Going Premium

I have been using “Day One” app since 2011. It had been great to put together my ideas and doing drafts of my blog entry. Over the years, the app developer - Bloom Built Inc - had expended with many features including photographs upload and syncing across platform.

An entry on my iPhone would instantaneously appear on my iPad and my computers. Six years on, the company behind it needed to pivot into a subscription model and I kinda understood their predicament.

When I use the app this much I felt that it was only right to contribute. So, I went premium. This only affected my iOS version as far as I could see but with the one payment, the subscription was upgraded to my iPad as well. I didn’t notice much change on the MacOS version thus far. The syncing still works fine and I hope by this new model, the app would expand in the future to offer more features ....

No Lightroom Gel

With almost everything in life, I believe at love at first sight. No, I wasn't talking about Anita here although truth be told it was like that. I was talking about my photography here.

I always had to try and use a camera before I buy it. And the same goes with my photography work post capture. I had been using Lightroom since version 1 but was never completely happy with it.

When Apple Aperture came into the picture, I gave that a go but in found the first iteration of that software very sluggish and almost unusable. I persevered Lightroom. Grudgingly.

Then came the later versions of Aperture and I never looked back. I loved the white balance control and the skin tones I was getting from it. I couldn't even replicate it consistently in Photoshop. And it was blazingly fast.

Imagine my disappointment when Apple decided to discontinue the development of Aperture and concentrate on a more consumer orientated product instead - Apple Photo. It hasn't have half the control of the old Aperture.

So, I had a choice to make. Shall I relearn and tolerate Lightroom. Or shall I cross my fingers and toes, stick to Aperture and pray that whatever support left that Apple put in on maintaining Aperture would carry me through. Or better still, Apple might change their minds and reinvest in what was otherwise a superb software.

In the meantime, I have decided to stick to Aperture. I had tried my level best in the last couple of weeks to tweak my workflow, but it looked that there was too much hassle for the change. Hopefully I would be able to get a third party RAW converted to my future cameras while I learn to use Lightroom. But that's not going to be any time soon.

Litely Impressive

I read on the net about a new photography app on the iOS called Litely. Similar to VSCO to be honest, a filter to enhance your photo, to make them less digital, embracing that hipster feel, but not to the extend of lomographic fidelity which oftentimes may appear fake.

The filter were more subtle. In fact, it was kore like using different film emulation from the pre-digital days. The enhancement were impressive and the fact that there weren't that many dials to mess around with, using it was more straight forward.

This was snapped in very low light .... managed to keep the noise down pretty wellThere were a few problems though as the GPS location was not embedded into the JPEG files, necessitating some post-uploading changes on Flickr if you're into those kind of stuff - which I do.

I use the app to snap, do the enhancement and exported the JPEG files staring into camera+ app for cropping and addition of border. I then used Flickit Pro to upload to Flickr. Tedious but it appeared to be sound.

Quite literally in complete darknessCertainly the results appeared better compared to doing filtration on the computer as part of post-production when it came to effect. I ended up paying for the in-app enhancements for extra filters. The main app - downloaded for free only contain less than 10 filters. You could then purchase three batches of a dozen filter at around 2 USD to complete the collection. Trust me, they were worth it!

Would definitely be using the app in the coming weeks. GPS embedding would be a welcomed change. You can read more review on the app here.

Go Fleksy

I thought I would give this app a go after reading about it on the RED feed. A few suitor though that I may have to get used to. But it was almost similar to the Blackberry OS 10.

I must confess that I am a fan of the Blackberry software keyboard and Fleksy seemed to be a great addition.

Typing speed was definitely faster and the autocorrection algorithm was excellent. Much better than the stock iOS. In fact, I would be as bold as suggesting that Apple should acquire this product and integrate it into the iOS as a standard input.

It worked much better on the Android architecture as it appeared as the default keyboard. There was no such thing for the iOS though. For Apple, we had to do the typing input in the app and copy and paste it onto where you want to place the text. Cumbersome. As a result, I wasn't able to use it for tweeting. Such a shame!

For the time being, I would be mainly using it on my Android device. Have to develop some muscle memories before able to adept it fully.

New FourSquare

I was surprised with the new update on the iOS FourSquare app. It was more intuitive and consistent with the iOS 7 interface. Very neat.

Maybe everybody would be treated with more check-ins. And that can't be good!