The iOS App Store is a wonderful thing. So many apps to choose from for virtually every conceivable use. However, as there are now just so many applications in there discoverability can sometimes be a challenge. Case in point, Mark has often lamented about the inability to crop photos in iOS to specific dimensions. He was not alone in this search as I have heard other users complain about this apparent lack of the seemingly most basic ability.
Dragon Anywhere for iOS has been a long time coming but details have been scare till now with Dragon Anywhere getting it’s release on a monthly payment system.
I’ve been a huge fan of Dragon Dicate products for years now. Once you get used to talking to computer and mastering Dictation commands it really is so much quicker and easier than typing.
Dragon Anywhere is the portable sibling of its desktop counterpart. Scheduled to be released I managed to get on the beta testing program and so far, it’s looking very solid experience.
Sometimes you just want to fire up and app and start running. Or you want to forgo the complexities of other in-depth fitness apps and just know that a moment doing exercise beats sitting on the sofa. That’s where Vima Run for iOS comes in.
A new app allows users to ‘remix’ artwork by Sir Peter Blake, the Godfather of pop art, best known for designing the 1967 Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. Dazzle It is commissioned by 14-18 NOW: the First World War Centenary Art Commissions and supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
File this app under potentially really handy. Netwatch lets you look at the connection status of your iPhone from your wrist. Read on to find out why this is handy (sorry, pardon the pun)
To celebrate, we’re launching a 50-percent-off Thank You Sale and sharing some of our lessons learned, failures, and successes on our blog. The App Store and its customers taught us a lot over the years, and I’d love to talk to you about what we’ve learned and where we are heading as a company.
Remember R-Type, a game that really set a new level for the continual scrolling game?. Well I was useless at it for some reason. Always got stuck at the same part over and over, incidentally I have the same issue with Pinball but I digress. Mc Line is sort of like that well only the side scrolling part.
GoEuro has launched a brand new free and easy to use app on Android and iOS, providing the best options for travel by train, coach or air, all at the simple touch of a button. The new app will allow users to compare travel time and prices from over 160 rail and coach companies as well as airlines globally, enabling them to compare travel time and prices for the full journey, and book their tickets in eight countries.
One standard has stood the passage of time and thats the ubiquitous office formats from the windows world. Being able to easily edit word, excel file on your iphone / iPad is now common place and with MobiSystems Office Suite app, even better than even Microsofts own offerings.
The Ministry of Sound have just released their own radio app for iOS allowing you to listen to their MoS offering and listening to their live weekender sets.
Glimpse brings website previews to your notification centre letting you “glimpse” at sites without having to unlock your iPhone. Finally notification centre has something to make it less nagging (at least in my case).
There’s several ways you can speed up your website, use a CDN, get a better host but none of that is going to help unless your images are properly optimised. JpegMini helps do just that, providing the optimum balance between compression, quality and clarity. If you used photoshop or Pixelmator and hit the file, export as jpeg function you could think that the jpeg defaults are set to optimal levels. Turns out this isn’t the case as theres more than one way to compress a jpeg for the best results
This is something I only found out thanks to the Mac And Forth podcast so I take no credit for this finding but JpegMini turns out to be a bit of a gem.
Jpeg mini is a small, easy to use program that shrinks down your jpeg image but proclaims to loose as little amount of the image detail as possible, all down to their own algorithms that look at all of the pixels in an image than taking just an average mix.
JpegMini
What this means in simple terms that JpegMini sees different shades of red as just that, different shades whereas programs like Photoshop tend to group reds in a more generalist sort of way and then clump them together.
Thanks to this more probing way at looking at the whole picture JpegMini claims to have less artefacts, color blow out and that annoying blockiness from things being over compressed. / blooming when you compress images with their app.
I’ve now realised I’ve been making a mistake for the longest time at pulling an image into Pixelmatr, applying a resize, then exporting the file with the default settings looking at the small preview window trying to guess the right balance of size vs quality. It takes a while to trust JpegMini to do the right thing as there’s no preview window, no quality settings just simply drag and drop the image.
So to test this I’ve pulled a selection of photos with varying colors and details for resizing and compression.
JpegMini has a default resize to 960 * 720 pixels, not enabled as default, with no other settings other than to where you want to save the new files.
So to test again Pixelmator, images were opened, resized and then exported as Jpeg twice. Once with default compression settings and then with the level of compression adjusted to match the file size of JpegMini for a true comparison
Not only does the file compression sizes speak for themselves but the quality of image is nothing to be sneeze at either. The amount of compression and clarity, clarity being a keyword here, is spot on.
All of the image and bandwidth savings come at a grand old price of free providing you don’t want to do more than 25 images in a day. A normal edition is available via in app purchase for £14.99 with no limit on the amount of images you can compress but is limited to images of 28 mega pixel or less. For those needing a multi user licence, plugin support and much, much more a pro version is also available with some seriously advanced features to boot with a price to match of £110.
If you want to take agenda at what Jpegmini can do with no uploads or perhaps take a snapshot of your website to see how much in terms of bandwidth / cdn costs you can save, JpegMini’s website will show you graphically what you can save. http://www.jpegmini.com/server
Overall.
Jpegmini represents fantastic value at being free if you want to do no more than 20 images a day.
If you’ve got a majorly busy website with CDN costs attached then JPEGmini is going to recoup its outlay in no time at all.
It;s hard to believe that with no tweaking or settings to play with images can get that compressed and still be as clear as they are.
JpegMini competently delivers in it’s promise to compress images without a major loss in clairty. Recommended.
JpegLite Is Free From The App Store JPEGmini Lite – ICVT Ltd. JPEG mini with more features, 50mp picture limit and unlimited conversions £14.99 JPEGmini Pro, Lightroom support, all cpu core processor support and MUCH, much more £109.99
Theres several ways you can speed up your website, use a CDN, get a better host but none of that is going to help unless your images are properly optimised. JpegMini helps do just that, providing the optimum balance between compression, quality and clarity.
Billing itself as the best of Vine, Snapchat and Instagram combined, Nutshell makes it simple to create it a great way to share life’s special moments and all you need is three photos to get you started.
2014 was the year I started running and actually did the fabled “couch to 5k” running plan and all it took to drop a stone in weight and trim up was 20 minutes a day going up and beyond that. For kicks I’d have RunKeeper in the background so i could see my time and distances ever improving. But RunKeeper is not the only app out there.
