haniblog

They’ve done it again, those Tapbots boys. Pastebot the third iPhone app they’ve released, after Weightbot and Convertbot and they’re getting better every time.

Pastebot is a clipboard manager for your iPhone and your Mac. Quite simply, with this app anything you copy, image, text or link can be pasted into Pastebot. Run the app, hold down on the item and it will be put into the iPhone’s clipboard to be pasted anywhere. The magic really happens when you get Pastebot Sync, a free system prefpane on OS X. Once connected with the iPhone when it’s running Pastebot, anything you copy on your Mac will automagically transfer to the app on the iPhone. Copy an image, a block of text (with formatting), html, video or an mp3 file and it pops into a slot in the iPhone.

Now how would this be useful? Here are a few recipes I picked up from different websites. As you can see I copied the recipe image and text and Pastebot did it’s duty and created slots for each item. The really cool thing is if I hold down on any image or text on the app it’s pasted into the current running application on my Mac! This operation is so quick it feels as if I hit ⌘-V on the keyboard.

Click to see the full interface.

As with the previous apps Tapbots conjure up, the interface is magnificent. Guys, you’ve done it again. Pastebot costs a paltry £1.79 in the App Store.

There’s been a huge volume of speculation on the rumoured Tablet and now it’s all but confirmed. Apple sent out invites to the press for a special event next week and the rumour mill has now changed into the cast of CSI: Apple Invite. Among the names for the new device, the two that seem to have stuck are iSlate and Apple Tablet but a recent comment on Twitter by Cabel Sasser just lit a big lightbulb over my head. My Apple predictions have been ropey, to say the least, but that comment along with the invite design above, seems to fit.

So, Apple Canvas?

I’ve been playing around with two apps that perform simple grading adjustments: PS Mobile, which Adobe finally released worldwide; and Mill Colour, an app written by London/New York/LA post house The Mill. Before I start, there’s a really good article on Phil Green’s site which helps with the grading terminology.

PS Mobile has a nice simple interface with a menu bar in icon form at the top of the screen and undo/redo controls at the bottom, whether the iPhone is in Portrait or Landscape mode. The icons at the top perform image functions, exposure and saturation operations, filters and finally effects. The colour controls are quite intuitive, though not the most responsive. There’s a lag when you drag sideways to affect the saturation or exposure for example.

Here’s what the interface looks like.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s a nice simple interface and it’s simplified further when grading the photo. Here’s the saturation control which is increased or decreased by swiping across the screen.

And this is the colour tint interface.

Aside from the frequent performance lag I would’ve wished for more fine-grained controls as well as separate RGB curves. PS Mobile is a free download from the App Store.

A disclaimer first before I start on this app. I used to work at The Mill years ago. I often think of the place as my alma mater!

I wanted fine-grain controls and here they are! With Mill Colour photos can be graded by adjusting Lift, Gamma and Gain and each with individual RGB sliders. Actually, can I have slightly coarser-grain controls now? The sliders start at 1.0 and then increment up or down by .02 values. It would be a lot more useful to be able to adjust those increments.

In performance Mill Colour is everything that PS Mobile isn’t: the interface keeps up with you, doesn’t have any lag issues and looks clean and uncluttered.

As with PS Mobile, Mill Colour has a set of looks and in this app they feel more professional. To demonstrate the subtlety of some of the looks here are the Print and 70’s look.

There is one thing in the interface which is really distracting and not in the iPhone aesthetic: the horrible button feedback glow-flare.

Aside from the controls adjustments and the button feedback issue, the app is a joy to use. Mill Colour is a free app as well.

With Christmas shopping in everyone’s mind, may I offer up a novel idea for the iPhone geeks in your lives? Yes, iPhone application icon coasters. A set of 6 coasters for £12.99 and they come in three different icon packs as well.

Gillian, hint hint nudge nudge!

I’m happy to say that my blog is finally iPhone aware! Using the brilliant WPtouch Wordpress plugin, this site should load a lot faster on an iPhone and display all the posts in the proper Mobile Safari UI.

Click here for a preview!

Amazon finally released a free iPhone app for the UK. Aside from searching for items as you would using a normal browser, this app has an interesting feature called Amazon Remembers. It will let you take a photo of an item you’re interested in, upload the photo and Amazon will try to find it for you. Yes, you read that right. Amazon will analyse the photo and match it to the items available for purchase.

Actually, that’s partly incorrect. The service doesn’t computationally analyse the photo, it uses Mechanical Turk to farm the job out to people who match the photo with items Amazon sells. Mechanical Turk is their online market place for people to carry out repetitive data-based menial jobs for a few cents per task.

When I tried the Remembers feature, the results came back within 15 minutes of the upload. I took a photo of our juicer and kettle and sent them off. The juicer was matched perfectly but it returned a coffee machine instead of the kettle. I’m sure the service will be refined and only improve over time.

It’s clear that Apple created a very compelling platform on which developers are using in inventive and brilliant ways.

Finally, the iPhone has more than one network in the UK. Two days ago Orange announced that they’ve broken O2’s stranglehold on the iPhone and will be selling all models by Christmas. Yesterday Vodafone declared they will be selling the iPhone as well from early 2010.

What will this mean to the iPhone? Considering that Apple recently reported that there are over 85,000 apps in the App Store and over 2 Billion downloads in its first year, those numbers will now skyrocket. There has never been a better time to start writing apps for the iPhone and the Mac platforms.

I’ve been dabbling with Xcode for a little while and found some really good resources to help me get started. The best guide so far has been BecomeAnXcoder and I highly recommend Aaron Hillegass’s book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. When you have a handle on Xcode and want to get started on iPhone development, there’s Stanford University’s excellent iPhone Application Programming podcasts.

Do it now if you can. The iPhone application market is about to expand massively.

The last few posts here have been very tech-heavy and I feel I need to redress the balance a bit. For years I’ve been an avid Graphic Novel reader… okay, call them grown-up comics if you want to! I still find myself re-reading The Sandman every few months and I must have bought the series a decade ago. Other favourites include a Sandman-offshoot character, Lucifer, pictured above, and Preacher. And let’s not forget the fantastic Watchmen series.

I do have the actual books themselves but also have digital versions on both my iPhone and MacBook Pro using two similar comic viewers: ComicZeal on the iPhone and ComicBookLover on the Mac. Both applications have utilised the best features of the platforms they run on. If I want to have a single page-view on my Mac, I turn the laptop over on its side and ComicBookLover will present the perfect view, thanks to the built-in accelerometer. On my iPhone, ComicZeal will let me zoom in and drag along the panels to read the story. Highly satisfying.

There are plenty of Sudoku games in the App Store but this one is a real “Look at what my iPhone can do!” game. You can photograph a game from a newspaper and Sudoku Grab (iTunes link) will digitise the puzzle… and then solve it for you. It will also let you email it to anyone who has a copy of the game installed on their iPhone.

The developer even posted how his application does it’s magic. Even though I don’t usually play Sudoku, this is enormous fun! Click on the images for larger versions.

This is my Father’s Day gift from my wonderful wife and two lovely daughters.

Gillian upgraded her first generation iPhone to the 3GS, wrapped it up and the girls gave it to me this morning, along with a brilliant home-made card. She now has my one-year-old iPhone 3G along with my wonder and gratitude.

The new phone is very fast and the touch-to-focus camera is fantastic. When I read the specs on the 3GS I was a little bit underwhelmed but having it in my hand really made me appreciate what Apple have achieved: an extremely responsive device which can take great photos and videos, render web pages a lot faster than anything else in the mobile space, track your run with the built-in Nike+ capability, be controlled with voice commands, and a lot more. The innovations also extend to the charger design. Here’s the new charger on the left and the old one on the right:

And yes, I am incredibly lucky to have such a wonderful family.