Samsung Galaxy S4 Unveiled: Spectacular Specs & Innovative Features
I read the review of the Samsung Galaxy S4 at ReadWrite. I found nothing innovative about it. Nice spec-bump, but hardly innovative. When Apple releases a spec-bumped iPhone (the 3GS and 4S), the Fandroid press screams doom for Apple due to lack of innovation. When Samsung does it, they claim ‘spectacular’ and ‘innovative. Amazing.
If you find yourself design billboards, you would be wise to test your design for readability. There are several ways designers have tested their work over the years, but Lamar Outdoor has by far one of the coolest (and easiest) ways to do it.
Visit the Lamar Outdoor Creative Test page. You can upload a JPG of your outdoor board (300×150 pixels at 72 dpi works best), then answer a few questions about the test view you would like to see. You can choose the type of outdoor board (bulletin, poster, bus shelter, etc.), a rough or smooth road, and the typical speed of the vehicle (20, 50 or 70MPH).
Once you click Drive, a video of what your outdoor board will look like to the driver under your parameters will be displayed in a clean, simple movie.
While not perfect, Lamar’s testing tool offers you a quick and free way to test for readability.
Adobe has been ranked #2 on Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Software Companies list this past week, while Apple topped the list of overall Most Admired Companies, followed by Google, Amazon, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks.
In part one of The iMac 27″ for graphic designers, I covered the reasons for choosing the late 2012 iMac 27” to replace my 2006 Mac Pro. As a graphic designer who works in Adobe Creative Suite apps all day long, with file sizes pushing the 1GB range, power is important. But as I found out with my MacBook Air, the Mac Pro just isn’t necessary anymore. Not only does the iMac have all the power you need, but it’s a much more elegant hardware solution, and significantly easier on the pocketbook. I also listed some of the pros and cons of the iMac.
Now I’m going to talk a bit about my experience actually using the iMac for the last two months. (more…)
To quote Charles Barkley:
“People are stupid.”
Apigee has released the results of the 2013 Mobile App Behavior Survey of smartphone owners across France, Germany, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S.
Survey respondents reported some fascinating country by country differences:
When asked the age at which it’s appropriate for a child to receive their first smartphone, 75% say somewhere between the ages of 12 and 16. However, 2% of Germans say a one-year-old child should have a smartphone, 8% of Americans say the right age is 10, and 6% of people in the U.S. and Spain say parents should wait until kids reach the age of 18 before giving them their first smartphone.
53% of drivers across the world admit to using apps on their smartphone while behind the wheel. Some countries have made more headway than others at curbing this behavior, but the numbers of respondents saying they do this is consistently high: Germany (64%), France (61%), Spain (56%), U.S. (49%) and UK (30%).
Interestingly, “pride” emerged as the top reason that people stay with the mobile platform of their choice. Americans emerged as the most proud of their chosen operating system at a surprising 37%. However, overall iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows users say it’s pride that keeps them from switching.
Spain ranked as the most app-reliant country with 93% saying they can’t go one complete day; while half (50%) of U.S. residents saying they couldn’t last just four hours without apps. And the amount of apps people say they use each day is significant: 72% say they use as many as 10 apps per day, and 2% in the global survey even claim they use more than 50 apps per day.
[zilla_alert style=”yellow”] Note: I received this information via an emailed press-release, and have NOT seen the actual report. But if what you see here is any indication, it’s got to be a great read. [/zilla_alert]
After six years of using the original Mac Pro as my main workhorse, I finally took the plunge this past Christmas and upgraded to Apple’s latest 27” iMac. It’s the first Mac I’ve owned since the Quadra 650 back in the mid 90s that wasn’t a tower model. It was a scary decision for me, but one I’ve been delighted with so far.
The first thing I had to come to grips with is the revelation that I don’t NEED all the expansion that the Mac Pro has to offer. In the distant past, the days when a 16GB stick of RAM took you a year or so to save-up for, the Mac tower models were the only way to go for pro designers. The desktop models simply weren’t made for people like us.
But times have changed. With NO exception, every Mac model available today can easily be used by the most demanding print and web designers—this includes the MacBook Air and the MacMini. If you think you NEED more, you’re most likely overestimating your needs. Today’s Macs are powerful enough for working with Gigabyte sized files with as little as 8GB of RAM.
Now I didn’t say that every Mac model is a perfect fit, far from it. And that’s where my decision got difficult. (more…)
I came across an article at ZDNet this past week that just drove me absolutely crazy. It serves me right for reading anything from ZDNet—because with little exception, they have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to Apple and the Mac. But when I saw the headline: “Is Jony Ive killing the Mac?” I just couldn’t resist clicking through.
The first thing that got my hair up about the article is that other than the headline and the summary at the top, the article makes no mention of Ive, or why the author seems to think the Mac is being systematically killed off by him. I’ve spoken to Jony Ive personally, and he assures me that he isn’t a killer.
Disclaimer: I haven’t spoken to Jony Ive, but I’m willing to bet the only thing he’s killed at his time at Apple is a mountain of bad ideas.
Even if you don’t bother to read the rest of the article, or actually believe that Mac OS X has gone to hell, most Mac users know that Jony Ive has had absolutely nothing to do with OS X up to this point. Obviously the headline is click-bait in an effort to gather more page views.
Now the reason the article is so short is because it simply points out another blog post titled Core Rot at Apple. It is here that I found myself throwing my hands in the air in surrender at the feet of nitpicking at the least, or in many cases, outright stupidity. My thoughts on a few of his points below.
“iTunes — a nightmarish kitchen sink design cluttered with dozens of tabs and modes and animations and clutter, all mixing highly variant purposes Fortunately, Walter Mossberg likes it (but it’s time for him to hang up his jockstrap).”
This is perhaps the only thing in the entire article that I could somewhat sympathize with. iTunes DOES do much more than it should. But “dozens of tabs?” Where are there dozens of tabs? Modes, animations and clutter? If anything, I think Apple has done a decent job of hiding what a mess iTunes is. The dig at Walter Mossberg just goes to show he had nothing of substance to say about it.
Still, at this point in the article, I thought perhaps it had some merit because I know iTunes is a sore spot for many, many people. I’m not in love with it either, so I read on with anticipation. Unfortunately, it got worse. Here are further thoughts… (more…)
standard display on left, retina on the right.
Designer and developers now have to accommodate different types of displays. This means two things: users with Retina Displays will either have badly displayed images on designs that did not include Retina support or the designs that do support Retina, the users will enjoy a high quality, crisp imagery that we all crave and love. If you’re a web designer, responsive web design is already a hot topic. Retina displays are surely on your radar, but if not this article will be a big help. (more…)
Pixa is an image organizer for OS X that appears to have been made specifically for freelance graphic designers who find other asset management apps like Apple’s iPhoto, Adobe Bridge, and Extensis’ Portfolio to be too cumbersome and time consuming to maintain. People like you and me.
While I’m a huge fan of Extensis software, I’ve never been able to force myself to use Portfolio full time. It’s a nice app, and handles almost every sort of file a designer might throw at it, but I found it slow, buggy, and overly-complicated to use—especially for a designer who works primarily with photos and vector art, and not audio and video files. And it required a lot of my time to maintain the files I added to its library. Bridge is ok, but also offers too much, and it’s sluggish. Don’t even get me started with iPhoto. And that’s been the problem with every asset management app I’ve ever come across. They claim to make your job easier, but expect you to do all the heavy lifting.
Pixa strips-away all the frivolous features, the need to manually add images to a library, even some of the chores such as tagging images and sharing, and puts your library of images front and center in a clean and easy to use interface. Read on for more about Pixa. (more…)
