Pixaloop. Once in a while you find a gem. Pixaloop offers a clever way to add mesmerising animations to photos and paintings. The example above shows how Westminster in the Moonlight by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1880) can be turned into a moody loop with the flowing river Thames and drifting clouds. The animation is defined by the combination of vector strokes and fix points that do not move at all.
Artivive. Well, what’s going on here? This is a screenshot of Artivive, while augmenting the reality as displayed on my computer screen – showing a photo of a painting by Paul Delvaux at Albertina in Vienna. Of course, the original intent is to use your mobile phone or tablet while exploring the museum. Surprising - fun - interactive – if the piece of art has been prepared to be animated with Artivive.
How to create a very special and unique login screen:
1) Launch a space station /phew, this is done. 2) Tune into the live video feed – for instance at ISS Webcam 3) Get the upper video into full screen and landscape mode. 4) Gaze in awe until you fall in love with the current view. 5) Take a screenshot and use it as your lock screen wallpaper.
6) As a kicker, you can follow TheRealBuzz and wait until he shows up on your screen in space. Epic!
Sometimes something is too fast to watch in detail on youtube. And youtube’s user interface is not suited to properly replay certain sections of a video; in this case: Don’t be so hot by Me and My Drummer to catch the chords. Snippz offers exactly that. Slow motion and jump marks for precise navigation.
[Update June 6, 2017] Snippz has just been updated to v2. More space for the video (image 1), which can even be zoomed. Less space for the timeline, which makes it a bit more difficult to edit the hot areas compared to v1 in the second image.
Waterlogue offers water color filters for photos. The results are impressive. However, for my taste, the app is a bit slow and the interaction is limited. I would prefer more influence on the pictures while they are painted by the algorithm.
Apollo MIDI over Bluetooth connects 2 devices with each other, either iOS or macOS. Hence my MIDI USB keyboard can now be connected with out any wires between Mac and iPad. The USB is plugged into the Mac, and Apollo transmits the MIDI over Bluetooth. Nice. Yet another successful link was just between AC Sabre on iPhone to ThumbJam on an iPad.
AC Sabre. Gestures to midi. After a few moments I’ve connected this music light sabre to ThumbJam on the same iPhone. More experiments and fun ahead. Get AC Sabre for 60% off until Jan-31.
As Noted. The simple and powerful personal note taking environment for iPhone, iPad, Android and Chrome on the desktop. Notes are synched via dropbox among all your devices. Tags, notebooks, search, im& export w/ Evernote. Simple and robust.
– Disclaimer: I am the designer and co-developer of As Noted.
iThoughtsX and iThoughts by toketaWare are two mind-mapping apps that synch between Mac and iPad/iPhone. In addition to sharing maps, customized styles can also be shared among devices. Tip-over diagrams – the example above is a UX Journey Map – have different layout rules depending on the node level. Typically they make good use of the real screen estate. Last not least, as in Mindcad Incubator, sheets can contain more than just one graph.
The best to say about ThumbJam is that it made me curious to explore the world of music on the iPad – and that it stayed among my top apps ever since. The number and quality of sampled instruments included is impressive. More instruments can be downloaded for free. The variety of scales is a cultural journey around the globe.
It should be mentioned that ThumbJam does a superbe job to take the gyroscope and accelerometer as input to twist and bend the sounds, e.g. shake the iPhone to play a wild e-guitar vibrato.
I’ve configured the screen above to play Hang 1. More layers are added for Hang 1.1 and Hang 1.2. MIDI support allows other apps to interact with ThumbJam.