HULU (and more) on your iPad

If you have an iPad and wonder if you can watch HULU on it, check out PlayOn. They developed a product that enables you to stream tv content onto several devices in your home. PlayOn is an HTML5 viewer that streams from your PC, so you wouldn't find it on the App Store.



The bad news is that they do charge for their product, but I found their fee to be pretty reasonable (check out both annual and lifetime subscriptions).
The great news is that they offers a 14 days trial, so you can easily check this out and see if it is for you.
At the moment PlayOn is officially supported only on the iPhone, but they are developing also an iPad version.
If you are impatient like me, and you have some passion for hacking, I can help you make PlayOn work on your iPad.
Here are the steps you will need to follow in your first set up:

1. Install PlayOn on a computer. Your computer will be streaming tv content to your iDevices connected to the same wifi network.
2. Get the IP address of your computer and append ":54479/index.html"
3. You should end up with an address that looks like this: http://xxx.xxx.xx.x:54479/index.html
4. Open that address on Safari on your iPad.

You can bookmark the location, so you can easily return to it.
Unfortunately the last digit of the xxx.xxx.xx.x may changes when you reboot your computer. So, if the last address doesn't work, try changing the last digit with numbers 0-9. One of them should work, and give you back the access to your PlayOn

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Best Pen for your iPad

Sketching and note taking are among the most important tasks I perform on my iPad. Unfortunately both this activities are almost impossible without a pen, even on your iPad. I have tried 3 different pens, so far, and I want to share with you my experience and preference.



The first pen I tried was Pogo Sketch Stylus (8$-15$)
This pen works fine, but it is not very precise. The tip has a squared edge and it is made in a spongy material. The shape and the size makes it hard to get a precise stroke.
The building quality is extremely disappointing. I would be surprised if it cost more that 50 cents to manufacture. The clip broke after a week, and the rest of the pen slowly fell a part within a month.

My second pen was a DAGi P501 (23$)
DAGi has a very original design. It allows an extremely precise input, since the tip is completely transparent, with a red dot that indicates the exact location of your input. This pen is well manufactured. Unfortunately I couldn't effectively use this pen, because it requires you to keep the pen at an angle, which is probably ok for sketching, but completely unnatural for tacking notes.

If your purpose is sketching, you may still want to try this pen. Watch this interesting video review on YouTube for more insights.
YouTube Video
The last pen I tried (and love) is the Capacitive iPad Stylus by BoxWave (20.95$)
This pen is perfect for taking notes and rough sketching.
The pen works very well, and has a very sturdy body. It is completely made of aluminum, which makes it a very strong and light pen.

For 7$ more you may want to consider their Capacitive iPad, which is very handy when you are in a meeting, just carrying your iPad, and someone gives you some handout that you want to mark.

Enjoy you pen and your iPad!

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Penultimate - v1.2

Penultimate is a simple iPad notebook app for hand-written notes and sketches, but, despite its popularity, it is not your best option. Its biggest limitations are: the inability to zoom (which causes me to fit only a few strokes in any given page) and lack of any real document management

Rating: Price: $2.99


What's Good
Penultimate is the most popular hand-written note iPad application. It is a very simple and well designed app. Penultimate does one thing: allows you to hand write your notes.
The main screen design is very similar to Pages and Keynote apps on the iPad. From this screen you can browse all your notebooks in a scrollable view. From here you can delete or share a selected notebook. Double click will open the selected notebook for editing.


This is the first program I tried that had a wrist protection. I love this feature and it makes hand writing with a iPad pen much easier.


There is an option controlling this feature, so make sure it is on!
From the same option popup you can control were to display tools on your page.

In the last update Penultima has introduce a new Pen tool, that finally allows to select thickness and color.
I prefer writing with the thin line, to fit more notes in one page.


Penultimate offers 3 different paper types. I personally prefer Paper Plain, but also the other 2 are not too bad.


The appearance of the ink is very pleasing, it has very smooth corners and a variable thickness that simulates very well traditional ink-writing.


What's Bad
Penultima displays a large right margin, only in landscape view, for scrolling the page. I found this feature very disappointing for two reasons.
First, I was extremely sad to loose such a large portion of the screen, which I would have preferred to use for writing or zooming.
Second, this feature doesn't work well with wrist protection. My wrist kept scrolling accidentally. It was completely impossible for me to work in this view.


Penultima doesn't allow zooming, which imposes to create large notes, filling up the page very quickly.
Export options are very limited. You can email the current page or an entire notebook.


There is no option to organize your notes in any way. I can't see myself using this app for lots of notes. I would end-up with hundreds of notebooks in a long scrolling list, or with few notebooks with hundred of pages.

Rating Breakdown
design
features
reliability

Resources
YouTube video review of Penultimate
Penultimate on the iTune App Store

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I am back!!

Hello everyone, I am back.
I neglected this blog due to an injury that prevented me from using my iPad. It was such a torture! In the meantime, few of the apps I had reviewed have been updated. I was excited to see that most updates had fixed issues I had flagged in my "What's Bad" section. I will publish an updated review for these apps, and I will archive all outdated ones. I then will be diving into new and exciting apps.

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Photogene

Photogene is a very well designed iPad app that provides many essential features for simple photo editing. This is my favorite iPad app for photo editing. It cannot replace my Photoshop yet, but neither can any other iPad app I have tried.

Rating: Price: $3.99

What's Good
Photogene is a feature rich photo editing application.
We will review, one by one, all of the nine mean tools provided by this iPad app.

CROPf
You can crop a photo with a unconstrained box or with an aspect ratio of your choice. Unfortunately the most common choices are missing (see what's bad section for more details).

ROTATE
You can rotate your picture 90 degree left or right, and flip it, horizontally or vertically.
Photogene also provides a straightening tool. By dragging a slider you can rotate your image in either direction a desired amount. While dragging the slider a grid is displayed to help you align features in your photo. In this picture I used the grid to align the horizon line visible in the background.
I was very pleased by the maintained image quality. This tool performed much better in this regard than others, as with Picasa, where I had experienced quality degradation after picture straightening.

MACRO
You can choose among 16 presets effects. You can tap on any of these effects and evaluate right away the result on your picture. More interesting is the ability to save a combination of settings in the Custom section, to apply to multiple pictures.


FILTER
Photogene has 8 filters: sharpen, pencil, edge blur, B&W, posterize, sepia, nightvision and heatmap. An adjust slider allows to control the selected filter.
Personally I don't understand photo filters, with the exception of the edge blur. I guess someone does, since they are common in photo editing applications.

COLOR ADJUST
This is, in my opinion, the most important tool for photo editing. Here you can adjust the most important characteristics of your photo: exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation and color temperature.
These are the essential settings to correct wrong exposures, back-lighting or wrong white balance. You can also play with contrast and saturation to get a nice B&W picture.







Photogene offers as part of the same tool the control for Levels. You can tap on Auto to let Photogene compute the right settings, or you can drag the sliders to define the desired range of colors. Finally three RGB sliders allows to change the overall balance of RED, GREEN and BLUE channels.






CURVES
The curves tool is another important tool, mostly used to adjust contrast and exposition of your picture. You can bend the default three point curve or add additional points for a very complex curve.

RED EYES
This is a classic red eye tool. You can zoom in the area you want to fix, and tap in the pupil location. You can the control both radius and intensity of the filter. This does a pretty good job even in difficult cases as the one below.



SYMBOLS TOOL
You can add text and shapes to your picture by using the symbols tool. Photogene has a library of 14 shapes that you can resize and position where you like on your photo.



Once you have add the symbol, you can then customize colors and appearance, or type your own text.



FRAMES
Frames allows to select among 13 different frames to add to your picture. You can customize color and other features for the selected frame. You can also add a nice reflection effect if you like.



What's Bad
To be honest, not much is bad in this photo editing application.
My only surprise was the selection of aspect ratio for cropping. I miss the standard cropping ratio for printing as 4x6, 5x7 and 8x10. I guess 2:3 count as a 4x6, but that may be not obvious for everyone. Also, the other 2 are not covered by any of the provided ratio.
For once here I have a list of wishes, here listed in priority order:
- cut, copy and paste of selected regions
- a stamp tool to remove imperfections
- support for multiple images (so I can cut a piece of an image and paste over another one)
- mask
- layers
Then I will have my Photoshop on the iPad and I wouldn't need to use my computer any more :)
As a side note, at the moment I did not find any other app that support most of these features, but I am hopeful in a brighter future.

Rating Breakdown
design
features
reliability

Resources
Photogene for iPad demo on YouTube
Photogene on the iTune App Store

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Note Taker HD

Note Taker HD is a simple iPad app for taking hand written notes. Except for the auto-scroll (which is indeed very nice) I couldn't find a reason why I would use this app. It has very limited features and nothing looks good about it, not even your notes.

Rating: Price: $4.99


What's Good
Note Taker HD has two editing modes.
Edit1 mode allows to zoom in and out and write everywhere on the document.


Edit2 mode presents a split screen, similar to FastFinga: full document above, and detail area below. In this mode Note Taker offers a brilliant auto-scroll feature. Auto-scroll allows you to write in the zoom area in a continuous stream, without additional actions. It takes a little while to get used to this behavior, but it can really speed up your hand writing. You can watch this YouTube movie from the author, to fully understand the behavior.


Finally, a view mode allows you to pan and zoom, without the risk to leave unwanted marks on your note.


If you tap on the Done button, Note Taker will navigate to a view which displays the list of pages. If you tap on the tools button on this view, you will get a number of tools to manage your pages.


If you tap and hold on any one of any the thumbnails, you will get a popup with a list of actions you can perform on the page.


What's Bad
The use of real-estate is horrible. When working with the split screen (Edit2), Note Taker takes a lot of space for too many controls. In particular, the zoom area is much less wide of what you wish, and it requires lot of scrolling. Sure, the auto-scroll makes it easier, but you still have to move your finger (or pen) from right to left to continue writing on the same line.

Note Taker supports only blank ink in one fixed pen size, which, is a little too thin.

Note Taker doesn't support anything besides hand written notes; no pictures or text.

The ink is thin and looks very jagged. This is also true when writing in a large zoomed view, and then zooming out. It seems impossible to get any sort of decent looking lines.

I personally don't like this light green paper color. Most of note apps I tried provide more attractive and crisp looking paper (see FastFinga and Sundry Notes for example).

You can edit the default thumbnail associated with the page. Unfortunately this is not a very intuitive process. I had to watch the author's video to discover that feature, contrary to my assumptions I had to resize the document to fit into the thumbnail, and not the other way around.

I appreciate the feature, but it requires more effort that what I am willing to make, given the functionality.

Other minor observations.
A small button below the document allows scrolling, but I don't know why I would need it, since I can always use the two finger gesture to do it. Finally, I don't think I have ever seen a REDO button before the UNDO one.


Rating Breakdown
design
features
reliability

Resources
You can watch this YouTube video from the author to see this app in action.
Note Taker HD Overview
Note Taker HD on the iTune App Store

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Adobe Ideas

Adobe Ideas is simple and nicely designed electronic sketchbook, plus it is free, which makes it a must download. Give it a serious try - I actually discover this app while looking on it more in depth while writing this review, and this is, now, one of my favorite apps! And don't forget to zoom, while you are sketching, which for me was the key of success.

Rating: Price: FREE


What's Good
Don't overlook Adobe Ideas. It is a simple, yet great drawing app.


It provides 3 modes: pen, eraser and pan, and it has an apparently infinite undo stack.
Within the pen mode, you can select: size, opacity and color.
For both size and opacity, a slider allows to change the value.
For colors, you can pick one of the 5 color from the default palette, or select one of your custom different palette.


I love the way Adobe Ideas enables to create custom palette.
From the organize page you can select the colors tab...


... which displays all the palette you had defined.
From here you can then pick an image from your photo album. Adobe Ideas will extract main colors and create your new shining palette. The selected colors are highlighted in your picture. I wish I could drag the pickers around, but all in all, in am very pleased with the choices Adobe Ideas makes.
The best way to use this app is to make heavy use of zoom - that, at least, was what made all the difference for me.


If you want to work in full mode, a small button on the top left corner allows to hide the tool palette.


A layer button, on the left bottom corner, displays the two layers this app provides. You can have a photo and a draw layer, which enables to trace or annotate pictures.


You can duplicate Ideas by tapping on the double pen icon on the top right corner of the Organize page. This is essential when you want to produce variations of the same drawing.


The best way to use this app, is to make heavy use of the zoom while sketching - this made all the difference for me. The way that Adobe Ideas renders and scales your strokes is the most impressive feature of this app. Your strokes become nice and smooth. You can zoom infinitely, in and out, and your strokes will always look amazing!


What's Bad
Export options are basically nonexistent, not even export to the photo album. The only way to use your work outside this app is to email it! This is pretty much the biggest shortfall (and it's not a small one) of this app.

The two layers, dedicated respectively to sketch and photo, tickled my desire for more layer capabilities.

As for all iPad drawing apps, I miss the capability to cut and paste, and move around portion of my sketch. I am the only one that makes heavy use of this functionality when creating electronic drawing?

A couple of a minor design flaws.
First. Changing color and size takes one more click then what I wish. I appreciate the design of this app, which preserve the real-estate for the drawing area, but I wish I could change my pen attributes in one click.
Second. I keep running into this error. I tap on a color from a different swatch, assuming that I am selecting both swatch and color. When I start sketching and then realize that the color hasn't changed, only the swatch was selected.

Rating Breakdown
design
features
reliability

Resources
Draw & share with Adobe Ideas for iPad
Adobe Ideas on the iTune Apple Store

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