Yesterday I wrote a rather scathing review of Adobe’s new Photoshop Touch for iPhone. It was deserved, I still feel, due to the app’s near-inability to work with other apps, even Adobe’s own desktop apps.
Then today, I wanted to do turn a picture of a friend’s daughter into a graduation gift. I’d take the picture on my iPhone, so I imported it into Photoshop Touch, did a bit of brightness and curves adjustment. Then I added some text - and it turns out Photoshop Touch had far more fonts when you're on a decently fast internet connection (29 to be precise, versus 10 when you're offline or on an EDGE connection).
I picked the font color from the picture, added a faint glow, then cropped the picture to the size I needed. Minutes later, I printed it off my printer over AirPrint. It worked, and was a great tool for the purpose.
So, if you want to edit photos on your iPhone, Photoshop Touch at least a decent option, one that let's you fine-tweak individual settings - like glow and shadow effects - far more than in other apps I've used before. It's just complex enough that, yes, it feels a bit too complex for a phone. But then, so does iWork on the iPhone.
I'm far from an artist, but I love trying out new apps. I also own Creative Suite 6 Design Standard, and use Photoshop daily. So, when Adobe announced that Photoshop Touch for iPhone had finally been released, after being available on the iPad and Android tablets for quite some time, I was excited to go download it.
Sadly, it was far, far less than I expected.
It's All About Integration…
One of the many things I use Photoshop for in my daily work is making the featured image icons for posts on AppStorm. For some of them, we have a template .psd file that we'll drop a .png icon into, tweak it a bit, and export as a 200x200px .png file. I thought I'd try doing this directly from my iPhone.
I opened Dropbox, found the .psd file, and figured I'd just open it in Photoshop Touch. Nope. It didn't show up in the Open In menu. So I tried emailing it to myself (yup, old school style). Still no luck. There is no way to just get a .psd file - or even a normal picture file - into Photoshop Touch from any other app.
Your only options are to import photos from your iPhone Photos Roll - an obvious option for starting a new edit - or from Adobe's Creative Cloud. You can signup for a free account and upload up to 2Gb of images, which is what I did since I bought Creative Suite 6 traditionally and don't have a Creative Cloud subscription. So, finally, I uploaded my .psd file to Creative Cloud from my Mac, then downloaded it to Photoshop Touch on my iPhone. Voilà.
And guess what: that too failed to accomplish what I'd set out to do. Why? Because Photoshop Touch imported my layered .psd file as a standard image, with no layers, layer styles, editable text, or anything. I might as well have imported a .jpg picture.
Working backwards - making a layered .psd on the iPhone and sending it to the Mac - only works marginally better. You'll be able to email files to yourself, but sending them to another app didn't work at all in my tests. Also, make sure you don't email yourself .psdx files, since Photoshop on the Desktop can't open them. You can upload to Creative Cloud, though oddly, .psdx is the only format offered. You can convert it from the site, though, before downloading to your computer. And it could just be my internet connection, but I seldom could get emailing or uploading to Creative Cloud to work.
Using Photoshop Touch on its Own
I've painted a pretty bleak picture of Photoshop Touch so far, but it's marginally better if you want to use it on its own. If you're wanting a mid-level way to edit your photos - something beyond the built-in photo editing and the likes of Instagram - then it's at least a decent option, if you're aware of what you're getting into when you start. It's not Photoshop, but rather an app that shares its name.
There are nice things: you'll find a quite good cropping and selection tool that works as you'd expect, with options to set your own image size in pixels and lock aspect ratios. You can add text - though only with an odd set of fonts that's mostly cheesy but does include Myriad Pro. You can paint - but with only one brush, though at least you can set the size, hardness, flow, and opacity. Oh, and picking colors is an exercise in imprecise frustration, and you won't find any options to choose colors by their hex number or from a Pantone palette.
There's a few features you'll almost be surprised to find, after all of the other limitations, including a magic wand that actually works good, along with the clone stamp and healing brush. There's also the smudge and blur tool, as well as the lasso selection tool. And, there's layers, so you can select a section, copy it to a new layer, add an effect, set the blending mode and opacity, something you'd expect from real Photoshop.
You'll find color curves, levels, brightness tools and more, along with a handful of classic and Instagram-style filters. There is an adjustable Gaussian and directional blur, as well as drop shadow, glow, and bevel effects. Everything's adjustable, something you don't always find in mobile apps. You can select a section, and apply the filter - say a blur - just to it, which is nice, say, for removing private stuff from screenshots, something I do often.
But really, that's just about it. It's quite a bit of photo editing features, some that are even nice, but it's not what I would have expected from Photoshop. No nice tutorials or tools to import online images as the iPad version has, either; this version is really stripped down. It oddly feels like a Windows app on an iPhone, and you'll wish you could trim down your fingers to use it better. Your best bet will be to save your finished pictures as .jpg files to your Camera Roll, too, since Photoshop Touch's sharing options are frustrating at best, and broken at worst.
One other thing to note: Photoshop Touch imports photos at 3 megapixel by default, but you can adjust that in the settings. That said, editing 8 megapixel photos natively in Photoshop Touch requires patience, as every edit brings up the wait icon, something you'll get used to seeing in Photoshop Touch.
In Closing
I wanted to love Photoshop Touch for iPhone, but it really comes up lacking. And that's sad.
The first version of Photoshop I used was Photoshop Elements 7 on the PC, and it had enough of Photoshop's power to make me decide to get the real deal while I still had a student discount. That's why I originally bought CS5: Elements, the basic version of Photoshop, showed me how much I could do with it. It was stripped down, but still powerful.
If Photoshop Touch was the first version of Photoshop I'd ever used, though, I'd be looking for alternatives for editing photos on my Mac. And that's really bad news for Adobe, since far more young computer users today will get their start on touch devices. While other companies are putting their best work into their iOS apps, Adobe's treating them as an afterthought.
Photoshop Touch is a $4.99 app for your iPhone, which isn't bad, but not something I can really recommend. If you need something to edit pictures, and can live with its limitations, then it can be usable, but don't have your hopes too high. I'll keep it around and see if updates make it shine better, but for now, it's far from an exceptional iPhone experience.
It's easier than ever to get published. As Seth Godin would say, you just need to choose yourself - just decide you want to be a published writer, and boom you can be published.
It really is that simple these days. It doesn't take anything fancy to start a blog, and it really doesn't take much to get a least a bit of traction.
I personally started blogging years back as a project in college, with a humble WordPress.com blog. I then added a domain to said blog, moved the blog to WordPress running on my own hosting account, moved to another web host, then another, then moved my site to Kirby CMS, and finally on to my current web host. In the mean time, my blog was the catalyst behind every job I've gotten so far, and has earned a decent chunk of change - nothing to supplement my real job, but enough for a couple nights out a month, and server costs.
Here's what you need:
A domain name
The very first thing you should get is a domain name. Any domain name, really, but ideally something you can live with for years, decades even. Your domain name is the only online identity you really own, and if you start blogging with your own domain name, you can move your site to any other service and your old links and followers will still be able to keep up with your site. No matter where you're going to start a blog, getting a domain name should be the first order of business.
Domains aren't free, but at $10/year on average, they're not very expensive either. I'd recommend registering your domain at a different company than where you're hosting your site, so your domain can never be locked up in a dispute over your hosting, or vise versa.
There's a number of places to get a domain name. I'm currently using Namecheap, though Gandi is another place that I've often seen recommended. I also have domains with Dreamhost, and have bought a domain with Media Temple before; both can be fine options, but I'd again recommended using a different place to register your domain than you're using to host your site.
Also, I'd recommend getting a .com domain name. There's no reason you have to get a .com, but I'd still highly recommend it, since most people will assume it's a .com by default. It just makes things easier.
One more thing: never get rid of that domain if you've got any bit of traffic coming to it. If you want to switch to a new domain, point the old domain at the new site, but don't just throw it away.
Social Media
Now run, don't walk, and get at least a Facebook Page and Twitter account for your site. An App.net account - especially now that they have a free tier - might be a good idea too, as would a YouTube or Vimeo profile. But at the very least, get a Facebook Page and Twitter account. Try your hardest to get the same name as your domain, but if you must, settle for something different. Just make sure to get the very same name on both accounts, even if it's not the same as your domain.
A Place For Your Blog
Wait: give yourself a round of applause. You've gotten halfway there already. Because now, no matter where you put your blog, and no matter what you change in the future, you can always get your site followers pointed to your current site.
You're now ready to start your blog. There's a number of options of how you could do this, and here's the services I'd recommend:
Hosted Services
The simplest way is to just use one of the ready-made blog solutions online. They're free, work great, and you can always move on to something else if you need to, now that you have your own domain. You won't be able to change as much, but you won't have to deal with hosting, either, which is a major bonus. Here's the services I'd recommend:
WordPress.com - This is where I first started my site, and it'd still - for most purposes - be the place I'd recommend. You'll need to pay to bring your own domain, and you'll need to pay to tweak your site's theme beyond the basics, but otherwise, you'll have 99% of the power of WordPress without messing around with hosting. You can make a site with static pages, or just make a blog, and then can export your site to transfer your site to WordPress on your own server if you ever want to. WordPress powers many of the biggest blogs online, and it's the everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink option. And at least it's rather simple on WordPress.com.
Tumblr - Just want a blog, perhaps one where you quote and link to articles on other sites, share photos, and update regularly? Then Tumblr's a really great option. It's got less power than WordPress.com, but it's dead-simple to use, doesn't have ads, and has a rather awesome community. Bringing your own domain is free, and you can export your data easily, too. Plus, you can tweak your themes far more than you can in WordPress.com.
Skrivr - Want to try a new way to blog, something similar to Kirby like I'm using to power Techinch? A system where you can just write plain text files with Markdown formatting, sync via Dropbox, and publish without ever opening a browser window? Then Skrivr is the new blogging option you should try if you don't want to host your own site. It's simple, designed for writers, and the service I'd try if I was starting a new, free hosted blog today.
Squarespace - When you want to go pro, and don't mind spending a bit to do so, then Squarespace is the hosted service you should check into. You'll get some of the best site themes - and best visual site editor - on the market, great iOS apps, a solid service that even includes eCommerce support, and even lets you post from Dropbox. It's the only service I really considered moving Techinch to when hosting got to be too much of a pain.
Self-hosting Your Site
So you've outgrown Tumblr and WordPress.com, and want something more. That's the normal progression most bloggers make - myself included - and now you'll need to find the place to put your site and what to use to run it. But first, putting it online.
There's a few options out there.
Shared Hosting - You'll likely think of shared hosting first, but really, most shared hosts are awful. Sorry, but it's true. I've had terrible experiences with several, and even DreamHost went bad on me after a while. Media Temple's (gs) shared hosting has quite the bad reputation, despite MT's great reputation for their other hosting services.
There's two I think I can really recommend right now: NearlyFreeSpeech, which charges per gigabyte of storage and bandwidth you use, and A Small Orange, which has reasonably priced tiered hosting. A Small Orange is the hosting service Techinch is on right now, and it's working great so far. They told me via chat that they allow up to 512Mb of ram per shared hosting account, a limit no other shared host I've ever seen would share. I'd never trust a shared host that offers "unlimited" hosting, because they all have a limit. Somewhere.
VPS and Beyond - Shared hosting is nice because almost everything is setup for you, but the next step up - a VPS - is a great option that'll take a bit more work from you. You'll need to setup and maintain a Linux server, or get a managed VPS which is more expensive. Media Temple gets good ratings on their managed VPS, and VPS.net is a popular option for unmanaged and cheap VPS. Yet another option is a new app engine like Amazon EC2, Pagoda Box, Fortrabbit, or Heroku. They're very cool, but again, they'll take a bit more geekiness on your part.
The Software
Then, once you've got hosting, you'll need the software to run your site. There's more options that I could ever list, but the two solutions I'd recommend now are Kirby, the awesome plain-text CMS that I'm using on Techinch (see my full review for more info) and WordPress.org. If you go with WordPress, I recommend the Twenty whatever themes that come with WordPress, or anything from WooThemes.
You'll want a few other things: analytics to keep up with your site traffic, an email newsletter, perhaps, and ways to make money. For analytics, Google Analytics is still your best bet for a simple, powerful, and free analytics solution. Mint is awesome if you're hosting your site yourself and want to run your own analytics system. Then, MailChimp and its smaller and simpler cousin TinyLetter are both great for email newsletters. No reason to run your own email newsletter system unless you really want to.
You should also setup IFTTT to automatically publish everything you post to Twitter, Facebook, and any other social networks you use with your site. That way, your followers on those networks will keep up with what you write easily, without you having to remember to post to all of your sites.
You also might want your own customized email address for your shiny new domain name. Google Apps for domains isn't free anymore, for the most part, but you can still get 1 free email address on your own domain with it via Google App Engine. Here's a tutorial on how to do that.
Making Money
If you read this far, you surely want to get something out of blogging. Now, I never thought I'd make money - much less, a living - from blogging when I first started a WordPress.com blog, but my entire career has been shaped by blogging - and WordPress, incidentally - ever since.
The thing is, your blog can be successful, even financially, without actually making any money directly. It gives you a voice on the internet, lets people know about you and your work, and is about the best resumé you could ask for. Communications are always important, and if you can write well, you can express your thoughts about anything. That's a very important skill to show off.
Then, as you get a following, you have the chance to turn that attention into a business. You can write a book, or build an app, or record an album, and instantly have an audience for it, both on your site and your site's social network accounts. You can start a store on your blog, selling almost anything, and make some extra cash. You could start a paid email newsletter - yes, MailChimp supports that - or start a magazine app that's paid, and if you have people that love your writing, you'll get subscribers and make at least some money. You could even put a paywall on your site, and charge for some of your content, if you're successful. There's tons of opportunities, things that are making other people's incomes or at least some spare change.
But that's not all. Ads and affiliate links are another great way to make money, even while you're getting started. Ads are a tough nut to crack, though; they're based on pageviews, so you'll have to be successful at getting a lot of readers to make much there. Adsense can make your site rather ugly, and it really doesn't pay out that much if you don't have many visitors - and will only send you payments if you get over $100 in ad revenue. Not recommended, and yes, I've tried Adsense.
What I can recommend is trying to get into one of the newer, design-focused ad networks like Yoggrt, Fusion, or InfluAds, the ad network Techinch is a part of right now. You'll have to have a decent number of pageviews on your blog before you'll be able to be considered, but if you can get in, it's worth the wait. The ads look classy, are for stuff your readers might actually be interested in, and their payout if not huge is at least more consistent than Adsense.
But what makes even better money is affiliate links (just be sure to disclose that you're using them). Amazon famously has an affiliate program, as does Apple iTunes/App Store. Most companies have affiliate programs, which will give you, say, 5%+ from each sale made after someone clicked on the link in your article. Find an indie book or product that has an affiliate program, and it'll likely work even better for you. I'd recommend writing about stuff you'd write about anyhow, but if something does have an affiliate link and you'd write about it anyhow, then use it and disclose the use. You'll likely find yourself making money that way, if only enough to keep your server fees and domain name covered.
The most important thing, though, is trust. Don't sell yourself or your site out, and don't make your site a scammy mess of ads. It's just not worth it. Do your best work, without even thinking about how to make money from it, and it'll lead to more opportunities on its own. Really.
Write, and write, and write, and…
Now here's where I've gone wrong so much: you need to write often, at least every week if not every day. I'm bad at this, since my day job is editing Mac and Web AppStorm, and sometimes there's only so much you can write in a day. But the best way is to be consistent and write, even if only a little.
And have fun! Running a site is an adventure, and you'll keep learning from it. I sure have.
Several years ago, I reviewed a then-new book on Evernote: Evernote Essentials. It did such a great job at explaining every tiny thing in Evernote - and showing you how to use it better - while keeping it interesting enough to not put you to sleep.
This week, Evernote Essentials 3 came out, as a free update to the original book. That's right: a free update for anyone who already purchased the book. That's something you might expect from an app, but with a book, that's very impressive.
The new version digs into Evernote's newest features, such as the redesigned Mac app, Notebook stacks, geolocation, Evernote Trunk apps, and more. It also includes plenty of geeky tricks that can make Evernote even more powerful for you, such as ways to make search more advanced, and strategies for going paperless with Evernote and organizing your notes to keep up with everything better. You'll learn the ins and outs of sharing notebooks, and find ways you can put Evernote to use in your life in unique ways. It's enough to make you an advanced notetaker, from the guy who Evernote hired to write their own documentation.
The only downside to Evernote Essentials I could find is that it still is only available as a PDF, which obviously makes it best to read on a Mac or PC, or perhaps an iPad. If you're reading on your phone, though, an ePub book would be much preferable. However, since the text is all in one column on the left, it actually is very nicely readable on the iPhone if you zoom in on the text.
So, if you're looking for a great way to learn more about Evernote, there's not another book I'd recommend more. I'm not actually an Evernote user myself - I usually use Simplenote and plain-text files in Dropbox - but this book could almost make me want to use it. And hey, you can't argue with free updates to a book, years after it was originally published!
If you don't have a copy of Evernote Essentials yet, and you want to learn more about it, go grab a copy now. I bet you'll enjoy it!
This is perhaps the exact opposite of what you'd expect the editor of a site about web apps to be writing, but I'm increasingly fed up with companies advertising cloud storage with a device like it's a cureall for small onboard storage. It's not.
Ever tried an app that just didn't fit into your workflow, that you then tried again years later and it suddenly fit perfectly? That's how PopClip was for me. I tried it, felt that it was little more than some iOS-style features on OS X, and sent it to Trash unceremoniously.
Then Apple included PopClip in the Get Stuff Done collection this week, and I gave it another try … and discovered that PopClip had added extensions. Powerful extensions. Ones that could call numbers on Skype, solve math problems you'd typed in a text editor, turn chunks of text into OmniFocus tasks. I was hooked.
Check my article above for the full scoop, or just run over to the App Store and grab a copy of PopClip while it's on sale this week. It's a mouse-powered tool that's nice enough, it won a keyboard shortcut geek's heart.
I finally got around to reviewing my new favorite web app: the Kirby CMS. I moved Techinch to Kirby last October, but it took me forever to get around to finally writing a complete review of it. Since I wanted so long, though, it turned into one of my most comprehensive reviews ever, since I've really used Kirby inside-out after using it to build this site from scratch, migrate old articles from WordPress, and keep writing on here semi-regularly.
Kirby got a 10/10 in my review, and if you're considering switching your site to it or using it for your next web dev project, you should be sure to check out the review.
Kirby's awesome, and I definitely wouldn't want to switch my site back to WordPress. WordPress is still good - hey, I use it all day at AppStorm, and am working on launching a new eCommerce site using WooCommerce - but for a writing-focused site, Kirby's amazing.
Now, I've just got to find a use for my extra Kirby license...
Facebook found a way to turn your likes and profile data into something a bit more useful - and a bit more creepy - with their new Graph Search. It's great for finding new things (apps, restaurants, movies, and more) based on what your friends like, and I can see a big future for that. But it's far from smart (you'll end up pulling your hair out trying to find a way to search for all of your friends' Instagram pictures), and veers enough to the creepy side to make it seem surprising that Facebook didn't limit some types of searches.
That Facebook can put all of this data together is no surprise, especially for anyone who's ever tried to buy an ad on Facebook, since you've been able to target ads using this exact same data for quite some time now. It's not all bad, per se, but it's yet another reminder that you should treat everything you put on Facebook as public, no matter what your privacy settings are. If you're fine with everyone on earth seeing everything you've liked and put in your profile, then you should be fine.
Dashboard Widgets seem to have lost their appeal before tablets became mainstream, and here we're several years into the tablet revolution. Yet, Dashboard still got a number of little updates in OS X Mountain Lion, enough that it still feels like an essential part of the Apple experience.
But it's not the iOS style widgets that have kept me using it, or the 3rd party widgets, since most of them are terribly dated now. Instead, it's Safari's Web Clip widgets, which I use mainly to have an easy way to get updated data from Wolfram|Alpha.
It sure would be interesting if Apple did more with Dashboard+iOS in the future, but there's still enough in Dashboard to make it interesting in 2013.
I've had a soft spot in my heart for web apps for quite some time, so it's no surprise that I picked up a small gig posting to GreatWebApps.com (now closed) years back, and then became editor of Web.AppStorm later on (where I still work). It's rather amazing seeing what can be done just from a browser, and exciting to know that anyone on any computer can use the app, no matter what OS they're running. As someone who used to use Windows and envy the shiny new apps Mac users regularly got, I've always found that inspiring about web apps.
One of the first web apps I fell in love with was 37signals' Backpack. I loved its free-form nature, and found it a handy productivity tool in college. In fact, one of the first app tutorials I wrote online was about Backpack. I was thus sad to see it closed last year, but also excited to see many of the features I'd loved about it in the new-and-redesigned Basecamp. The new Basecamp was good enough that I got our whole AppStorm team using it for collaboration, and it's worked great … but I've always wished I could use it for my own projects without paying $20/month.
That wish has come true now with the newly released Basecamp Personal, a lite version of the new Basecamp that gives you 1 project for a one-time $25 fee. Check out my full review over at Web.AppStorm for more info. In short, it's the best of Basecamp (including the great email integration) designed for tiny teams - or even individual projects.
The neatest thing is that it's a one-time payment, something rather unusual for web apps. In fact, monthly payments are my biggest frustration with web apps, and that's the reason I don't use more of them in my daily life. I buy a lot of apps on iOS, OS X, and even on the web, but am wary of spending money on subscriptions since they can cost so much over time. Now, some of my favorite web apps - Pinboard, Typerighter, Kirby, and now Basecamp - have personal account for a one-time payment, and that makes them much easier to recommend for most people who won't want to pay per month.
Plus, the new Basecamp is nice enough that it'd sell itself anyhow, if it wasn't for the subscription price (and hey, that's even reasonable enough that for a team the size of AppStorm's, Basecamp is far cheaper than most competing products. Really.).
