Author: Terry White

Terry is the co-author of The Best Selling "The iPhone Book" 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions. He has been active in the industry for over 25 years and is the founder and president of MacGroup-Detroit, Inc., Michigan's largest Macintosh Users Group, host of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast and a technology writer - Terry White Tech Blog.
Navigation / Reviews
GPS-everywhere

Turn Your iPhone into a Heads Up Display (HUD) for your Car

People have been using iPhones in their cars since day one. The obvious use is to make/receive calls. After that people found various ways to use the iPod feature to listen to their favorite tunes during the commute.  When the iPhone 3G hit the scene people used the integrated GPS chip with the GPS turn-by-turn navigation Apps that were hitting the scene. Fast forward to today and things are better than ever. Now your favorite GPS app can run in the background while you take calls or use other Apps.

GPS everyWhere turns your iPhone into a beautiful Heads-Up-Display (HUD)

If you’re using a Navigation App then you’re probably going to occasionally glance at the map while you listen the voice directions. However, what about the regular commute day to day? In most cases you know the route and you’re not using your GPS Turn-by-Turn App. At that point your iPhone display is a lot less interesting. This is where GPS everyWhere comes in. Just fire up the App and drive. You’ll be presented with your current speed, weather info, time, compass, humidity and more. You have your choice between 8 different themes. The App works in both portrait and landscape and presents the info in °C °F °K or MPH or km/h. You even slide open the Google Map display.

It’s a real HUD too

Please excuse the image above which looks like a serious case of double exposure, but that’s just how it photographs off the windshield as a reflection.

One of the things that got me excited about testing this App was the promise of a using the iPhone as a “HUD”. I had a car once with a built-in HUD and I do miss it. While it does work as advertised you have to realize that the iPhone display is just not bright enough to compete against the sun! You’ll barely be able to see the display reflected off your windshield in daylight if at all. In the evening or at night you should be fine though. Even then you’d have to weigh the value (geek factor) of reflecting the image off your windshield vs. just using a mount that displays the iPhone at eye level. Neat idea though!

You can get the GPS everyWhere for $0.99 (on sale) here from the iTunes

 

Photography / Reviews
CameraAwesome

Camera Awesome

I must admit that when I saw the news that Smugmug had released a “camera App” for iPhone, I thought “oh no, not another camera App!” After all the built-in camera App in the iPhone 4s has gotten better and there are lots of great camera and editing Apps already on iOS. What more could this new App do? Everyone seemed to be digging it so I decided to download it and give it a shot. The first thing that got me was that it was “Free”. Most good camera Apps are at least 99¢. I’ll come back to the “Free” factor in a minute. I fired up the App and quickly realized that it could probably replace at least two if not three of the Apps i was already using. It has features of the venerable Gorillacam App by Joby such as a burst mode and self-timer. You can also enable a “big button” to allow you to tap anywhere on the screen to take the photo although with iOS 5 I rely on on screen buttons a lot less since you can now using the Volume Up button as your shutter release.

You have a variety of Composition overlays such as rule of thirds, golden and trisec. It also has a separate focus and expose zone. I was also impressed with how fast the camera snaps the pic and adds it to its built-in camera roll.

Effects galore

Once you snap your pic then you can apply a variety of effects including the “Awesomize” effect that automatically adjusts your photo with a slider to control how much of this Awesomeness you get. Although the App is published by Smugmug they did not bias it to just posting pics to their service. You can post pics to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket as well as email and SMS.

Speaking of effects and here’s where the gotcha comes in. While the App is free and you can use it as much as you want with all that I mentioned above, there are SEVERAL in-app purchase options to buy more effects and filters. While it’s not totally in your face about it, it pops up anytime you scroll past the free effects. I guess there’s nothing wrong with this, but it may annoy some.

The Bottom Line

Camera Awesome is definitely worth the download and like I said for many I could see this App replacing many of the Apps you already use including perhaps the built-in Camera App.

You can get Camera Awesome for Free here from the iTunes

Productivity / Reviews
EmailShotPro

Send Emails to A Group of Contacts with Mailshot Pro

I use Contact Groups all the time on my computer for both work and personal correspondence. It’s much easier sending an email to “The Team” than it is to add each individual team member to every new email. While Apple does allow you to sync groups from your desktop Mac or PC to your iDevices, it doesn’t really allow you to use those groups very much on the device itself. For example, one of my requests for years has been “give us the ability to assign ringtones to groups.” While that’s something that everyone may not find useful, I would argue that anyone that has groups would definitely want the ability to email to those groups from time to time. Yet we’re in iOS 5 and still don’t have the ability to email to a group of contacts. To make matters worse if you don’t have a computer, let’s say you’re “PC Free” as Apple likes to tout iOS 5, then you can’t even create or edit groups on your iDevice at all.

Mailshot Pro let’s you create groups and email to them

I have to give credit to my friend Linda S. for turning me on to this App. I almost didn’t believe it until I tried it myself. The App is very simple. You can create your groups within the App manually by selecting your contacts and their email address that you want to send to with the group (if they only have one email address then it will just add them). You can also import contacts from your existing groups to save time. Your new Mailshot Pro group will be added to your Contacts as a single entry. Now you can fire up Mail and just address the new email to that new Contact (group) and once you send it, it will send the email to everyone in the group! This special contact should work in all of your Apps with the exception of email directly from the Contacts App in iOS.

There’s more: You can even use Siri to send to this group because it’s a Contact. Also since your group is a “Contact” it gets sync’d with iCloud across all your devices.

The Bottom Line

If Apple wants to truly go “PC Free” then they need to remove the last few PC only features from iOS such as working with Groups and creating custom ringtones. There are still some things that can only be done if you have a computer. I’m glad to see an App like Mailshot Pro fill in the slack in the meantime.

You can get Mailshot Pro for $3.99 as a Universal App for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch here from the iTunes

News
PS-touch

Adobe Photoshop Touch Now on iPad 2

While I have a variety of image editing Apps on my iPad and iPhone including Photoshop Express, Adobe Photoshop Touch will most likely make me forget about all of them. As a long time Photoshop user I’ve become accustom to where things are in Photoshop, what they are called and how they work. While there are some great photo editing Apps on iPad already, none of them are actually “Photoshop”. Sure they do the same kinds of image editing tasks, but each one has its own unique interface, terminology and way of doing things.  With Photoshop Touch I’m almost immediately at home with the familiar tool icons and workflows.

Work With Layered Files and Take Them To Photoshop CS5

Not only can I start a project on Photoshop Touch and work in layers, but I can finish what I start on Photoshop CS5. I don’t have to start over and I have access to all the layers that I created on my iPad. I can bring in images via the iPad’s albums, the iPad camera, Google search, Facebook and more importantly via the Adobe Creative Cloud. The Creative Cloud option gives me wireless access to my photos and Touch projects.

Beyond Simple Filters and Effects

While Photoshop Touch does offer a variety of one click effects, it goes beyond this by offering true layering and compositing of multiple images. Very few iPad Apps in this category allow this.

Sharing

Your finished image can be shared directly to Facebook, Sent via Email or saved to the Camera Roll so that it can be used in any of your other applications. The layered files can also be uploaded to Creative Cloud so that you can use them in Photoshop CS5 on the desktop.

Check out my Introduction Video

The Bottom Line

While Photoshop Touch doesn’t offer every feature of the Photoshop CS5, it does offer most of the most important ones. The layered workflow between the desktop version and the touch version can’t be beat.

You can get Photoshop Touch for iPad for $9.99 here from the iTunes

Note:
• Requires iPad 2 and iOS 5. Not available for iPad (first generation).

If you’re looking for a Great Stylus to use with this App, here’s the one I use.

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Business / Reviews
Snap2PDF

Snap2PDF – Scan Documents and Share Searchable PDFs

Lately these days I’m finding that when I need to scan a document it’s more convenient to just snap a photo of it with my iPhone and convert it into a PDF using an App. This allows me to do it just about anywhere as opposed to having to wait til I get home to use one of my document scanners. While it’s easy to take a picture, using an App to finish the process makes for a better “document”. For example, it’s hard to take a picture of a document without your hand being in the way and casting a shadow. You can avoid this by holding your phone at an angle, but then the picture will be at an angle too.

Snap2PDF offers a simple solution

Snap2PDF provides a simple solution to the document scanning process. Snap your picture and then use the guides for the “Rectification” feature of straightening the picture out so that it appears flat and not an angle or distorted. You can also rotate the page if you need to. Optionally you can perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition of 21 languages supported) to convert the picture into searchable text. This is great if you plan to ultimately store this PDF on your computer and want to be able to search for word on the page later. In my case I’m usually scanning receipts or other quick documents to send to people, so I really don’t need the OCR feature. However, it’s nice to have.  At this point you’re ready to file the document in the App or export out a PDF via Email or to the cloud using Dropbox.

It’s Good, but could be  a little better

First of all this I would like to see this (and the other Apps in this category) become a native (Universal) App for iPad as well. After all more and more people are using iPads for business and it seems to be a natural fit for this type of App to take advantage of the iPad 2 having a built-in camera. Next, while Dropbox support is there, it’s not very straight forward on how to set it up and use it. Other than these few tweaks, Snap2PDF is a solid choice.

You can get Snap2PDF for $1.99 here from the iTunes

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