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Back in 2009, we reviewed xScope, the then-new comprehensive toolkit for designers. xScope offers precision features for measuring, previewing, and organizing everything on your computer’s screen, from element dimensions to color codes in any format.
The Iconfactory recently released xScope 3: a major update to their popular software, promising over 70 new features and improvements in interface and performance, let’s take a look at what’s new!
A while ago I introduced Snapseed to the readers of iPhone.Appstorm and Apple honored the photo editing app with the App of Year 2011 award. For good reason: Snapseed took full leverage of the intuitive gestures on mobile devices and made editing a breeze.
Now Snapseed is available for the Mac and of course the question arises: does the app stay true to it’s clean interface and ease of use? I have taken Snapseed for a ride and will let you know after the break if the experience for Mac users is as awesome as it is on mobile devices.
Do you remember the last time you searched frantically for your camera to capture a moment, a landscape or something else that took your breath away? And do you remember the disappointment when you later at home saw that something – a lamp post, a person, a trash bin… – completely ruined the photo?
Now you can easily fix this problem without having to take intermediate lessons in Photoshop. With Snapheal, it’s as easy as painting over the parts of the image you don’t want and make them disappear. We’ll take a closer look at the app after the break…
Dribbble is a delightful little online community specifically created for designers to share bite-sized previews of what they’re working on. Each “shot” is a 400px by 300px image that a user has chosen to share with the Dribbble community, often for the purpose of feedback (and a little showing off here and there).
Whether or not you’ve scored an invite to participate in the exclusive community, it’s a great place to stop by and browse for loads of gorgeous visual inspiration. Today we’ll be taking a look at the Dribbble community through the eyes of Play by Play, an awesome new Mac application that lets you check out all the latest Dribbble action without venturing into the browser (and without having an account). Let’s see if the app lives up to its awesome icon.
We’ve all experienced the frustration of collaborating with someone or trying to communicate over the Internet without any sort of visual support. To better explain your visual ideas, you can take screenshots and add indicators so that other people know exactly what you are talking about, but this process can get time consuming and annoying if you do it a lot.
The app that we are reviewing today is called Clarify, and it can help you create documents by capturing and modifying screenshots. Let’s take a look!
With the multiple common web browsers these days, designing websites that work on all of them can be a strain, especially when they each read CSS in different ways. Even if you’re not someone who creates websites, you’ve no-doubt heard the complaints of many a web coder about the different formats for the multiple web browsers.
JumpZero pounced on the opportunity to create what they call “the missing link between web designers and colors,” and at a launch sale of just $4.99, I think they may just have found it. Head past the break to get an in-depth look at Gradient.
As a web designer, I spend a significant amount of time creating graphics and interfaces in Photoshop. Like other designers and artists, I love the power and limitless possibilities it offers, while at the same time, I grow increasingly frustrated with high prices, feature bloat, and the myriad little quirks that seem designed to drive us insane.
Photoshop’s lack of competition is partly due to the large scope and flexibility of the application – it is used by web, graphic, and interface designers, digital artists, photographers, and more. I doubt Photoshop’s reign as the king of multi-purpose graphics software will end any time soon, but developers have been chipping away at its supremacy in individual fields.
In the more artistic fields, Pixelmator has long been a popular Photoshop alternative, loved for its speed and simplicity. Despite these advantages, Pixelmator could never quite match Photoshop in terms of sheer power – until now. Pixelmator 2 was recently release with an impressive list of new features, find out if it can really compete after the jump!
While we have all of this information and inspiration at our fingertips, it’s often a little difficult to pull quantitative data from what we’re seeing. Mac OS X has some built-in measuring abilities, but they’re fairly limited and stuck inside the screenshot function. Fortunately, there are some third party tools available in the form of browser plugins and stand alone applications that aide in acquiring some actual data that can be useful when working on your own project or just to quench your curiosity.
Many solutions are often a little odd to use or just not there when you need them. PixFit aims to remedy that situation. PixFit is a very quick and simple menubar application that lets you measure anything that is displayed on your screen.
We’ve discussed, on several occasions here on Mac.AppStorm, the niche of apps comprised of consumer-grade imaging and design software. It is still a fairly young app space with huge potential for hobbyists and part-time designers that may not have the funds (or the feature requirements) for the professional tools like those developed by Adobe.
I like to dabble a small bit (emphasis on “small”) in vector art, and with a brother who is a graphic designer by trade, I’ve had my time to play with the big guns like Illustrator. Not only is it way more firepower than I’ll ever need, but I’m also not willing to shell out the required cash for what amounts to a part time hobby for me. Today, I’ll take a look at iDraw, a vector drawing app by Indeeo with a more reasonable price tag and a less immensely overwhelming feature set for the small-timers like me.
If you are a professional or at least enthusiastic user of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you will have worked with brushes. And the beauty of brushes is that there are millions of them out there and that they can be loaded into PS fairly easily.
But how often has it happened to you that you’ve downloaded some brushes and then later forgot what they looked like? Or maybe you have a huge collection already in PS, but finding the right one requires clicking on every one of the sets. That’s where Brush Pilot comes in – it previews your brushes and saves you oodles of time. We’ll take a look at the helper app after the break.
