hence for normal average hands, it fits right in. Everytime I had to handle the phone it felt as if I might just drop it. Carrying it around felt like carrying the iPad, but as it it was folded into half. In fact the Samsung Tab 2, albeit a little smaller but it visually felt as if it has the same dimensions. Handling the iPhone 5 again felt like holding a toy and it felt so convenient.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7HnIi2sd6k1Bk-4HyD1QDFuIa3wOMDGB2nAjNbgmIdNZuq3l6vDuSvurftQbRJ6-HY5e0Bi9lEhjSI9RE19fmUaonMlBhG1ehdR0YmSntRGRyJSDZ9oHSG-0BkbKvtYdbmUSyr7kKM1c/s1600/comparePhones.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7HnIi2sd6k1Bk-4HyD1QDFuIa3wOMDGB2nAjNbgmIdNZuq3l6vDuSvurftQbRJ6-HY5e0Bi9lEhjSI9RE19fmUaonMlBhG1ehdR0YmSntRGRyJSDZ9oHSG-0BkbKvtYdbmUSyr7kKM1c/s320/comparePhones.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Note the Australian 50 cent coin at the bottom left corner.<br />
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On the software front, I tried to run a couple of apps including the ones made by me. The interesting thing to note is that despite it having a HD screen resolution of 1920x1080, the apps that work on the iPhone4 or iPhoone 5 resolutions adapt well and the difference is like watching a movie on a 60" Television after watching it on a 30". Some of my apps that were created with dependencies on iOS 3.x run perfectly fine and scale well too. I also found that two of the apps crash but that is because they relied on playing an embedded resource sound file, since that does not exist, it is nil and hence it fails and crashes. But till that point, it scales and works quite well. Some of the other apps created with other frameworks using Lua.<br />
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Holding the iPhone 6+ to my ear was a bit uncomfortable given the size.<br />
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Other features like touch ID, reachability worked fine so did Air Drop. The features that interacted with the desktop did not work as my macs did not support Bluetooth 4.0 LTE. So that would remain to be tested sometime in the future. <br />
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When I had the iPhone 3, my first iPhone (after having the iPod Touch - Macy Gray version) the iPhone3 was an amazing device and most of all, it would connect on the WiFi which was not possible with the iPod Touch. While the Windows Mobile devices like the iPaq, etc would easily connect onto the wifi network. From the iPhone 3 to the iPhone 4 (I did not get the 3G as contacts are 24 months) The iPhone 4 was amazing and before they were released in the Australian markets, I had seen one with a person that purchased one outright from the UK and the other with an Apple employee at the AUC conference. The retina display was something to be excited about. From the iPhone 4 to 5 (again I did not get the 4S due to the 24 month contract) The iPhone 5 was slightly larger which was not much of an advantage over the previous screen size, I mean the additional pixels can display an iAd or a notification, nothing more. It was slightly longer but since the width was the same, it was ok. <br />
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It has been just one day with the phone so it would be too early to comment on how it feels. And carrying it around would literally require a man purse as it would not fit in any jeans pockets. Keep a look out for another detailed article after a couple of days having tested it further.OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-16446370471266684322014-10-05T01:45:00.002+10:002014-10-05T01:45:48.487+10:00New Apple DevicesThe new iPhone 6 and iOS8 was released earlier in September and despite all of the resistance and dislike the uptake is amazing.<a name='more'></a><br />
However there are a couple of things that are important and require a bit of looking into<br />
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1. Devices<br />
Apple has always been a Device manufacturer and it has been selling software for some amazing but expensive hardware. This differentiated it from Microsoft, that were software manufacturer for all device manufacturers. Then with the introduction of Tablets and Phones, iPads and iPhones took over as more popular devices than the Apple Desktops ever did. To the extent that the latest devices, the iPhone6 are now as powerful and as expensive as desktops themselves. Macbook Airs and iMacs are in the same price range as these.<br />
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2. Display resolutions<br />
The resolution of an iMac 21.5" is 1920x1080 which is the same as the resolution on the iPhone 6 Plus. The resolution on the iPhone 6 is 1334x750 which is similar to many Wintel laptop screens that were at 1344x768.<br />
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3. CPU<br />
After Apple started its own line of CPU's modelled on the ARM processors, they have been able to create some amazing powerful mobile processors that are also energy efficient. When they created the A4 they opened the doors for these powerful processors. The A8 in the new iPhone6 are supposedly exponentially powerful in comparison to the A4 processor. From 4 to 4S, there was an approximate 20% increase in performance with the Apple A4 to Apple A5 CPU. Then with the iPhone5 and the A6 CPU it provided an improvement that was nearly double than that of the 4S. Then with the 5S and the A7 it upped the performance further to achieve about 75% improvement over the iPhone5's A6 processors and then finally with the iPhone6's A8 this has once again increased to approximately 25% over the A7. All of these CPU's were created on an annual basis between 2010 and 2014.<br />
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4. Price<br />
While technology should become cheaper with every iteration but with Apple it has been the other way and no one seems to mind it. While the Windows Phones were in the range between $200-$800 and were the smartphones that actually did Word, Excel and Powerpoint and had touch screen capabilities. Now even after 10 odd years of that the prices are not going down.<br />
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5. Software<br />
When Microsoft created the PocketPC, they had something that was modeled on the Windows CE system which was similar to something between windows 95 and Windows 98. But when iOS was released and created, it was a very basic software that was slightly better than the MP3 software available in earlier iPods. It was supposedly a touch screen iPod that could then play music and video. It has come a long way from that and one can bet that with Apple's processors and software, there might be a point of unification that might see a single OS for both the Desktops and the Mobile Devices.<br />
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Having presented all of those facts and the blatant truth that the iPhone 6 is a rather large device and expensive in comparison to the earlier models. With the annual upgrades of the CPU, OS etc it is nearly forcing users to spend $1000 every two years even though the hardware quality allows the same to last for at least 5 years or more.<br />
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My iPad 1 running iOS 5.x still works perfectly fine but is at the end of it's life cycle and cannot have any updates and the CPU on the same is not adequate to run the updated OS versions. The iPad 2 managed iOS7 but is soon falling off the update wagon with iOS 8, however these two devices are perfectly fine in great condition and would by an estimate run another 4/5 years (if the software do not require updates and thereby require a newer OS)<br />
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The new iOS devices are a good thing because they now have NFC, a larger screen, faster processors, larger resolution etc but the pricing and the life of these devices are factors that are not in favour but still there is no shortage of people lapping this up, rather than point fingers, I just got an iPhone6 4.7" on a plan and ordered an iPhone 6 Plus 5.5" on another, soon I will have the need to get an iPad Mini with Retina so that it has the A7 processor which would last the next two years or so. <br />
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The first radical change that Apple introduced with the Retina display was amazing, the graphics on a LCD/mobile device was no longer pixellated but crisp like it would be in print. The next change with the longer resolution of iPhone5 was a bit strange and honestly with the iPhone6 it is ... beyond words. It was really funny watching those with iPad Mini's stuck to their ears (sarcastically referring to the Samsung Galaxy Tab type Phablets) and now Apple has put them on to a similar offering. It might be a good idea for those that have large hands but for the majority that enjoyed using the iPhones single handedly and could reach all the corners of the screen, thing are a bit different now. Watching videos is however a pleasant experience on these large screens. Lastly since from the offerings from Apple, if you have to buy something that would last for a while, you have to choose top of the range which is an iPhone 6 Plus if you choose the 5S, you get a device that is inferior in terms of screen size, battery life, processor, etc. <br />
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From a developer's perspective there are other joys and pains with the new devices and OS. Add to that the new language Swift which makes it easier to develop with in comparison to learning and using Objective-C. <br />
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Apart from the continuing prestige of the Apple brand and Swift there are issues with the quality that is expected from Apple. Technologically there cannot be any complaints but there were lesser issues with Jobs at the helm than there are now. However till the next release, I shall enjoy my iPhone 6 plus when it is delivered soon.<br />
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There would be a more in-depth review of the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus and comparison soon.OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-15897278545236362292014-07-18T19:21:00.000+10:002014-07-18T19:21:23.841+10:00Prototyping Mobile Apps<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIeO6Zve7SXUCjV7Xd6SwWTozqFLZ7cbq0U2w6j0RpyYe7EZVwDi9Bz7lrYx_DrC6yrnRN2Vx4jba-QdIMIsuUFvH5w0enkuDr5dvhpcShE5e6Gh8MJGx-NKqWDEnrUVIKvXtLmnkG6i8/s1600/5145OT.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIeO6Zve7SXUCjV7Xd6SwWTozqFLZ7cbq0U2w6j0RpyYe7EZVwDi9Bz7lrYx_DrC6yrnRN2Vx4jba-QdIMIsuUFvH5w0enkuDr5dvhpcShE5e6Gh8MJGx-NKqWDEnrUVIKvXtLmnkG6i8/s320/5145OT.jpg" /></a><br />
We are in 2014 and we still do not have flying cars, however if it is any consolation, we have better mobile/portable devices than that carried by the crew of Starship Enterprise in Star Trek. This mobile revolution has given us a lot many devices starting from the early days of DaVinci, Palm Pilot, Sharp Zaurus, etc which then paved way for Compaq iPaq, Aero etc leading up to the iPhone, Blackberry etc. While all of these devices were perfected from a small monochrome display to color displays. The early UI's basically were simple textual menus where now they are replaced by hi-res notifications, dialogs, alerts. <a name='more'></a><br />
Packt Publishing offered a copy of their book Mobile Prototyping with Axure 7 by Will hacker for review. <br />
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The book works with Axure 7 as the package for prototyping mobile devices. The books pace is well set as it takes the user through concepts gradually. The screenshots are quite detailed to get with the book if you do not have a copy of Axure. Though it looks a lot like Report Builder or a Visual Basic 6 IDE.<br />
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While there is a lot to speak about Axure which replicates a lot of features that xcode offers in terms of creating interfaces. The book is geared towards iOS devices than other android or other devices. The interfaces created generate HTML+CSS code that can offer interactivity and allow for testing the UI. <br />
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This is a mini book on how to use Axure and it delivers well with all of the resources and the app axShare which allows viewing the prototype and deploying it to clients/team.<br />
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There are a couple of good prototyping softwares that work on Mac/Win/iOS/Web to create UI's while this review is for the book, the book is well written and worth a read if you use Axure. However if you want to prototype, there could be other alternatives than Axure. Lastly, if you want to prototype for iOS devices, xCode6 has many more features and it even allows for code connection and works for not only Mobile but also desktop applications. <br />
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Till then if you are part of a team that requires to use Axure and need to brush up on your skills, this book could help you getting up to speed. It is available from Packt Publishing at <a href="http://bit.ly/1mJ7MYW">http://bit.ly/1mJ7MYW</a> OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-55176091209247214572014-06-18T01:19:00.000+10:002014-06-18T01:19:19.714+10:00The Balance Between Entertainment and Frustration - GamingGaming on these little mobile devices has become common and given the number of games that are made on a hit theme, it is no wonder that endless number of hours are wasted on these activities. It is tempting to use this as research for a paper and towards a PhD but then that is for the easy way out. However somewhere at the start of this year I started with Clash of Clans on the iPad and from there grew this experiment and my experience on the genre.<a name='more'></a><br />
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<h2 align="left">Games</h2>Tis review is looking at a couple of games in this genre, these games are spread over three devices the iPad, iPhone and an Android tablet. The games that are used for comparison are<br />
Clash of Clans (iOS and Android)<br />
Boom Beach (iOS 7+ only)<br />
Battle Command (Android Only)<br />
World Battle (Android Only)<br />
Samurai Siege (iOS and Android)<br />
Second Earth (Android Only)<br />
Kingdom Clash (iOS only)<br />
Backyard Monsters Unleashed (iOS only)<br />
Clash of Lords 2 (iOS and Android)<br />
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<h2 align="left">The test</h2>So after starting Clash of Clans around January it was exciting as the buildings were upgrading quickly and 100,000 gold sounded like an unachievable dream. The game tutorial explained that you need to protect your town hall from raiding enemies and with the wooden walls it was a test of strategy to protect the town hall and resources. The trophies were also fun as at low levels the defenses are very weak. Then comes a stage where with two builders it is near impossible to build anything, if you upgrade the gold mines or the elixir collectors, you cannot upgrade the defenses and if you focus on the defenses, then you can't get the resources. I must confess that my gaming days started in the days when games were slightly different and the word online was science fiction. So the Command and Conquer series strategy games were the rage and the way to play. There if your base was attacked, your buildings needed repairs, they did not automagically repair themselves. The opponent did not steal anything other than wounding your pride and mostly the game was played on the mission levels in the game or online with westwood servers. From that experience the Clash type of games changed the dynamics of war. In many ways similar to how wars have changed from the olden days to this day. The leaders led the armies and the wars were on a battlefield and it was more about the might. These days wars are no longer about honour and might. They are not even fought on battlefields, they are fought everywhere which is a shame as there are no rules anymore. Anyways, the point here is that the rules of engagement changed with the Clash type games. It became more about looting other players.<br />
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<h2 align="left">The problem</h2>The problem with these games is that they are not made to provide entertainment, these are created to make the millions that the makers are raking in. In most of the games, what the game developers call Balance, in reality is Imbalance, wrongly tweaked parameters that opened the doors for a whole lot of cheating. When you start the game you have level 1 barbarians, these guys are the only troops you have and they sound better than green goblins, however when you get raided by other players, you see troops that you might have never seen before. Level 6 giants, Archer Queen, Barabarian King, Flying healers, Golums, Hog Riders, etc. If a beginner gets raided by a player that high in the game then there is definitely a big disparity in the game tweaks or what they call the Balance. As the players progress, there is a big difference in the army a level 50 can have and a level 60 can have. The resources are clamped down to restrict, in a similar way as EA did with Dungeon Master where clearing one tile block was a task for a day or more. Having tried the original Dungeon Master 1 and 2, I must say that it is difficult to wait a day to just clear a tile. It nullifies the fun aspect of the game. It sucks out the essence of the game leaving behind an empty lifeless shell of cartoony graphics that you must visit the next day or pay real money and loads of it to clear that tile faster. <br />
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With Clash of Clans, the resource collectors are few and they produce about 1000-2500 (depending on the level of that resource collector) per hour. At a stage in the game you get about 6 collectors each for Gold and for Elixir. 6x2500x12 = 180,000. The equation is 6 collectors x 2500 resource units collected per collector x 12 hours. The reason to calculate this in 12 hour units is the shield is generally set for 12 hours before you raided again. So it is a 12 hours period of peace and quiet. During this time you collectors collect 180,000 units and at the end of this time, the shield is off and you are open game. Like blood hounds these gamers come sniffing that out and raid you, taking away about 240,000 to 340,000 resources. So essentially what happens is that you are now worse off than you were to start with. So now if you want to upgrade your base or defenses you need to buy them using real money. Real money to buy the gems, these gems in turn for gold or elixir or buildings. Even walls that are defenses start with wood and are dirt cheap and as they progress the cost increases to 1000 -> 10,000 -> 30,000 -> 75,000 -> and so on. We are talking prices in gold for each unit of wall in the game. At 75,000 we are talking purple walls which is somewhere in the middle (around 40% upgrade) you can calculate the price of upgrading 100 wall units at 75,000 each which is 7,500,000 and at the rate of 180,000 per 12 hours you need 250 days of collection before you can upgrade those walls and assuming that no one will attack you. Having said that there are players with much higher walls units. <br />
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It is slightly different with the buildings and defenses, these cost lesser in comparison but can take very long with average times after level 40+ reaching a day in upgrades. It becomes a big messy situation, you want to build/upgrade your unit/building but you cannot because you do not have a builder free, if you have a builder free, you do not have the resources and if you have say the resources, your total capacity is significantly lower than the price of that building/upgrade. To get a dragon, you need to upgrade the training huts to Level 7 and at that point you see that it costs 1,500,000 for a dragon. That is roughly about 4.5 days of uninterrupted resource collection.<br />
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Then comes the raids, the shield is activated for an arbitary time depending on the damage caused by the attacker. They can loot quite significant amount of resources from you. These are in the range of 180-200K and provide a shield of 5-12 hours. Some are smarter, (it might not even be a strategy, it must be their lack of strategy) they do not attack 100% they could throw in a fight but before they do they do steal a significant amount of resources. You win a couple of trophy points but you are vulnerable to the next attacker as the traps, bombs need to be fixed after every raid (if they explode or are activated by the raiding enemy). <br />
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<h2 align="left">How they solve this</h2>The way that it is handled is that you can buy a shield, or boost your resources with gems and the number of gems required for a few gold coins is absurdly insane. The game recommends that you can earn better if you in turn raided other players. This sounds like a good idea, BUT... The moment you attack, your shield is removed and after a battle you lose all troops used in the battle and you need to train more troops which takes time. So either you are glued on to the screen 24x7 it is difficult to manage the game and keep raiding. It takes just one second to slip and you will get raided, losing resources based on what you have, the capacity of your storage and the level of the attacker. If the level of the attacker is higher it is not necessary that you get the advantage, you might only lose more resources to the attacker.<br />
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<h2 align="left">So what's the problem?</h2>These game mechanics might be nice to earn money from gamers but if you are in the game for some fun (Like there are peaceful countries, not all countries are warring nations raiding and looting other countries; there are players that might want to play the game and just upgrade their troops and bases). The breaking point arrives where you reach a point where it is simply impossible to play further, you would simply have to give up or start raiding other players.<br />
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<h2 align="left">What about the other games?</h2>The other games had some advantages and disadvantages while trying to cash in on this genre. Each of the games have some component that works and many others that don't. Supercell will probably not even blink at this cringe as they are making huge amounts of money with their three games Hay Day, Clash of Clans and Boom Beach. About a year ago their game Hay Day suddenly became unplayable with the barn collecting junk and they provided no way to clear it or use it elsewhere so the barns were full and you could not harvest or do anything, it was like stalemate.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Boom Beach</h2>The first game I tried after Clash of Clans was Boom Beach. Being in Australia, we got the chance to try out Boom Beach while it was in Beta. The first thing that appealed about the game was that your troops that survived a battle would stand to fight another battle. The game was fun, free the islands from Hammermann and Doctor Terror. Then suddenly the game turned and you had more online players that would take over an island and fight you or steal your resources and many a times capture your resource base. There are no shields after getting attacked you can get raided in a row (however not by the player that attacked you) At the end of each battle, you COULD get a shard. These are then put together to craft a statue and depending on the colour of the shard, the statue would give some advantage. However, the down side of this is that there can only be so many statues deployed at one time. If you want to upgrade it, you cannot simply upgrade that as upgrades are unlocked based on the level of your base. Leveling up a base or defense later is near impossible unless you start to spend real money.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Other Games</h2><b>The CONS</b><br />
Each game has their own issue, the issues common between the games is the ridiculous amounts of resources required to upgrade a unit/building and the time that it takes to get those resources. They might expect you to upgrade a building that needs 100,000 resources but the storage space is only 20,000 and there is no way that you can collect 100,000 at that time. So you set out to upgrade the storage, which would change to 40,000 capacity, then another upgrade would double it to 80,000 capacity which is very difficult as that would require 5-6 days and till then you would have been raided a couple of times. <br />
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<h4 align="left">Battle World</h4>The game Battle World is a refreshing look as it is a modern day version of the clash of clans.You have mecchas, soldiers, zeplins that look like flying sharks. The only problem with that cheap knock off game (they have stolen the sounds, music most stuff from CoC) Initially since your resource are low, you are unable to do much, after a couple of weeks of upgrading the game finally gave some decent looking building and troops. The problem with this knock off game is that when they copied Coc they did not copy it correctly. The game graphics are also cute and inviting but then the gameplay is the deterrent. <br />
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<h4 align="left">Backyard Monsters</h4>The game is ... interesting but in more times than not, the game is confusing (in terms of graphics) Coc is inspired by this game which makes it playable.<br />
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<b>The GOOD bits</b><br />
<h4 align="left">Second Earth</h4>The game Second Earth is the same but set in futuristic space colony. The good thing that I liked in the game was Instant Troops. You select the troops you want and if you have the resources for that, instantly you get your troops. However the AI and the balance of the game is a bit skewed.<br />
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<h4 align="left">Samurai Siege</h4>This has some beautiful graphics and the game progresses gradually. However there are plenty that would want to raid, loot and plunder. I have been able to grow the base without raiding another player for resources. The game provides you with troops and buildings as you progress through the missions. This is therefore engaging and progresses with you.<br />
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<h4 align="left">Kingdom Clash</h4>This surprising has a blend of gameplay and graphics. It is easy to figure out the troops and learn their strengths and play the game. It has something similar to Clan Wars that actually give free gems and resources to all participants so it makes more sense to participate in the wars as compared to fighting in the Coc Clan Wars where you would end up going backwards instead of forward with resources if you did not win a war or even if you won a war.<br />
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<h2 align="left">The best of the lot</h2>Surprisingly, I had not even expected this game to be worth looking at. However amongst all of the games, this is the game that I found most playable. The game provides you with heroes. These heroes can be upgraded by cards that you get (each hero is actually a card) You also build your base with defenses and walls etc so that you can defend your base when other players would attack to try to loot. There are trophies, there are resources, there are Experience Cards, Rings, Souls. The game has multiple playable sections. There is a main mission timeline. Then there is a resource raid section where you can raid other players for gold. Then there is the League of Lords, where you fight other players and attack them for points and exp cards (at the end of the fight). Lastly, slightly different on the Android there is an Arena, which is missing in the iOS version. You can also fight in the arena and the points relate to massive resource awards. The game gives a player so much that it provide a pleasant experience that one would look forward to. If you want to build your base, you can keep raiding and upgrading the heroes with the exp cards to your hearts desire.<br />
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The only disappointment with this game is that there are no clear specifications and instructions. If there was a repository that explained what are Glory Points, how do different heroes level up and what are their powers, etc. This game would be more fun. Right now it is a stab in the dark as far as information as far as heroes and upgrades are concerned.<br />
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<h2 align="left">Summary</h2>From my perspective, I would like a game that would focus on the gameplay balance rather than on the bank balance alone. A good game would allow the player to progress slowly but surely. When the game disallows the user to progress making it absolutely difficult one of two things could happen, people would wean off the game OR spend money on the game. They have a 50-50 chance of making money. However I feel that this attitude has spoiled gaming and brought in a lot of aggression in the gamers (online for sure). If the games instead offered stuff to the players the players would come back and be happy, not frustrated with the game. If a player leaves a game, it would rather be after being content than in contempt and frustration. Secondly why can the games not be offline mode? Thirdly why do they have to be so unrealistic in the time they take to upgrade units and buildings. In Coc, you can plan ahead that your resource which could be at level 1 will reach level 10 or 11 in about 10 weeks then you would be able to upgrade the barracks and collect enough in another 5-6 weeks and then it would take another 4-6 days for the upgrades. So you can get a dragon (hopefully) in about 20-24 weeks which is like 6 months. This is not long term engagement but long term frustration. Lastly if they provide some way to have a raid between similar level players with similar troops/buildings and not match players with over 10-15 levels. At the lower levels this difference is negligible, However after level 35-40 each level makes a whole lot of difference. There should be other ways to get resources than raid, loot and plunder. <br />
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Note: There were other games but then not played after a single session as they sucked in gameplay. Like Nozomi, Call to ARms, Clan of Heroes. Royal Revolt was interesting but then there was enough on the plate to add another game that differed in it's story line as compared to all others following CoC.<br />
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OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-30128244675494543112014-03-30T17:06:00.000+11:002014-03-30T17:10:17.417+11:00Tydlig is the Calculator - It's absolutely Clear<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha_dkg92_8zQSXB8SkzlmLkz1wMHlSzCNmIiS8rGaDvTFkcs7RtZ4CSWVpLdJ4F0_TysVtLNngTTaiYEDANOqWLLMuUSVwgI_5bgvXj4xJ7nfwlGSPyclFjeZ1mfcfsEPXp1694AIjxXM/s1600/tydligIcon.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha_dkg92_8zQSXB8SkzlmLkz1wMHlSzCNmIiS8rGaDvTFkcs7RtZ4CSWVpLdJ4F0_TysVtLNngTTaiYEDANOqWLLMuUSVwgI_5bgvXj4xJ7nfwlGSPyclFjeZ1mfcfsEPXp1694AIjxXM/s320/tydligIcon.png" /></a></div>The biggest Gripe with the iPad is that Apple did not provide a calculator app. So to fill the gap there are hundreds of calculator apps and truth be told, each one better than the other starting from free to some amazing costs which make you wonder. However even after all of that, if you are outside of your office and trying to cost something complex and do not have a laptop to start up excel or numbers (any such spreadsheet app on the iOS device is not really usable IMHO) what do you do?<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/xbXaKxxUomE?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>There are not many options. From the few options available, there is Tydlig that we are looking at today. The first question that came to mind was why the difficult name? A quick google search Cleared that up, Tydlig is the Swedish word for Clear. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://tydligapp.com/images/productshots/tydlig-ipad-student-2-940.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://tydligapp.com/images/productshots/tydlig-ipad-student-2-940.jpg" /></a></div><h2 align="left">First Impressions</h2>When you start the app up for the first time, you are greeted with a screen full of equations, this could be a bit confusing as to why do I have someone's work when I start the app for the first time. However those are like a Tutorial, where you can see how Tydlig works. It has a minimal iOS7 look and feel, the icons are thin outline icons and so are the font. This can be fixed via settings to select a larger and thicker font. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://tydligapp.com/images/feature-responsive-results.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://tydligapp.com/images/feature-responsive-results.gif" /></a></div>You can just about start typing anywhere and the whatever you type from the keypad is instantly seen on screen and converted into tokens. Then numbers can be then dragged over to become part of another equation. The numbers can also be tagged with a text label for easy understanding. This can also be then used for graphing. <h2 align="left">Some bits - unclear</h2>The way it works is wonderful, simply type 50 - 10% = and you will promptly get the answer 45. However if you want to tweak and find out what % of 50 is 40, although there is a token "?" which I presume is used for an unknown value. So I could not get that to work backwards. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://tydligapp.com/images/feature-canvas.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://tydligapp.com/images/feature-canvas.png" /></a></div>The canvas is an open infinite canvas, you can type on the next line and continue your equations, though there is only one equation per line. Could not figure out how to move the entire line, reorder or arrange the equations. The other thing was the canvas scrolled to the right, not to the left. While this might seem a bit restrictive, it serves as the left side of a very large page. There are two keypads, one with numbers and one with functions and both are hidden at first and the numeric pad is toggled everytime you tap on the screen. This covers up the functions keypad that has quite a few functions. This is perhaps the best way to present a non obtrusive keypad of functions while still providing all the space on the screen for equations and calculations. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://tydligapp.com/images/feature-graphing2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://tydligapp.com/images/feature-graphing2.png" /></a></div>Graphing is easy and yet complicated. It takes a while to figure out how to set the axis and make the graph interactive. <h2 align="left">Some Gems</h2>One of the good things is that you can long press a numeric token to select displaying a slider. So you can slide the slider to change the value of that number and the best part is that the ranges can be altered by simply tapping the min or the max range and typing the new range. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://tydligapp.com/images/feature-slider.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://tydligapp.com/images/feature-slider.gif" /></a></div>Tags can also include Graphics and emoticons, if it can be typed from the keyboard, it an be displayed as a tag. Once tagged all the places where the value is used, it shows up with the tag. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://tydligapp.com/images/feature-annotate.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://tydligapp.com/images/feature-annotate.png" /></a></div>Tydlig is a universal app available for both the iPhone and the iPad. It requires that your device has iOS7 installed and is available for $4.99 USD on the App Store. This is the calculator that could replace all of the expensive calculators used by students. However if you are looking for something way advanced than this, then you can use one of the scripting apps that allow you to program your own stuff, for all others Tydlig could serve the purpose. <pre><b>SUMMARY</b>
Software : TYDLIG
Version : 1.2.1
Publisher : Andreas Karlsson
Website : <a href="http://tydligapp.com">tydligapp.com</a>
Twitter : @tydligapp
Platform : iOS (iOS 7 or higher)
Price : $4.99
App Store : <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/app/tydlig-calculator-reimagined/id721606556?mt=8">https://itunes.apple.com/app/tydlig-calculator-reimagined/id721606556?mt=8</a>
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</pre>OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8901559313824988882.post-54888887006477594512014-03-22T19:41:00.000+11:002014-03-22T19:41:35.574+11:00Candy Libraries - No crushing sagas here, just plain Eye Candy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6jbZo0dMnL5MLCxZ8H0T6_rssbw093xKI4X8lR9qsCWaEJOw-9zcOvrJJC-R6o2Vgsi5D7X1B21srSgMoVeUY-5gpW-OFRiHML-CByztz_xTg9To26jpkmBbNtegfu4pYbP3qCVhBLSU/s1600/%5B2014-03-22064158%5D++Gideros+Player-ParticleCandy+-+Gideros+Player.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6jbZo0dMnL5MLCxZ8H0T6_rssbw093xKI4X8lR9qsCWaEJOw-9zcOvrJJC-R6o2Vgsi5D7X1B21srSgMoVeUY-5gpW-OFRiHML-CByztz_xTg9To26jpkmBbNtegfu4pYbP3qCVhBLSU/s320/%5B2014-03-22064158%5D++Gideros+Player-ParticleCandy+-+Gideros+Player.png" /></a></div>The word Candy was trademarked, and thereby while it would have helped one particular company build an empire on this word, it would have made things difficult for a lot many, imagine if someone trademarked the word "the" how would anyone write anything in English? There have been some amazing writers that have challenged themselves and the most notable one was Ernest Vincent Wright whose works could never be published as an e-book. However today we are revisiting a library from X-PRESSIVE which has made life easy and applications so much better with Particle Candy and Widget Candy.<a name='more'></a><br />
Earlier in a review <a href="http://reviewme.oz-apps.com/2011/11/give-your-apps-gloss-they-deserve.html">here</a> and <a href="http://reviewme.oz-apps.com/2011/11/sweetmore-candy.html">here</a> and <a href="http://reviewme.oz-apps.com/2012/05/new-candy-flavour-widgetcandy.html">here</a> we reviewed Particle Candy, Text Candy and Widget Candy for Corona SDK. X-PRESSIVE have worked hard on their libraries and made it available for the Gideros SDK. While Text Candy is being worked on, both Particle Candy and Widget Candy are available for use.<br />
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It was interesting to have a look at the libraries for a couple of reasons. In an earlier HowTo article we ran the Code sample available with Corona adapting it for use with Gideros SDK and found that it was faster than the original Corona code. Secondly, while the language used with both Gideros and Corona is Lua, the approach is slightly different, where Gideros uses a slightly more advanced Object oriented, Corona uses a slightly simpler programming api. This point is a double edged sword as it can be both a good and a bad thing. However, from a developers perspective the resulting code with a slightly more structured object oriented methodology, the code is much clearer and crisper.<br />
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So on getting a copy to play with and review, we started the app and the first thing that I must admit is that X-PRESSIVE know how to present. There are so many libraries that can do similar things, we have reviewed them in the past or in some cases even helped a couple of developers with shaping the library in terms of mentoring them with code, etc. While scrolling though the various effects that can be achieved with particle Candy, each demo can be construed literally as an app in itself. Compile and run the sample file, you might have an app that could have the potential to go viral. The demos are amazing and polished. Without going into the history of Particles and Emitters and the history of how this developed through the years, it is a simple concept and to top that, it is also non-interesting. However when you look at the demos, the same bring uninteresting particle emitters suddenly become the polish on your app, that make your app pop, Bring it to life.<br />
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The second library Widget Candy is rather an interesting one. I say interesting because it helps the developer create themed UI components. Something that is very important to keep a uniform look and feel. You get check boxes, grouped elements, buttons, dialogs, scrollable lists, etc all that make your app easy to work with and best of all Cross-platform. These can be themed with simply changing the sprite atlas and your components have a new look and feel. This reminds me of Linux where from the Window Manager you can alter the look and feel of the windows.<br />
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This library was earlier available only for Corona and now that it is available for Gideros as well, any developer that wants to make great looking apps using a Lua based framework could choose either option between Corona and Gideros but have the uniform api of the Candy Libraries. The code and methodologies to use these libraries are the same, so there is no new learning curve involved. <br />
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In a discussion with the author at X-PRESSIVE Text Candy was not released earlier as Gideros supported Bitmap Fonts, however many used the Text Candy Libraries for the Text FX more than for just Bitmap Fonts. The author has some plans to release this for Gideros soon. <br />
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These are libraries that must be available in a developers toolkit. You can have a look at the Video and images and decide for yourselves at <a href="http://www.x-pressive.com/ParticleCandy_Corona/media.html">http://www.x-pressive.com/ParticleCandy_Corona/media.html</a><br />
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Action Shots<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgupRl7-9CZLTJliFqe843AJnO6LM8uuutVFo3-byus3WM9-eqvgFagtGEtM3-RFJU5wU2TG0Q-5WaBffHvsPjN6VBlq68jMNmP2XDVxLDJILvNWbw_zaUfimCwjaEBlxRHfENArRQiDsw/s1600/%5B2014-03-22063527%5D++Gideros+Player-ParticleCandy+-+Gideros+Player.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgupRl7-9CZLTJliFqe843AJnO6LM8uuutVFo3-byus3WM9-eqvgFagtGEtM3-RFJU5wU2TG0Q-5WaBffHvsPjN6VBlq68jMNmP2XDVxLDJILvNWbw_zaUfimCwjaEBlxRHfENArRQiDsw/s320/%5B2014-03-22063527%5D++Gideros+Player-ParticleCandy+-+Gideros+Player.png" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNkfZHd_1BqwzyxF662qhyphenhyphenwhzcTE2_u21TnY_4rM7UW2wsT6hY33oqSkGJLhN2qY-gAdNjdeKL1Sr0NUJQmIttXHWrJHVr-CCoIN22oF0QVzLLmZ5DZ43cBACUdaG6XDK5lPo0_-QpQp0/s1600/%5B2014-03-22063606%5D++Gideros+Player-ParticleCandy+-+Gideros+Player.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNkfZHd_1BqwzyxF662qhyphenhyphenwhzcTE2_u21TnY_4rM7UW2wsT6hY33oqSkGJLhN2qY-gAdNjdeKL1Sr0NUJQmIttXHWrJHVr-CCoIN22oF0QVzLLmZ5DZ43cBACUdaG6XDK5lPo0_-QpQp0/s320/%5B2014-03-22063606%5D++Gideros+Player-ParticleCandy+-+Gideros+Player.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisfzx5BpNbOyxxmjSIt33QMyCg9aruPrvQIJa63IvtJT6rOddGpwdSooiFuor-7hITQblMPFyMRJ4u44Lpw0YSoSFLaRF3pAgeXXj0a5HwBvErEShv_biBc-f9oW7RnYu7wx0stXtmgv4/s1600/%5B2014-03-22063634%5D++Gideros+Player-ParticleCandy+-+Gideros+Player.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisfzx5BpNbOyxxmjSIt33QMyCg9aruPrvQIJa63IvtJT6rOddGpwdSooiFuor-7hITQblMPFyMRJ4u44Lpw0YSoSFLaRF3pAgeXXj0a5HwBvErEShv_biBc-f9oW7RnYu7wx0stXtmgv4/s320/%5B2014-03-22063634%5D++Gideros+Player-ParticleCandy+-+Gideros+Player.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaA6Kt1Iqg-ZPidEsXdYEF-RTyK26lSIqzrhxvIF-5GYY29Bmuyko_MXownMA2nXtp3zaC70vzTz9A7gZ9r2yVI5Bc1coi_YKxrkQnzeiqF96c3b1v_kqtdT_mwyqih5U7e9byP7rtyoc/s1600/%5B2014-03-22063645%5D++Gideros+Player-ParticleCandy+-+Gideros+Player.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaA6Kt1Iqg-ZPidEsXdYEF-RTyK26lSIqzrhxvIF-5GYY29Bmuyko_MXownMA2nXtp3zaC70vzTz9A7gZ9r2yVI5Bc1coi_YKxrkQnzeiqF96c3b1v_kqtdT_mwyqih5U7e9byP7rtyoc/s320/%5B2014-03-22063645%5D++Gideros+Player-ParticleCandy+-+Gideros+Player.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN6Y7eZouncUsYoyM3ONN-c47k4EPTKwBsMSkNbgKaOJOsqDqMl8jQzwsIAV0I4wqi1CvJ-R3T8mJMwYQ4dkrr0XZ3Pi1Jxzg-NhPmGjB-TIPH-2hqUMKyo-bmd8yWFSv_3IfvPQgl0_w/s1600/%5B2014-03-22063656%5D++Gideros+Player-ParticleCandy+-+Gideros+Player.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN6Y7eZouncUsYoyM3ONN-c47k4EPTKwBsMSkNbgKaOJOsqDqMl8jQzwsIAV0I4wqi1CvJ-R3T8mJMwYQ4dkrr0XZ3Pi1Jxzg-NhPmGjB-TIPH-2hqUMKyo-bmd8yWFSv_3IfvPQgl0_w/s320/%5B2014-03-22063656%5D++Gideros+Player-ParticleCandy+-+Gideros+Player.png" /></a></div><br />
You can buy your own copy of these libraries from http://www.x-pressive.com/ParticleCandy_Corona/download.html and http://www.x-pressive.com/WidgetCandy_Corona/download.html<br />
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OZ Appshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13688092415264246125noreply@blogger.com0