Category: Uncategorized

A Dozen great iPad apps for Designers

by Justin Alcon

On Friday, we talked about the new iPad application suite from Muji. In case minimalism isn’t your thing, or if you’re curious to see some of the other sketching-type apps are out there, here’s a list of some of the best iPad applications for designers:

Penultimate: Penultimate is an excellent iPad app for taking notes, keeping sketches and more. It’s a must-have app for any designer who values mobility.

iDesign: iDesign is a useful iPad app for drawing 2D vectors and designs easily. With iDesign, you can Create vector graphics and illustrations, add shapes, insert text, and more.

SketchBook Pro: Autodesk SketchBook® Pro for iPad is a paint and drawing application for professionals. Based on the same strong foundation as its desktop counterpart, SketchBook Pro for iPad delivers a complete set of sketching & painting with a streamlined and intuitive user interface that has been designed with the iPad in mind.

Adobe Ideas: Adobe Ideas enables users to execute sketching and drawing tasks easily. Adobe Ideas is an ideal companion for the professional design applications from Adobe that we know and love like Illustrator® and Photoshop®.

Brushes: Brushes is a popular painting app, specially designed for the iPad. Easy to learn, yet powerful enough for professionals — Brushes has been used to create covers for popular magazines like The New Yorker.

iFontMaker: iFontMaker is perfect for editing fonts and saving them as TTF files. Afterword, the created fonts can be used in other applications like the Adobe® CreativeSuite™, Microsoft® Office™, and virtually anywhere else that your new custom font is needed.

TypeDrawing: TypeDrawing is a super easy app to use, but it is still powerful enough for creating typography art or a unique watermark to protect your art from pirates.

OmniGraffle: With OmniGraffle, you can create diagrams, process charts, page layouts, website wireframes and other documents that are great for design and organization.

iMockups: iMockups for iPad is the most popular and lauded mobile wireframing and mockup app for your projects.

WordPress: WordPress for iPad moderates comments, creates and edits blog posts and pages, and adds images and videos easily with your iPad. One of the great features of this app is that it is free.  If you are a blogger or wordpress developer, this is a must have.  Full disclosure, this blog is powered by wordpress, but its inclusion in this list is unsolicited.

Moodboard Pro: Moodboard Pro is simple and powerful, a design tool for creatives from all fields to help you produce better work faster. With this app, you can design a website, plan a wedding, visualize a film or web video, organize your art project, plan the perfect vacation, create a collage, or achieve just about any goal that you might want to get organized around.

Artist’s Touch: Artist’s Touch is another excellent painting application which enables users to create paintings from photos and edit them using a suite of tools and brushes.

There are of course many other applications available, but this is a good overview of what I think are some of the best for the creatives in your organization.

iPhone glitch could make you iLate (cheesy-I know)

by Mario Armstrong

If you haven’t heard this could be worse than Y2k (just kidding). But seriously the glitch can affect iPhone and iPod Touch owners who have set recurring alarms on their devices. Apple says there will be a software fix out later this month. If you want to make sure your alarms work correctly on Monday morning and don’t have you late to work follow these 6 steps:

1. Open the Clock application.

2. Click on the Alarm icon at the bottom of the screen.

3. Click the “plus sign” icon in the top right corner.

4. Create an alarm and make sure you have the “repeat” option set to “never.” (The glitch only occurs with repeat alarms, such as those workers set to wake them up at the same time each weekday).

5. Select the appropriate time and sound, and click “save.”

6. After November 7, you can again create repeat alarms without trouble, but you should delete any recurring alarms that you set before that date!

Google Instant Goes Mobile

by Mario Armstrong

I just received word that Google Instant is now available on mobile devices in beta for most iPhone and Android devices in the U.S.  To try it out, go to google.com in your phone’s browser and tap the Google Instant “Turn on” link beneath the search box (if you don’t see the “Turn on” link, try waiting a moment and then refresh the page).  Google Instant should help you search faster when using your mobile device by giving you predictions of what you might be searching for.

Check out Googles demo video: