Category — Software

Photobucket has introduced Photobucket Stories as a brand-new Photobucket feature; in fact, it looks like Stories are still in Beta, and part of a general overhaul of Photobucket.

The basic idea behind Stories is that you upload pictures, you select a background, you arrange them and title them, you select their size (small, medium, large), and you add text annotations in the form of small text fields with a choice of color and font (limited in both cases, but quite reasonable options).

You can drag and drop to rearrange; you can change photo size, text placement, etc. And it’s dead easy to Share your saved/published story, or invite collaborators.

Photobucket Stories are strikingly similar to iPhoto for iOS Journals. You can see what I thought about Journals for iPhoto for iOS.

You can’t add weather and calendar widgets, and stories are a bit more limited in terms of options for layouts, but the concept is the same, and frankly, it’s a bit easier to us (at least on the Web; thus far it doesn’t seem to be actively supported by the PhotoBucket iOS app). Like Journals, Stories have built in facilities for sharing a link to a Story, but at least at present there’s no way to download all the content and make a stand-alone static Web site, the way you can with iPhoto for iOS Journals.

What’s interesting in particular about Stories is that you can collaborate with others on a Story. That’s a neat way to create a record of a family or group event, or to share data.

I made, roughly, the same kind of a Story as one of the previous Journals I made with iPhoto for iOS.

Here’s the Photobucket Story about Life in Washington.

Here’s the iPhoto for iOS Journal about A Year in Washington.  

I’m curious to see which of the new features are implements and supported in iOS apps.

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Last year Snapseed, Nik Software’s nifty photo editing app for iOS was named the 2011 iPad App of the year. Then in September Google bought Nik Software. There was already a version of Snapseed for the OS X desktop, and now there’s a version for Android too.

Snapseed uses the Camera Roll on iOS for photos, but lets you edit, crop, rotate, adjust and apply various filters, and then share the results. There’s a decent Getting Started Snapseed tutorial on their Web site.

Today, Google released Snapseed 1.5 for iOS for free. Go, get it. It’s a super companion to iPhoto for iOS, or the iOS Photos app. The update includes the expected cosmetic branding changes (new icon Google branding) some new filters, and Google + integration for sharing. I’m intrigued by the Instagram-like “square mode” given the disappearance of the Twitter “cards”feature for inline images from Instagram.

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First, the big news.

Apple is taking orders right now for March 16 shipping for their third version iPad. The specs are here. The crude details:

• Retina display with 3.1 million pixels (2048-by-1536-pixel resolution at 264 pixels per inch)
• New rear-facing iSight camera offering 1080p HD video recording, 5 MP images, stabilization, Auto focus (tap to focus)
• Also 2nd FaceTime camera with VGA-quality photos and video at up to 30 frames per second.
• Voice dictation (this is NOT Siri)
• An A5X CPU with quad-core graphics
• Both WiFi 4G LTE versions (buy the model for either AT&T or Verizon) and WiFi only. See Glenn Fleishman’s explanation of LTE and why you should care.
• Form factor a tiny bit larger (fractions of a millimeter larger), includes Bluetooth, battery life about the same, storage (16G, 32G, 64G) and pricing identical to the iPad 2. Black and white bodies both offered.

Apple’s shiny pictures and tasty videos are here. Smart coverage from TidBITS here, Jeff Carlson in the Seattle Times here.

Other announcements included the refreshed Apple TV, iWork updates, the $4.99 iPhoto for iOS (which is available now from the App store, and looks very very sweet, but requires iPad 2 or the new iPad), and iOS 5.1, with updates to lots of Apple’s apps, available now.

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Peachpit has posted an article by me about my love for books, and the iPad:

Lisa L. Spangenberg, coauthor of The iPad 2 Project Book, readily confesses to being nuts about books. Like many of us, she is gradually becoming more comfortable with substituting digital reading for paperbacks and hardbacks, but she is already hopelessly in love with the many free (or very cheap) apps that let lovers of reading explore the written world in a whole new way.

There are so many super iPad apps for readers and bibliophile’s that I’ll be posting about some apps that I had to remove from the Peachpit article because it was already quite lengthy. In the meantime, head on over to Peachpit to read The Best iPad Apps for Book Lovers.

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Michael Cohen has written a helpful review of Snapseed at TidBITS complete with simple explanations about using Snapseed on an iPad to edit and digitally enhance or modify photos. Snapseed from Nik Software is a $4.99 app for iOS. It’s one of Apple’s iPad Apps of the year, and well worth checking out.

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Stanza, the free ereader for iOS was broken, quite badly, by the iOS 5 update. Since Lexicycle was purchased by Amazon, Stanza had remained moribound (the previous update to Stanza for iOS was nine months ago). But today Amazon released an update for iOS 5, and it does seem to be working.

You can read about the likely EOL of Stanza for iOS via Macworld.

It’s a shame; Stanza is really quite an elegant reader.

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