VPaint – 2D vector animation package

VPaint is an experimental vector graphics and, now as of version 1.5, animation editor based on the Vector Animation Complex. The new version was presented on SIGGRAPH 2015 currently going on in Los Angeles.

Materials from this year's conference are not available yet. In the meantime, you can check out presentation from SIGGRAPH 2014, where the ideas behind VPaint 1.0, were presented.

VPaint 1.5 will soon be available on rollApp for you to try.

Dark Sky 5

For iPhone 6 users, we are also including the option to turn on automatic pressure sensor reporting. The iPhone 6 comes with a built-in barometer, primarily used for determining altitude. But there also exists the potential to revolutionize weather forecasting. If you opt-in, your phone will periodically submit pressure readings which will provide us with extremely useful meteorological data. We’ll hopefully have lots more to say about this in the coming months.

Chances are regular computing devices can get sensors and other non-computing features faster than regular electronics will get computing capabilties to form Internet of Things.

Freemium is hard indeed

In discussion with Shuveb Hussain, who admits that he Killed App Sales By Going Freemium, Marco summarizes it nicely:

Freemium is hard. Its effectiveness depends on where you can put that purchase barrier in your app. Many app types simply don’t have a good place for it.

Pricing is generally hard. Especially, if the magic "free" is involved.

It usually good idea to have free users "pay" for basic service by spreading the word about your application or service (of course, you have to provide them with ability to do so). Once they grow to depend on you and grow the need for advanced features, they would start paying for real. And finding the boundry between basic and advanced determines the success of freemium model for a particular app.

Microsoft acquires Wunderlist. Official

Yesterday's rumors confirmed today: Microsoft acquired Wunderlist.

6Wunderkinder acqui-hired for reportedly $100 million to $200 million.

Pixelmator comes to the iPhone

The offerings sound impressive. The trouble, of course, is making them useable on the iPhone. Other apps have brought powerful image editing tools to the iPhone before, but they've generally failed at making them easy to work with.

This is the question indeed. Would be great to see new UI ideas for the tasks like advanced photo editing, which traditinally belonged to the realm of "real" computers and now move to mobile.

Cross-platform cloud clipboard

The company is now working on a cloud clipboard app called OneClip. The app is designed to let the user copy whatever they want and access it on whatever device they need it on.

We usually think clipboard, when we need to pass data between applications on a single device. When transferring data between devices, we think files.

Will be interesting to see which UX solutions Microsoft would offer to manage the cloud clipboard and how they handle sync, when something is copied to the clipboard on multiple devices.

Photoshop Touch out, Photoshop mobile apps in

Adobe has announced that Photoshop Touch (photo retouching app for iPad and Android tablets) will be discontinued on May 28, 2015. Development focus will shift to a family of more specialized mobile apps like Photoshop Mix,Photoshop Sketch, Brush CC, Color CC, and others.

We recognized that bringing core Photoshop technology to mobile would open many creative opportunities for our customers, but it had to be done right, which meant nailing the experience. To do that, we needed to distill very complex desktop workflows and features into a naturally intuitive touch environment. We’ve also sought to provide a solution that helps people achieve great results quickly. So we’ve recently focused on creating individual mobile apps that each perform core tasks, rather than provide all-in-one solutions that mirror the desktop versions of our applications.

This move is interesting in many regards.

First, this is one more proof that super powerful all-in-one applications are not always a good fit for mobile uses and workflows. Mobile needs apps – smaller well-defined utilities, which serve few (ideally only one) purposes. More content creation activities move to mobile and they are fulfilled by sets of highly focused independent apps. This will prompt more sophisticated inter-app communication capabilities in mobile OSes.

Second, pay-for-app is getting way for pay-for-service. Apps like Comp CC, Shape CC, Brush CC, Color CC only make sense if you use Adobe applications on desktop and subscribe to Creative Cloud. In this setting mobile apps serve complimentary role and create value added for the CC service.

Looking forward to see how Adobe's Project Rigel, which promises serious retouching for mobile, will come out in late 2015.

Microsoft celebrates 25 years of Solitaire with a tournament

Solitaire. Tournament.

It almost hurts to think how much time has been wasted on Solitaire around the globe in these 25 years.

Ceasar Salad app

Promoted on the last Talk Show was The Best Ceasar – app all about the ceasar salad. If you recall that, for instance, AutoCAD is also an application, this would be a vivid example of how wide the notion of "application" is nowadays.

Affinity Photo – new Photoshop killer

Last couple of months have been fairly fruitful for photo apps with new release of Lightroom, arrival of new Photos app for Mac (check out great review from MacStories and I almost missed the release of Affinity Photo – new photo editing app for Mac from Serif.

Serif advertises its software as “the fastest, smoothest, most precise, professional image editing software for Mac.” My fellow designer, who tried Affinity Design – another graphics product from Serif – told me that it definitely felt very snappy and seemed quite capable to him.

Worth checking out if you are into photography and use a Mac. Affinity Photo is free while in beta.