|
Stanford/Palo Alto Macintosh User Group Newsletter April 3, 2010
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dear Laurel,
|
 It's the weekend of the iPad. Does it live up to the hype, or down to the derision? See David Pogue's Online Blog post for multiple examples of the latter. Meanwhile, crowds all over the world (see San Francisco & Palo Alto below) lined up for it. If you haven't been down to an Apple Store to see or buy for yourself, or ordered one to arrive at your home today, you'll get the chance to see it demo'ed at our Monday meeting!   |
|
|
|
| April SMUG Meeting Agenda |
 Steve Shepard, creator of Storyist, will show off his new iPad.
He plans to:
· Demo the iPad (hardware, out-of-box apps)
· Demo some of the major 3rd party apps available at launch
· Demo of iBooks (and other bookstores if they are available at launch)
· Demo of getting your books into iBooks using Storyist
Storyist is a powerful story development tool for novelists and screenwriters. It helps you track your plot, characters, and settings, and keeps all of your writing organizied and accessible--so you can focus on your story. (Note from Dave Strom: And I am writing my first novel with Storyist: The Comic Book Code.)
Shareware
If you were at the March meeting, you'll have seen Bill Atkinson's demo of his iPhone/iPad app via the Xcode emulator tools. In the Shareware session, Dave Aston will take a look behind the scenes and show what's involved in developing real code for the iPhone (or even just for a Mac). Because of all the free resources available, anyone can get started!
Plus Q & A and raffle
|
March Meeting Report: Bill Atkinson's PhotoCard
|
 Bill Atkinson is one of the original Apple people. An Apple
Computer software legend, a world-renowned nature photographer! (Note from
Dave: That is from Bill's website, www.billatkinson.com. From what I see there,
the words are deserved.)
Bill was at SMUG a couple years ago. He has been a nature photographer
since before he worked at Apple. He makes art and sells it in galleries. And more
and more, people can't afford big art. And those that can't afford it give it up.
But Bill is a populist. He wants to make art available to as
many people as possible. An alternative to $1000 art is a $1.50 postcard. Bill
wanted us to see the quality of the printing, and make postcards that are
really nice prints. You can have some of his art at a really cheap price. Regular
post cards and written letter is pretty much on the way out. But his PhotoCard
app is not. (Note from Dave: OK, I said that last sentence, but PhotoCard does
look pretty nice.)
Bill ran the iPod simulator with PhotoCard. PhotoCard is available
on the iPhone app store, a full version for $4.99 and a free version.
In the $4.99 version of PhotoCard, you have 150 nature photos
at your disposal; the free version has 10 such photos. (Note from Dave: Those
nature photos are very nice photos that Bill took. He is quite the
photographer.)
You can flip to the back of the postcard and choose a stamp
for it, address it a person, and the photo card gets the digital postage (bar
code stuff). Type your message on the card. And you can decorate with 325
stickers!
Confirm print-to-mail to mail the photo card. Yes, it is a
physical photo card. 8.25 x 5.5, printed on an HP Indigo digital press. You pay
98 cents: that is what it costs for this type of art. You can buy credits for
postage. Card to the US costs 2 credits, 3 credits for international.
Every morning, Bill pulls down all the PhotoCard orders. He
fixes all the address (people make mistakes, he fixes them, once in a while he
has to email the sender and ask).
The electronic card is a multi-page PDF. The physical card
is large, coated, and post office resistant. Some people want to just send an
email, and can send it that way. You get a preview sheet, the picture you
choose, and you get a 956 pixel wide jpg. You can add a voice note (only with
email, not printed cards). You need an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad to send the
card.
It costs nothing to send the photo card as an email.
What if you want to use one of your own photos? Use the choose-my-photos
option. Bill chose a photo of his dog. He did some zoom, position, and brightness
adjustments. He also had a photo of a friend. He rotated it.
Bill developed with Misha way to show digital postage.
A first! Bill told us that PhotoCard runs on an iPad, and he
showed an iPad prototype! It was a Plexiglas mockup the same size as an iPad.
Bill found that an iPad is very different than an iPhone or laptop. The iPad
does not replace them.
Just as you have apps on your PowerPC Mac that can run on
your Intel Mac, you have apps that run on both the iPhone and the iPad.
Bill showed a bit about running PhotoCard on an iPad. He did
choose a photo, he scrolled between them. You can see the photos 960 pixels wide;
the iPad is big enough to show that. We SMUGers are first to see this iPad demo.
PhotoCard on the iPad has voice notes. And one more thing: you can turn the
iPad to see the front and back of the photo card at once.
Postcards are mailed within 2 business days. During the
non-Christmas season, the post office can get the card in one day, mail it
within usually 3-4 days.
Bill is an artist and a programmer. His artist friends have
no clue how to write an app. So he did.
How do you use your own pictures? You can use iTunes to sync
photos, but Bill does not recommend that, since the photos get down-sampled
(shrunk and lose quality). Instead, in Lightroom, export the photo at 1440
pixels wide. Take those photos, send an email to yourself with the photos
attached, receive the email, press and hold to save them. The optimum size is
1440 pixels.
The photos Bill has in PhotoCard are copyrighted, but you
get limited license to use them.
Bill went to his saved photos, where he had a photo of his
niece. He cropped it and added a caption to it. There is no text ON the photo! It
is meant to be a beautiful photo, not messed up with text. Well, you can Photoshop
it if you really want that text over the photo.
Bill will make a Mac version of PhotoCard someday. When you
are out and about, the iPhone is what you have with you. PhotoCard would be
hard to run on Windows or the web: it calls Apple libraries a lot. The Mac
version won't be too hard to create since the libraries are similar. It would
be hard to put PhotoCard on and Android phone.
You can use all the fonts that are on your system.
It costs $1.50 card to $2 to mail a photo card within the
Untied States, $2.25 to $3 international.
The photo cards are all made with the nice coating. They
have no white borders.
You can zoom the photo card to fit, or zoom to fill, for
orientation of the card on your system. Of course, if you send a physical card,
you can manually flip the photo. (Note from Dave: Even if that seems
primitive.)
The Perfectly Clear iPhone app costs $2.99. You take a
picture and you can then do corrections for contrast, tint, and so on. You can
do auto choice correction: it works well. You can bring up correction controls
with sliders.
Tech support: wife wrote a nice manual, a PhotoCard user
guide. Bill has a teaching video on his website. www.billatkinson.com/aboutPhotoCard.html
The free beta version of PhotoCard is nice; it gives you
access to lots of nature photos.
Bill's code can handle 100,000 cards if PhotoCard gets
really popular (he might get address correction to work more automatically and
reliably). Bill prints them on the HP indigo digital press, and he does this early
in morning. People operating the press get in at 6 am.
There will be an expansion pack available sometime. Bill plans
to make this available to photographers to get their work sold.
|
|
See you all on Monday April 5th in the Redwood Room.
Sincerely,
|
|
Steve Bellamy
SMUG President
|
|
|
|
|
