Posts Tagged ‘creative’
App Review ~ FolioBook
FolioBook 2.2
FolioBook Home Screen
Foliobook is the iPad portfolio app that allows you to create your own magazine-like home page. Professional Photographer Magazine said “Its the most unique customisable portfolio app”. Not only does it allow you to express your work and your individuality, Foliobook is also fast and easy to use. – FolioBook website.
App Review ~ Portfolio
Portfolio (Version 1.5.6)
Home Screen
Portfolio
Portfolio for iPad is a blank slate waiting for your personalisation. You can customize its appearance to completely fit your business, giving the appearance of a custom app developed exclusively for you.”
Simon Heys of Minimal Folio Interviewed
The eleventh interview from a larger series of interviews with Photographers and iOS Developers. All of them develop portfolio Apps for Apple’s iPad and iPhone. This interview is with Simon Heys, based in London, England. He is a graphic designer and Programmer. He writes his own iOS Apps.
Minimal Folio is a simple way to present images and video on your iPad or iPhone. The app is unbranded so your portfolio can do the talking.
iTunes, App Shopper, Homepage, Twitter.
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App Review ~ Collections for iPad
Collections for iPad Home Screen
Collections for iPad Version 1.7
CFI provides a one-stop solution to organise your photos into photo books, collect you photos into a portfolio and even share your collections. You can choose your favourite layouts to show off your photos. You can transfer your photos from your computer (directly), Facebook and Dropbox into beautiful collections for sharing, export your photobooks into PDF and play slideshows of your photo books with music as well.
Collections for iPad
As with all iOS portfolio Apps, it’s important to know how they introduce themselves on first use. Do they provide a quick run through of the App with instructions, contain a help guide/slideshow? How easily does the App allow the user to get to work? The first thing an artist is going to do is create a gallery and then customise it. This walkthrough and others walk that line.
Collections for iPad (CFI), is the fourth iOS App in this series of portfolio Apps to be reviewed. As you can read from the Quick Features list, there are options galore for customising nearly every aspect of a portfolio. You might feel a little overwhelmed, but for those who want an extreme amount of control, if you want the ability to edit to your hearts content, to the individual pixel, Collections for iPad is probably it.
Viewbook
My photography portfolio has always been hosted by viewbook.com. They are great hosts, never had a problem and I like the tools they offer for me to show my work. One reason why I chose them, was because their website worked on the iPad from the very beginning when it first came out. Some of their higher priced competitors didn’t, since they were an all Flash affair.
Now I’ve heard they are releasing their own iPad portfolio App! I’ll be reviewing it soon. I’ve been informed it’s free for existing users of Viewbook.
Sigurd Kranendonk of XtraFolio Interviewed
The fifth in a series of interview with various Photographers and iOS Developers. All of them develop portfolio Apps for Apple’s iPad. This interview is with Sigurd Kranendonk a professional photographer from the Netherlands talking about his app, XtraFolio.
XtraFolio and XtraFolio Lite can be found at any of the links below:
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Tiger Ng of Collections for iPad interviewed
The fourth in a series of interview with various Photographers and iOS Developers. All of them develop portfolio Apps for Apple’s iPad. This interview is with Hong Kongese developer Tiger Ng.
Tiger Ng is a developer based in Hong Kong. Tiger is also responsible for other iApps such as PictureGames and PictureSecret. All his Apps involve some element of photography.
Collections for iPad can be found at any of the links here:- Website, iTunes,
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What gave you the inspiration to write Collections?
I found the built-in Photo App in the iPad boring, and other photo album Apps are also used in a similar way to browse photos, i.e. list of albums, list of photos in grid view, etc. There is also no iPhoto (Apple’s iLife) product in the market. Therefore, I would like to write a photos app to make people browse photos like photo books.
Who are you? Are you a photographer? Tell us a bit about yourself or the Portfolio team.
I am Tiger Ng, I am based in Hong Kong. I am not photographer. I have been working on iOS platform for 2 years.
Is this your first App for iOS?
My first app is Photo Only, it is an app that grabs any image from any web page, and users can download and view photos offline with it.
Slideshow with time line
How easy was it to code in order to create Collections? How long did it take to get Collections to Version 1?
It took me four weeks, it has also given me image processing experience.
Do you write any other Apps for iOS?
Yes. Recently I have written an app called “PictureGames”, it allows people to create their own photo games (4 games now) in a few minutes. Another of my Apps is called “PictureSecret”, it provides a new way to share any hidden messages using photos.
Will you write other Apps for iOS devices? More importantly, photography related ones.
Yes.
You released Collections before iOS 4.2. Did coding for iOS 4.2 make much of a difference compared to iOS 3.2?
Big difference. There are no multiple photos selection provided in iOS 3.2 and the image picker cannot be customized. In iOS 4.2, you can customize your own image pickers to provide multiple selections. That’s a major feature for photo Apps.
How long did it take to write Collections?
4 weeks.
Edit Mode
Where do you want to take Collections with future updates, where do you see yourself in a years time?
There is a lot of potential with that. Collections will be going to support videos, integrate with more photo sharing sites, and add sharing capability itself.
What do you as a Developer/Photographer want to see in the next iPad, either to aid your Apps or just for your own pleasure?
Camera. It is the most important feature for creating new photo Apps.
Are you a one man operation or is this a group effort?
One man.
Where are you based and where have you seen the greatest uptake of Collections at the moment?
In the US.
I found the built in Photo Application rather lacking for a Pro Photographer, others will feel it’s good enough. Were you concerned of your App’s uptake by other Photographers before committing yourself to creating Portfolio?
Collections provides new way to organize your photos in iPad. It can be for photo books (collage template), portfolio (edit, view, and slideshow mode), and even an image organizer (global search and folder).
Can you explain anything about the creation process behind your app? Did you involve other photographers or even editors to ask what they would want in a digital portfolio that attempts to replicate the printed portfolio and presentation?
Just do it.
Directly import images from your Computer
Just to wrap up. How do you see this market developing as we go forward? Are you concerned about the ‘race to the bottom’ and copycat apps affecting this class of applications?
I think the quality is the most important. Less bugs and great performance can attract new users. The market is highly competitive because iPhone and iPad is still becoming popular and many people are coming to develop Apps. To keep growing, extending to other platforms, e.g. android or windows phone may be another solution.
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Collections for iPad at the time of writing is priced at £1.79 and $2.99 on the iOS Apple Store.
Portfolio To Go IPAD App Review
Sharing your images
A recent winner of Apple’s ‘iPad App of the Week’ award, Portfolio To Go features an elegant and intuitive photo-wall giving users instant access to all of their Flickr photosets: scroll each gallery horizontally to browse thumbs, scroll vertically to traverse through all synced galleries. The main purpose of Portfolio To Go is to enable photographers to present their portfolio offline to clients – perfect for use with iPad wi-fi: just sync and go. Photographers create and edit their photosets on Flickr.com and Portfolio To Go acts as a presentation tool, keeping in sync with all your Flickr changes.
Quick Features
- Photo Wall: View all your Flickr photo galleries at once – scroll each gallery horizontally to browse thumbs, scroll vertically to traverse through all synced galleries. Click on any thumbnail to jump into the main image view.
- Main image view displays gallery thumbnails to enable intuitive gallery navigation. Just click the main image to go full-screen.
- Flickr Authorization: access to all of your private, friends and family and public photos
- Multiple cached portfolios: add unlimited Flickr portfolios via your contacts or Flickr IDs to P2G and switch between them.
- Auto-cache photos: all photos get cached in the background while you browse (you can turn this feature off in settings)
- Send Portfolio to a Client: Pick and choose which galleries to include and then send your portfolio straight to clients and friends by email from the app. Clients will download the free Portfolio to Go Player app to their iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch and launch your portfolio from the emailed link.
- Share your photos and Flickr links via Facebook, Twitter or Email
- Save favourite Photos to your iPad Photo Library
Portfolio To Go
The developer of Portfolio To Go (PTG) has taken a distinguishing approach towards the iPad Portfolio market. PTG assumes your portfolio already exists online on Flickr, and allows you to effortlessly import it onto your iPad with little effort. It also means, creative types don’t need to spend any time creating a portfolio. Flickr IS where you are already showing your work to millions, so it feels like a valid reason to take your photography with you on your iPad.
Importing Images
Upon activation, the first thing you need to do, is sign into your Flickr account. This is mandatory for using PTG; you can’t side load content from iTunes. As with any 3rd party application, you have to authorise a service to work with your Flickr account, nothing unusual there. PTG will then automatically download your galleries from Flickr, it’s quite speedy with images appearing quickly, showing up as thumbnails on your home screen wall. Lot’s of content however creates a cluttered home screen. A prolific photographer would end up having tens of galleries in PTG and it would end of looking very busy like in the image below.
Gallery layout
Notice how caption text runs off the screen, all text is the same weight, everything is shouting for the same amount of attention. Look at the gallery view in iPhoto, much cleaner and easier to navigate. Thumbnails represent entire galleries instead of having all the images as thumbnails, text is reduced to the most important element, Gallery titles.
I would like to see some tweaking with the UI, making it easier to view specific galleries. There is another way to view galleries which is kinder to the eyes, pressing ‘Galleries’ in the top left brings a pop over menu onscreen. It illustrates partially what I’ve just described as an aid for the user. You get a thumbnail of the galleries with some descriptive text, from here you can hide any galleries you don’t want to show and it makes navigating quicker. If this idea was expanded on, PTG wouldn’t be as busy.
You can deselect galleries on the pop over menu.
The pop over menu helps but there still needs to be a redesign on the main screen without needing to tap up a menu screen. Flickr.com has it’s own minimal looking gallery view as well.
Flickr Gallery View
Editing Images
You use Flickr to edit your photography so there is not much to say here. PTG doesn’t allow you to edit anything beyond image scaling, refresh rates and auto-caching photos. Think of PTG as being more of a playback tool rather than an App with a huge array of functions to show off your work. Again this is a boon to creatives who don’t want to edit their portfolio on the iPad, but just concentrate on using PTG to give presentations.
Video Captions
PTG, doesn’t import video, I think it should. PTG does allow for captions. You can’t edit text within PTG, again you’re not supposed to. Captionsthat are longer than two lines are cropped until you push your finger over them to reveal more. I’d have liked to have a bit more space allocated for captions, so I didn’t need to finger them. Better yet, why restrict caption space if there is a button that can hide/show text anyway? Many Apps on the App store do this so, and I’m not sure why it’s so common either (Reuters & Latitude Magazine to quickly name two others).
Branding
Your home screen, consists of all your portfolios from Flickr. PTG has no authoring tools for creating a personalized home screen. If you want to brand yourself, a more novel solution is required in order to present your identity as a creative artist (custom iPad portfolio box maybe)?
Presenting
Presentations are effortless with PTG and the lack of editing tools does reduce the App’s complexity. In a gallery, a single tap takes you to a shared screen view, main image on top and a thumbnail timeline running along the bottom, further onscreen taps, alternates the view with a full screen mode hiding the timeline. There is no pinch to zoom during slide shows.
Settings
Settings Screen
At the top of the screen are five buttons; top left is the Wall/Gallery switch view, with the remaining four on the right. From left to right they are: a share function (share on Facebook, share on twitter for example), an option to suggest new features/write a review, ‘Settings’ for presenting imagery and a very useful button shaped like a portfolio which allows you to view your contact’s galleries. Let’s be honest, Flickr.com is terribly slow to navigate, this is a great feature to include in the App. Everybody else’s work is just as accessible! During slideshow mode, more buttons appear on the bottom; controls for showing images, info button which hide/shows caption text and another share button
Wrapping Up
The Ugly
- Doesn’t import flickr video
The Bad
- No Pinch to Zoom
- Home screen UI needs redesigning
- Captions feature needs tweaking
- You need to have a Flickr account
- Doesn’t import gallery intro text
The Good
- Flickr, on your iPad!
- Automatically imports image captions
- You can easily view other people’s work
- Fast and easy to use
- Install and download content on the go
The Best
- No need to edit your portfolio, everything is done for you
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There is also an interview with the developer of Portfolio To Go here.
Portfolio To Go can be found at any of the links below:
