Tag: Image »
148Apps 2013 wrAPP-Up - The Dynamic Duo of Digital Comics and iOS
Comic book purists who like their comics bagged, boarded, and boxed may disapprove, but there's no doubt that digital comics have revitalized the comic book industry these last few years as more and more people embrace the platform on their tablets. Below are just a few of the ways and reasons to go digital this year.
Comixology
Where better to begin than with the biggest comic book store on iOS: Comixology. Featuring titles from DC and Marvel (sharing content from their respective apps), Valiant, Image, and a plethora of indie publishers - their thoughtful collections, frequent discounts, and generous giveaways are a great avenue for discovering new series and lesser-known works. Digital format is also often the only way to read out-of-print comic books or issues that would cost a fortune to purchase from online merchants. Comics have often been thought of as a perfect medium between literature and cinema, and Comixology's Guided View technology only strengthens that idea. Delivering the content in a frame-by-frame format not only makes reading possible on smaller devices, but really builds suspense unlike anything comic readers will have previously experienced. Especially since there is no opportunity to have a cheeky peek at those bottom-of-the-page spoil-the-surprise panels.
ThinkInvisible Review
FilmWise Invisibles Review
Interlacer Review
Photoshop-Quality Image Retouching For iPhone?
This kind of cloning tool and the algorithms behind it are not far from the powerful features found in Adobe’s Photoshop software, except Photoshop will set you back several hundred dollars. For $1.99, CaPix offers incredible results that could save an image or perfect one of your favorites.
If you don’t believe us, check out the video below.
[itmsapp: 366262211 ]
Smart Photo Retouching For iPhone Coming Soon
TouchRetouch uses intelligent algorithms that avoid compromising any other elements of the photo outside of the problem area. Using a simple swipe, users can select the area of a photo they wish to fix and hit the Go button to perform the edit which preserves the surrounding area. The app will be compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad and also offers features such as in-app video tutorials, unlimited undo and smart image background recovery. If TouchRetouch lives up to its billing and provides the features promised it should be an interesting prospect for its small $0.99 price point. Adva-Soft president, Davydov Maksim said of the launch "Word got out that we have developed this piece of software and there seems to be a bit of buzz going around about it. We're figuring on quite a bit of activity the date of release.” TouchRetouch is planned for launch on May 25th subject to App Store approval.
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CardSnap
QuadCamera-Multi Shot Cam
PicTricks
Ki-Ri-e
Save My Docs 2.0
Everest: Hidden Expedition
Endless Walls
Price: $1.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0.4
iPhone Integration [rating:0/5]
User Interface [rating:0/5]
Re-use / Replay Value [rating:0/5]
[rating:overall]
Endless Walls is an application that displays a slideshow of wallpapers from Flickr and allows you to copy then to your camera roll for later use as wallpapers. The problem with this is that it looks like many of the images used in Endless Walls are copyrighted. Even though the images are loaded directly from the Flickr servers, this is still an application that ignores any sort of copyright or do not download settings the owner has set on their images. I'm not sure how I feel about this.
It would be easy enough to go to one of the Flickr groups that were created to index iPhone sized wallpaper images and download them directly to your iPhone in Mobile Safare. So is this application doing anything different? Well, yes. For one they are charging for the ability to do this. They are also ignoring the setting that the owner has set to keep people from downloading their images. Next, they are not even displaying any of the metadata for the photo such as who uploaded the photo, title, etc.
Another thing, they claim that there are over 7,000 wallpapers. Then why do I see so many duplicates? Inside the Endless Walls bundle, there is a file called cache.xml -- while I'm not sure that this file contains all of the images used, it does contain only 2,000 unique URLs all pointing to Flickr.com image servers.
Motacore.com, the developers of Endless Walls were asked if they though their use of copyrighted images in this application was OK and this is their response:
That's a very interesting point that our attorney may have overlooked. Thank you for bringing that to our attention. I will speak with our counsel as soon as he is available for a meeting.While Flickr is currently one of our bigger sources, we are in the process of moving away from it to a user submitted (submitted to us) cache of wallpapers.
Way back in the pre-historic days, you know before the App Store, when there were other ways to get application on the iPhone, there was an application called Wallpaper, developed by Sean/Big Zaphod, who now works for Tapulous. It was a great and similar app but all of the wallpapers were user submitted directly from their iPhones. Seems like that is the direction that Motacore is heading. (And here's hoping we'll see an official version of Wallpaper, too!) Motacore is targeting the end of September, 2008 for this move. We'll see how it goes.
So, in the end, I'm torn. This is a really easy application to grab new wallpapers on your iPhone, and fairly well developed. But legally and morally it just doesn't seem right. So I'm going to have to leave this application at 0 stars. In the end you will need to make your own decision. Once they move to a user-generated and submitted version, we will re-visit it.