JixiPix Photo-Editing Apps Let You Indulge Your Creative Inner Dabbler

If you yearn for the golden days of black-and-white photography or want to explore the possibilities, Dynamic Black & White is a great app to have. With the app's slider tools, you can fine-tune your photo in a dizzying number of ways. Sharpness, brightness and contrast controls are in the app, as well as tone and spotlight tools. The tone slider lets you add mood and depth to an image.

Anyone who's casually grappled with a full-featured image editing program -- like Adobe Photoshop, for example -- knows how taxing it can be to find the tools you want when you want them.

What's more, full-featured programs come with full-featured prices. That can put a damper on the creative fire of shutterbugs interested in experimenting with some of the alluring features of those apps.

Those creatives need not fret, however. There are single-purpose apps available at the Mac App Store that can give them a taste of some of the interesting things that can be done in a bloated image-editing suite.

One software developer, JixiPix, has an assortment of such single-purpose apps. Among them are Dramatic Black & White, Simply HDR and Pop Dot Comics.

Spotlight on Creativity

Dramatic Black & White by JixiPix is available at the Mac App Store for US$5.99.

 

Most black-and-white photos created at the camera and phone level lack the arresting qualities of stills captured on film and processed in a darkroom.

All that changes with an app like Dynamic Black & White. DBW gives you the kind of control you need to turn a color digital photo into the kind of black and white beauty that graced the pages of Life magazine during its heyday.

After you drag a photo into the app or download it from your hard drive, you can fine-tune its look with the software's spotlight and slider tools.

The spotlight tool lets you choose an area to highlight in the photo. It's the equivalent of "dodging" areas of a picture in the darkroom. With the app, though, you have better control of the final result.

You can choose to have multiple spotlights or spotlight the entire photo. Spotlight areas appear as ellipses and can be sized and moved by grabbing handles and pulling or pushing them for effect.

The app is fast, with results appearing quickly, which is more than can be said for some full-featured programs performing similar tasks. 

Tools Galore 

With the app's slider tools, you can fine-tune your photo in a dizzying number of ways. In the bad old days of film, a photographer would control the red, green and blue wave lengths in a shot with filters. With DBW, you can do that with slider controls. Better yet, you don't have to take a bunch of test shots to see the effects of the filters on the scene. Sharpness, brightness and contrast controls are in the app, as well as tone and spotlight tools. The tone slider lets you add mood and depth to an image by emphasizing the red, blue or green wave lengths in a photo. The spotlight slider lets you determine the opacity around the spotlights in the picture. If the area is opaque, it will appear as black around the spotlight. As you decrease the opacity, though, you can reveal more of the picture surrounding the spotlight.<o:p></o:p></p> <p>You can also control the black-and-white strength and grain in the image. By manipulating the strength of the black and white in the image, you control the bleed of the color in the original photo into the image. Darkroom-style grain can add more interest to the picture. The program includes seven grain types -- all of which can be further modified with slider controls. If you yearn for the golden days of black-and-white photography or want to explore the possibilities, Dynamic Black &amp; White is a great app to have. 

Incredulous Photography 

A photographic technique currently gaining some notoriety is the making of High Dynamic Range photos. To create an HDR photo manually requires at least three shots bracketed around each other. One is usually shot at a base exposure; another overexposed and the third, underexposed. With HDR, the three shots can be combined to capture more details in an image. Washed out details in the base shot, for example, can be brought into the final image from the underexposed shot. However, HDR can be taken to broader extremes -- and the effects can range from stunning to surreal. Simply HDR lets you experiment with many of those effects.

It lets you tinker not only with color HDR, but also with black and white HDR. In some respects, it overlaps with Dynamic Black &amp; White. The app includes contrasted light and contrasted HDR effects as well as shadow and light effects. Contrasted HDR effects can give a photo a painted post card quality. Contrasted light effects can range from hypernatural to surreal -- purples replacing blues in photo, for example. Shadow and light effects alter the shadows and highlights in an image for effect. A nice feature of the app is that it displays a row below an image of thumbnails illustrating how the presets included with the software will affect the picture. All the presets can be modified with slider controls. If you want to challenge your post-processing creativity, Simply HDR will give you the tools to do it. 

 Comics by JixiPix is available at the Mac App Store for $5.99. Apps to transform photos into comic book art are common, but few have the kind of detail Jixi Pix has included in its app. It offers five comic styles -- Sunday Comics, Halftone, Noir Comics, Pop Comics and Pulp Comics -- and within each style, there's anywhere from a half dozen to a dozen sub styles. If you can't find your comic style here, you're never going to find it. All the styles can be adjusted, of course, with slider controls. The app also gives you a variety of papers that can serve as backgrounds for your comics. Of course, no comic program would be complete without the ability to add voice and thought bubbles, as well as sound effects. Pop Dot Comics has a good library of both. Full-featured image processing programs can't be beat for intensive photo work, but for experimenting with a variety of techniques at a price that's right, apps like those from JixiPix can fit the bill quite nicely.

New iPad Mini Tiptoes Into the Market

Whether Apple's new iPad mini with Retina display is worth the $400 to $830 price tag may be a moot point if the company is unable to stock store shelves. It appears manufacturers of the display have been slow to ship. Once the supply chain kinks are ironed out, consumers will have a chance to see for themselves how the vaunted Retina display model compares with less-pricey 7-inch tablets.

Apple snuck out the iPad mini with Retina display in a low-key launch on Tuesday, making it available for purchase online, through personal pickup of Web orders at its retail stores, or from various carriers.

The device is also available at selected authorized resellers, Apple said, although it did not give details.

However, the iPad mini with Retina display apparently is not available for direct purchase at Apple stores.

Mini With Retina Display Specs

Consumers can purchase the mini with Retina display in a Space Gray or silver finish, with either WiFi-only or WiFi and cellular connectivity.

The devices come with a choice of 16-GB, 32-GB, 64-GB or 128-GB capacities.

Pricing ranges from US$400 to $700 for the WiFi-only versions, and from $530 to $830 for the WiFi-and-cellular devices.

The iPad mini with Retina display has a 7.8-inch screen and runs on a 64-bit A7 processor. Battery life is up to 10 hours.

The device runs iOS 7.

All four major carriers -- Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile -- support the iPad mini with Retina display, and offer no-contract data plans ranging from free in T-Mobile's case to $50 a month, for allotments of 200 MB to 6 GB of data per month, depending on the carrier.

Consumers with existing flexible shared plans can upgrade them to add the iPad mini with Retina display.

Wrestling With Screen Resolution

The iPad's Retina display has been unfavorably compared to that of the less expensive Kindle Fire HDX.

"In pure resolution count, the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9-inch is higher," said Vinita Jakhanwal, director, small and medium displays at IHS iSuppli.

However, the difference is slight -- the HDX 8.9 offers 339 pixels per inch and the iPad mini with Retina display has 326 PPI.

"All these products, including the second-generation Google Nexus, are in the same range of resolution in terms of PPI," Jakhanwal remarked. "With the iPad mini's Retina display, Apple is standardizing its display performance and user experience across all its devices, which has its own merits when working with apps across platforms."

However, display quality is critical when it comes to content, Ray Soneira, president of DisplayMate Technologies, told MacNewsWorld.

"Both Amazon and Apple want you to buy and consume lots of content, so if your tablet is as good as your HDTV -- or, in some cases, better -- that will encourage you to buy content," he pointed out.

Still, the iPad mini with Retina display doesn't fall into the same category as the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9-inch tablet, which Soneira classifies as a flagship tablet, together with the iPad Air and Google Nexus 10.

DisplayMate's comparison of the flagship devices' screens can be viewed here.

Constipation at Cupertino?

The low-key rollout has sparked speculation that Apple might be having supply problems.

"Reports from the display supply chain suggest a slow ramp-up of shipments from display suppliers for the iPad mini Retina," iSuppli's Jakhanwal suggested. "Only one of the suppliers currently seems to be ramped up; others are ramping slowly."

The main display suppliers are LG Display, Sharp and Samsung, Jakhanwal told MacNewsWorld.

The Importance of Honesty

Apple "warned very early on, and it was in their financial call, that they expected there to be challenges with getting a substantial supply of the new iPad mini in the market for the holiday marketing season," Jeff Orr, a senior practice director at ABI Research, pointed out.

"It was nice to hear them say that up front, compared to a year ago when the first iPad mini came out and they had supply issues," he added.

One reason for the tight supply is the late introduction of the iPad mini with Retina display, Orr told MacNewsWorld, because "it takes some time to transition production lines from one product to the next."

How QWERTY Will Save The PC

 

There's no getting around it: keyboards are holding tablets back.

As analysts like Gartner throw out predictions that worldwide tablet growth is expected to be 53.4% this year and PCs are declining by 11.2% in the same period, there are a lot of people who are proclaiming doom and gloom for the PC industry as a whole.

That will simply not be the case.

I have often said that the PC industry is in trouble because of the disruption brought by tablets. So have a lot of analysts. IDC predicted earlier this year that by 2015, sales of tablets will be larger than desktops, laptops and notebooks combined.

But this is a far cry from saying that PCs are going to die altogether.

The PC market place is shrinking, of that there is no doubt. But it is not going to go extinct. What we are seeing now is a culling of the PC sector, that is separating who bought PCs for work and who bought them for play.

Pulling The Ol' Switcheroo

In a way, the tablet device is capitalizing on a glaring weakness of PCs: a lot of these machines were marketed for reasons other than productivity. You can play games, talk to Grandma and Grandpa on the Internet, watch movies and read online content galore, the commercials said, and for lack of a better device, consumers bought into this completely.

This marketing began on the desktops and continued apace on portable PC platforms. Everyone was doing it, because you had to have some reason to sell personal computers to home users who would otherwise have little reason to buy a computing device.

Then Apple did something pretty simple and very, very clever: they looked at their own marketing and sales data and that of less-expensive and faster-selling PCs and realized that if they could give users a device that could perform all of those non-productive tasks cheaper than a Windows PC, then they just might have something.

And they were exactly right.

The genius of the iPad for me was not the slick design or interface. It was the fact that here was a portable device that cost less than any decent portable PC on the market that I could carry around the house and surf the Web or run apps.

Interestingly, it was the opposite argument that almost kept me from getting a first-gen iPad in the first place: I worked from home, I had a laptop, why would I need a tablet? It would be the offer to write a book or two about the iPad that would justify my iPad use case to my wallet, but after using it for a while, the case was made very clear: a laptop or notebook, no matter how light, is no tablet.

Tablets are lighter, not as hot, not as clunky with cords. Tablets don't care if the person in the seat in front of you on the plane reclines five seconds after takeoff. In short: tablets make PCs—even mobile PCs—harder to justify as a tool for reading, watching or playing.

This is what we are seeing now: users who only look at Facebook, check their email or watch their favorite episodes of Star Trek realize they don't need the expense of a standalone or mobile PC anymore. Tablets are for consumers, not producers, and the declining sales of PCs are showing us all just how many people were basically using their PCs for such light (if important) purposes.

Not The End

But there will come a day in the next few years when the decline of the PC will have to level off and for one very simple reason.

There's still work to get done.

Tablets can be used for work, of course, but it is currently not an easy task. Long-form writing on a tablet requires something tablets don't have, which is a decent keyboard. Without some way to get the words in our heads into electronic form on a handheld, the PC still holds an advantage. Writing, in other words, is the safety net preventing the complete extinction of the PC.

Voice recognition is coming along pretty well, many are noting, but it's not perfect. And there is, for some, a big difference between verbalizing and writing. And there are feature gaps in productivity software on tablets. Like it or not, many of us are quite enamored with the feature set of office suite software, and many businesses and power users are not willing to see it go.

Tablets need a much stronger input device if they are to be used for productivity. Most human cultures are centered around the written word, not a purely oral tradition, so getting "pen to paper," even electronically, has to happen if a device is to be used for work.

Until such an interface method comes along, or more users learn to adapt to the interfaces that tablets do have, PCs have no fear of being eliminated altogether. The writers, the spreadsheet jockeys and the coders will all still rely on the PC to get work done.

Qualcomm's Toq Smartwatch Shows Off The Future Of Displays

Qualcomm may not seem like a company that would make a big splash in the smartwatch Arm Race. After all, Qualcomm has long been known to make the pieces that go inside people’s gadgets, not the gadgets themselves. Its Snapdragon computer processors have hit almost every major smartphone released in 2013, for instance. But it is Qualcomm’s technical prowess and research-driven approach that gives its smartwatch—the Qualcomm Toq—a unique approach that makes it worth a look.
The Toq is a $350 smartwatch that will be available to consumers on Cyber Monday—December 2. It can work in conjunction with many Android smartphones to deliver notifications, take phone calls and run a variety of apps. It uses an always-on display that uses a low-power technology to bring crisp images to the Toq’s screen. As smartwatches go, it is one of the more advanced in an device category that is still nascent. 
But what the smartwatch can do is nowhere near as interesting as how the Toq does it.

Bringing MEMS To Display

Smartphones and tablets traditionally use one of a variety of display technologies. Usually they are built with liquid crystal (LCD) or organic light-emitting diodes (OLED). These displays have made great strides in recent years to bring devices that have extremely clear and crisp screens that use less power than previous generations. The Toq doesn’t use these standards but rather a proprietary Qualcomm technology it calls Mirasol based on MEMS—microeletromechanical systems—to deliver its low-power solution called Interferometric Modulation (IMOD).
 

 Regular ReadWrite readers might be familiar with the concept of MEMS: the microscopic machines that could one day be the basis for Smart Dust. As we explained as part of our Future Tech series, Smart Dust is like taking the concept of the Internet Of Things to the very air we breathe. MEMS would act as sensors floating in the air to perform a variety of functions like environmental monitoring or machine tuning. While we focused on the concept of Smart Dust, MEMS are not limited to these types of sensory applications.
The Toq uses MEMS to produce the IMOD effect. Interferometric Modulation creates colors in a different way than LCDS or OLEDS. Essentially, the MEMS that comprise the display have two elements: coated glass on top and reflective membranes on bottom. An air pocket between the two layers is what creates colors depending on what type of electrical charge is applied to the pixel. Basically, the reflected light is creating its own image with very little power input as opposed to an LCD where colors are created through filters and must have a continual power source to create them. Essentially, the MEMS are the structure of the pixel while the thin-filmed optics are what help manipulate the light into an image. 

 
 The core of a Mirasol pixel.

The result is the IMOD display technology. It is called Interferometric Modulation because it is basically interfering with light to change (modulate) it as opposed to manipulating it as other emissive and non-emissive screens like LCD and OLED do. 
The concept of MEMS display has been around for more than a decade but came to a tangible reality in 2009 when Qualcomm MEMS—a subsidiary of the chipmaker—released a white paper outlining the benefits of IMOD. Qualcomm MEMS Technologies began in 1996 as Iridigm Display Corporation and changed its name in 2004.

The Purpose Of Toq

Qualcomm would love to see the Toq become a huge consumer hit. That is not likely to happen and Qualcomm knows it. It’s a smartwatch and we have not yet seen a smartwatch that has captured the imagination of the mass market (the Galaxy Gear is certainly not it).
The Toq is a proof-of-concept device that shows off the IMOD and MEMS technology while combining advanced wireless charging technology and cutting edge use of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for connectivity. Basically, Qualcomm wants to show off to other manufacturers that it has a wide range of technologies that can be of benefit to their smartphones and tablets or potential smartwatches. 
Qualcomm’s value proposition is that it is the company that creates the guts of mobile devices. Through the Toq, it is attempting to show how its technologies from wireless charging to MEMS-based IMOD screens are best in class. If you are actually looking to purchase a smartwatch in 2013, the Toq will be one of the best on the market. Otherwise, it is more likely a device that serves to promote Qualcomm’s goals to power the brains of your devices for decades.

5 Best Windows 8 Apps for the Home

Home is where the heart is, as the old saying goes, but it's also ripe for suggestions and ideas from mobile apps. Among those featured this week in the Windows 8 category are Remodelista for hacking stuff for your home, Allrecipes for culinary adventures and Architectural Digest on the topic of interior design plus Easy DIY for building and repair tips and the Oprah Winfrey Network for celebrity advice.

Here's a look at the top five free Windows 8 apps for the home.

Among the offerings covered in this week's All Things Appy are apps for Windows 8-based home-tech hacking on the cheap -- or not so cheap -- plus cooking, home repair, gawking and some spiritual guidance.

About the Platform: Windows 8 apps can be obtained in the Windows Store. Click on or touch the Start page store tile in Windows 8 and browse to the category that you'd like to see. Or, search for an app by choosing the Search charm's icon.

No. 1: Remodelista

The Remodelista app is rated 4 stars out of a possible 5 with one rating in the Windows 8 Store.

Here are some great ideas for repurposing, or hacking stuff for your home: Door mats made from recycled fire hoses; Spanish lighting made from fishing traps; school buses converted into mobile homes; and spacious, barn-like living are all in the current version.

Other articles found within recently have included useful advice, like how to maintain your home in order to save money in the long run.

This is well-thought-out, forward-thinking stuff, and it mixes high-concept with low.

No. 2: Allrecipes

The Allrecipes app is rated 3.6 average stars out of a possible 5 with 985 ratings in the Windows 8 Store.

Got some bacon left over from breakfast, or a wedge of bacon sitting forlornly in the fridge?

This app lets you customize your meal based on ingredients you have available.

I'm just using bacon as an example, but you could choose anything. Unfortunately, there aren't any recipes based on chocolate and pasta -- but you get the idea.

No. 3: Architectural Digest

Architectural Digest is rated 3.1 average stars out of a possible 5 with 21 ratings in the Windows 8 Store.

While it carries only samplers -- not full magazines -- from Condé Nast's peculiarly titled, residential interior design staple, there are a bunch of free, full articles in this app and plenty of high-quality inspiration if you're thinking of remodeling your Aspen mountain retreat or just appreciate the ideas and expansive pictures.

This app's navigation is also highly simple and logical and worth checking out from a user interface perspective.

No. 4: Easy DIY

Easy DIY is rated 2.7 average stars out of a possible 5 with three ratings in the Windows 8 Store.

This app collates YouTube-like building and repairing video tips related to the home, including such items as how to best waterproof a basement, kitchen cabinet makeovers using vinyl, building a paved pathway and more.

The videos are sourced from establishments like retailer Home Depot, among others. A similarly video-oriented sister app from the same publisher is also available in the store, called Easy Garden Projects.

The app offers useful, solid videos, but it gets a downgraded position in our Top 5 due to the nagging attempts to try to get an upgrade out of the user.

No. 5: Oprah Winfrey Network

The Oprah Winfrey Network app is rated 3.5 average stars out of a possible 5 with 237 ratings in the Windows 8 Store.

If you think you might be having a spiritual crisis while sitting around the house all afternoon, here's your one-stop destination for celebrity advice on the subject -- plus gems such as why making the bed in the morning is a good habit.

A popular mid-afternoon TV franchise goes free Windows app, with large amounts of free video and article content that may just start you on a new path. Did you know that couponing, for example, isn't as easy as it looks? Learn why with this app.