TheAppNews

Topaz Star Effects Released – Photography Plugin

Spencer Scott — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:19:30 +0000

Photographers have a new plugin to add to their collection with the release of Topaz Star Effects. As the name says, this app which is compatible with Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, and more gives you the ability to create star and lighting effects in your images.

“Topaz Star Effect™s pairs powerful light source detection capabilities with an easy-to-use selective star brush, making it faster and easier for you to create effects. The advanced detection algorithm automatically seeks out the light sources in your image and then offers you the ability to quickly control how many of the detected sources are affected using the Threshold slider. The included selective brush offers more flexibility, allowing you to individually select more light sources to add or remove your effect from – in just a single click. Then using the sliders in the Main Adjustments, Color Adjustments and Additional Effects tabs, you can control the appearance and characteristics of your effects.”

A free trial is available and the full version is $29.99 for Mac or PC.

http://www.topazlabs.com/stareffects/

Most Wanted Apps for Windows Phone

Spencer Scott — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:33:53 +0000

There has been a lot of discussions over the past couple of weeks regarding apps and Windows Phone 7. Detractors are quick to say since WP7 doesn’t have X amount of apps, that it’s not as great as another platform with more than X amount of apps. That’s just false on many levels first being that iOS had several years head start. Besides, is every single app in the App Store really good or useful? How many of those are just pure garbage and a countless variety of clone apps? I would prefer quality over quantity any day.

With all that being said though there are some apps available for iOS that I think would find a welcome home on Windows Phone. I wanted to put together a list of my “most wanted”, and hopefully we will see these apps on the WP7 platform one day.

1. Instagram

This is a hugely popular photo sharing application for the iPhone that has many photo filters to apply, easy ways to find your Twitter friends, and just a neat way to share photos. There’s been a lot of rumors lately that Instagram may in fact come to WP, but nothing other than rumors. There’s also news of some clients for it, but unless Instagram gives permission or creates an official app, these are just photo viewers only not letting users upload their own images.

2. Flipboard

Flipboard made it’s first strong debut on the iPad, and eventually made its way to the iPhone. Flipboard is a social magazine which can be customized to deliver the news and content you desire the most. This would look and work amazingly well with the Metro interface.

3. Steam

The Steam app for Android and iOS is brand new, and actually still in beta at the time of this writing. However, for the many of us who are PC gamers already appreciate the ability to connect and chat with friends, browse the catalog and sales, and purchase video games right on your mobile device. Since obviously PC gaming is heavily Windows based, I would hope a Windows Phone version is coming.

4. Urbanspoon

Urbanspoon is a website that offers restaurant reviews and offerings for cities across the U.S. It’s a fantastic way to find new places to eat which are often reviewed by food bloggers and just people looking to have a good meal. The iPhone app is very handy and again this is another app which would be perfect for WP7.

5. Delivery Status

If you send or receive lots of packages via UPS, FedEx, etc. then this is an app you will appreciate. I have previously reviewed this, and the clean layout with syncing abilities again makes this something that would be well received in the Windows Marketplace.

If you agree or have some favorite apps you think would be great on WP7 then please let us know!

CCleaner v3.15

Spencer Scott — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:19:46 +0000

CCleaner is one of the best utilities you can have for Windows, and they have recently released the v3.15 update. CCleaner helps your PC by removing unwanted junk from Windows.

This version offers many fixes and additions:

Added Chrome Canary Omnibox search shortcut cleaning.
Added option to only clean Recycle Bin files deleted more than 24 hours ago.
Improved Firefox History cleaning.
Improved Analysis results for Firefox and Chrome cookies and cache.
Improved Driver Wiper feedback for successful operations.
Improved thread synchronization algorithm to avoid possible deadlocks.
Updated Chrome Canary Saved Form Information cleaning.
Updated Chrome Canary Saved Passwords cleaning.

Free download: http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

Steam Gets iOS and Android Apps

Spencer Scott — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:27:38 +0000

Anyone who knows games is most likely familiar with Steam, and today we see the release of an official Steam app for iOS and Android Devices. The Steam app lets you connect with your Steam friends, chat with them, and browse the Steam sales.

Note: This is in beta, and you will need to wait for an invite. It apparently puts you on a list when you try and login.

http://store.steampowered.com/mobile

Review: PhotoSweeper (Mac)

Spencer Scott — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:03:33 +0000

If you have a hard drive full of pictures you probably know that they can easily take up a fair amount of space. Aside from taking up space, having thousands and thousands (or more) of images can also make it more difficult to sort and organize your collections. Even if you are good about sorting the time always seems to come when you have a mess that will need your attention. Duplicates are usually the number one problem. Whether they are copies that made their way into your collection, or just a bunch of similar photos, eventually you might just want to clear your Mac of these.

I have been using PhotoSweeper from Overmacs for the past few weeks. PhotoSweeper is an application designed to find duplicate and similar images and help you take care of them properly. Getting photos into PhotoSweeper can be done either by dragging them into the window, or by using the media browser where you can import photos from iPhoto or Aperture. Once the images are in you can adjust the Compare Settings where you can set how in-depth you want the scan to be. There’s several setting used to analyze the images, and you can set PhotoSweeper to analyze with a Histogram, metadata, bitmaps, or a combination of settings.

All the comparing methods seemed very accurate, but you might want to experiment with just a few photos at a time until you get comfortable with how it works. In many of my tests I used the ‘Duplicate Only’ setting so I could find obvious duplicates that didn’t need to be on my Mac anymore. Once the images are analyzed you can review the duplicates and choose whether to move them into the Box. Of course there is an option to have PhotoSweeper do this automatically saving you even more time. The Box is where the offending photos are placed and from there you decide what happens to them next. You have the option to delete the images completely, or rename and copy/move them somewhere else.

This is a very handy app for people with decent sized photo libraries. It makes finding duplicate and similar photos a breeze, and depending on the size of your collections, it could possibly help you free up lots of hard drive space. PhotoSweeper was pretty easy to use, but I do recommend at least browsing through the quick start in the manual just to get a rundown of the basics.

At the time of this posting PhotoSweeper is just $4.99 on the Mac App Store, and a free trial is available via their website.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

http://overmacs.com/photosweeper/

Stardock Tiles 1.0 Released

Spencer Scott — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:33:28 +0000

Tiles works by creating a side-bar on a user’s display. At the top of the side-bar are labels for each page such as ‘My Tiles’ or ‘Documents’ or ‘Apps’. Users can then drag and drop programs, documents, or website URLs onto Tiles. When the program is inactive, it appears as an icon. When it is active, it appears as a live preview tile. The look of Tiles can also be customized further with additional themes, background images, and more.

Tiles is available as a free download with additional features available for purchase, as well as a full version at $9.95 for instant access to all of the features or as part of the award-winning full suite of desktop utilities, at or as part of Stardock’s award-winning full suite of desktop utilities, Object Desktop.

http://www.stardock.com/products/tiles/

Review: Stacks 2 (RapidWeaver Plug-in)

Spencer Scott — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:10:15 +0000

One of the most popular reviews on TheAppNews last year was the review of RapidWeaver 5 from Realmac Software. RapidWeaver is an app that lets you create and publish websites from a variety of templates with lots of customizations options. One point I made during the review was how extensible it was with addition of plug-ins from 3rd party developers. One of those I mentioned was Stacks, and with a recently released 2.0 version, it was time to give this a review. This is a pretty big update from previous versions and the interface itself received a complete overhaul. A new library design now lets you search for a particular Stack which is very help for those who have built up a collection.

RapidWeaver has some great layout tools, but it’s still limited and that is where a plugin like Stacks comes in. It gives you a wide variety of options to where you can simply drag and drop page elements to create just the site you imagined. Insert columns, images, stacks of HTML, buttons, and quite a bit more! It includes over 25 stacks, and there’s over 250 available for download from 3rd party developers.

I sat down with Stacks and just started to drag and create all types of layouts that came to mind. Drop a column here, insert an image there, and so forth. Naturally, Stacks works seamlessly with RapidWeaver themes, but I even used a blank theme and was able to create my own page with the theme layout like I really wanted. That’s not really the ideal scenario as RapidWeaver is all about themes, but it shows that with RW and Stacks alone, you could create an entire website design beyond what RW offers out of the box. This is one powerful add-on.

Whether you are new to RapidWeaver or a long-time user, if you had to choose one add-on then there is no question Stacks is the one you want. RapidWeaver is an awesome application by itself, but with Stacks it takes it to another level that you will appreciate the very first time you use it.

Stacks 2 is available for $29.95, and previous users can upgrade for $14.95. A free trial is also available.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

http://yourhead.com/stacks/

The Nokia Lumia 900 Should Be Your Next Windows Phone

Spencer Scott — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:29:49 +0000

I haven’t had a chance to actually hold one yet, but everything I am seeing and hearing about this is grand. I’m determined to make this my next phone, and if you are even thinking about switching over to Windows Phone, this is probably the decider right here.

“Coming exclusively to AT&T in the coming months in cyan and matte black, the Nokia Lumia 900 has a 4.3-inch AMOLED ClearBlack Display for rich, bright images both indoors and out, faster connection speeds based on cutting-edge 4G LTE technology, and a long-lasting 1830 mAH battery for enjoying content all day.

The primary camera includes Nokia’s exclusive Carl Zeiss optics, with large aperture (F2.2) and wide angle focal length (28mm) for high-quality, uncropped images even in low-light conditions. In addition, the Nokia Lumia 900 includes a front-facing camera boasting a large aperture and a wide angle lens that ensures sharp, bright images for high-quality video calling, right out of the box”

http://www.nokia.com/us-en/products/phone/lumia900/?intc=ncomprod-fw-ilc-na-nokia900_0x0-na-ncompress-us-en-1todtmt961c1f

Lightroom 4 Public Beta

Spencer Scott — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:48:06 +0000

With all the news coming out of CES this week I didn’t see this until now. Given that Adobe has been putting significant discounts on Lightroom 3, I knew LR4 wasn’t too far off. Yesterday they finally unveiled news and the public beta for Adobe Lightroom 4.

Some of the new features in Lightroom 4:

Highlight and shadow recovery brings out all the detail that your camera captures in dark shadows and bright highlights.
Photo book creation with easy-to-use elegant templates.
Location-based organization lets you find and group images by location, assign locations to images, and display data from GPS-enabled cameras.
White balance brush to refine and adjust white balance in specific areas of your images.
Additional local editing controls let you adjust noise reduction and remove moiré in targeted areas of your images.
Extended video support for organizing, viewing, and making adjustments and edits to video clips.
Easy video publishing lets you edit and share video clips on Facebook and Flickr®.
Soft proofing to preview how an image will look when printed with color-managed printers.
Email directly from Lightroom using the email account of your choice.

The free public beta is available for download now, and will expire in March. No set date was announced but Lightroom 4 should be available in the next couple of months.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom4/

CES: HTC Announces Titan II–4G LTE Windows Phone

Spencer Scott — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:40:41 +0000

Lots of news coming out of CES today, especially regarding Windows Phone. HTC announced the Titan II which is the first HTC Windows Phone to run on the 4G LTE network.

Features:

Blazing-fast 4G LTE speeds
4.7-inch WVGA super LCD capacitive touchscreen
1.5 GHz Snapdragon™ S2 processor by Qualcomm
16-megapixel camera with a dedicated button, autofocus, dual LED flash,
f/2.6 28mm wide angle lens and 720p HD video recording
1.3-megapixel front-facing camera with video recording capability
HTC Watch and Xbox LIVE gaming

“The HTC TITAN II comes equipped with a brilliant 4.7-inch super LCD capacitive touchscreen display for an optimized viewing experience when watching movies, playing games or enjoying photos and videos. The HTC TITAN II offers quick and easy access to the latest movies and TV shows via HTC Watch and on-the-go gaming with Xbox LIVE.

Packed with advanced imaging technology, the HTC TITAN II features a 16-megapixel camera with a wide-angle lens, autofocus, dual LED flash, red eye reduction, image stabilization, a backside-illuminated sensor and a physical camera button, offering a viable replacement for digital point-and-shoot cameras. The HTC TITAN II delivers a number of features that HTC has developed to help consumers capture photos in a variety of conditions; for instance, panoramic shot for sweeping landscapes and burst shot for action photography. The smartphone also enables 720p HD video recording with the rear-facing camera, as well as on-the-go video chat over Wi-Fi with its 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. “

The Titan II is expected to ship on AT&T in the next few months.