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Prepare images for blogging on iPad

Jacken — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:36:21 +0000

Image editing for blogging on iPad

When I first got my iPad I thought it was great for consuming media, but not for creating it. But after a year I do most of my writing and blogging from my iPad. With a connected Bluetooth keyboard it’s an excellent tool for writing. No spinning hard drive, no fan, just comfortable silence. And with apps like Writing Kit and Blogsy, I can do all the things I need for blogging. But handling images isn’t that easy. Here’s my tips on getting your images in shape directly on your iPad.

Color correction

My favorite image editor is Snapseed, who got Apples iPad app of the year award 2011. I’m not so interested in the filters, but the image editing features. To adjust brightness, ambience, contrast, saturation and color balance, you use the Tune Image feature. You select what you want to adjust by dragging up and down, then you set the amount to adjust with a left and right swipe.

Crop

Snapseed has a crop feature that is equally easy to use. There’s also an excellent sharpening feature.

Change size

Here’s the snag. There is no resize function in Snapseed. So you need to save your corrected image to the photo library and use another app for that. There are some free apps available, but I like to use Photoforge2 for that task. It also have some great features for advanced image editing, but I think that for most of the editing, Snapseed is faster and easier to use. The apps aren’t expensive, and you do remember what you paid for Photoshop, don’t you?

Upload the image to the blog

When the image is finished, I use Blogsy to upload the image. I then export my markdown file to HTML from Writing Kit and paste it into Blogsy.Now all you have to do is to post it, and feel happy about doing it all on your iPad.

Asus PA246Q ProArt Professional monitor review

Jacken — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:07:18 +0000

Asus PA246Q ProArt Professional monitor

To be able to really get the most out of your images, you need a color accurate monitor. You usually have to pay a lot of money to get a good monitor that’s factory calibrated and uses a IPS panel, a panel type that is better at showing correct colors than the more common (and cheaper) TN panels. But there are some reasonably priced monitors. One of them is the Asus PA246Q ProArt monitor. It’s factory calibrated and even ships with a printout of the calibration result from the factory. You can set the monitor to sRGB or Adobe RGB 1998 color space directly on the front controls of the monitor. It’s also has fairly high resolution with 24″ size 1920×1200 pixels.After using my Spyder Color calibrator there wasn’t that much of a difference between the built-in calibration and the Spyder created one, but calibrating the monitor is always a good thing to do.The monitor is thick, so you need ample of desk space to accommodate it, but the monitor stand is sturdy and there is a lot of adjustments available including height. Very handy.When comparing the Asus PA246Q monitor to the monitor on my Macbook Pro mid 2010, you really see the difference in image quality. I wouldn’t edit images using Lightroom or Photoshop on the Macbook anymore. You get spoiled fast when seeing the difference you get from a good monitor.There is a built-in USB hub and connectors for HDMI, D-Sub, DisplayPort and DVI-D. It also includes all the cables, except for the mini-DisplayPort cable for my Mac, which is a nice touch. There is an audio-in port but the build in amplifier has way to low gain to be usable. It’s essentially useless. But for me that’s not a problem. I bought the monitor for it’s image quality.When buying a monitor, one thing to look out for are dead pixels. A dead pixel in the middle of the screen can really be annoying when doing editing. Different manufacturer has a minimum of dead pixels the monitor has to have for a replacement. Mine has one dead pixel fairly low on the screen, so I can live with that.There’s a built in 7-1 card reader, but considering that the monitor is aimed for the professional market, the absence of CF-card capability seems a bit stupid.Would I recommend this monitor? Yes, even though there are some problems, the price and image quality makes up for the faults.Here’s the manufactures description:

The Most User-friendly P-IPS ProArt Series Professional Monitor

P-IPS panel with 98% Adobe RGB coverage and 178° wide viewing angleQuickFit Function instantly boost design efficiency by providing real-size document, photo, and grid on screenBuilt-in USB hubs and 7-in-1 card reader for instant connection

Panel Size: Wide Screen 24.1″(61.13cm) 16:10

Color Saturation : 98%(Adobe RGB), 100%(sRGB), 102%(NTSC)

Panel Type : P-IPS

Resolution : 1920×1200

Display Colors : 1073.7M (10bit)

Good

Factory color calibrated.

Great image quality

Able to display 98% of the Adobe RGB color space.

Bad

Built-in audio interface has too low gain, making it practically useless.

No CF card support in card reader.

IPad first gen crashing – updated

Jacken — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:57:56 +0000

Update

It looks like I finally found a solution to my iPad gen 1 crashing problem. I found it on a forum and I’ve been running my iPad all day without one crash. Haven’t been able to do that since upgrading to iOS 5.01.

All you need to do is to reset all settings. Open the Settings app and under General and choose Reset. Press Reset All Settings. This sounds dangerous, but you won’t lose any data, only your settings. The machine will show a progress bar, which is normal. After the machine is reset, you should now hopefully have an iPad gen 1 that doesn’t crash all the time. All the settings for mail etc wasn’t affected by the reset by the way.

I’ve had problems with my iPad since I upgraded to iOS 5. Apps would constantly crash, usually when opening a built in browser or showing video. I tried to backup and restore, but the problem remained. Looking at the crash logs it’s always memory full errors. But after searching iPad forums I finally found a solution that at least makes the iPad crash less. I turned off most of the iCloud functions. My guess is the photo sharing that causes some of the problems. Anyway, I have had zero problems with my iPhone 4, which has twice the ram amount.

Hopefully Apple will fix this in the 5.1 update, because it’s really handy to have automatic photo sync between my iPhone and iPad.

Update: After a day my iPad is back to crashing often. This is getting annoying.

Blogging with Byword and Marked with WordPress

Jacken — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:55:26 +0000

Byword and Marked

I just got Byword and Marked from the Mac App Store because I’m totally addicted to writing in Markdown. I didn’t like the predefined fonts, but found a great typeface called Droid Sans that you can download here.

Byword

This is a really simple and nice text editor that handles Markdown like a charm. I really like the way it dims down the markup, making the text easier to read.

Marked

This is a nifty little application for previewing the live HTML output from your Markdown text. Great for catching mistakes.

Images

I’m using a WordPress blog and I have found that it’s easiest just to upload the images using the WordPress Dashboard and then copy the link. There are shortcuts for most of the Markdown commands, so all I have to do is to press alt-command-i and paste the link to the image. Thanks to Marked I know that the images will look ok. This looks like a great way of writing blog posts.

iPad/iPhone

I store all my blog posts in a directory in Dropbox, so If I want to I can edit the post with my favorite iPad/iPhone Markdown editor Writing Kit. For me that’s an enormous bonus. Bored on the subway? Write on your blog posts.

Finishing

So when you are finished writing, you just need to export HTML to clipboard and paste it into WordPress.

iPad, useless expensive toy?

Jacken — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 01:13:54 +0000

After buying my 32G 3G iPad I was a bit worried that it would become yet another victim of my impulsiveness. The first day with it, I was convinced that I’d get bored within the week and having it ending up on my mountain of cool but never used electronics. But during the weeks I’ve used it, it’s becoming indispensable. Checking out Twitter with Twitter for iPad. Reading news on FlipBoard (which has the most beautiful design of all news readers), answering mails, making plans with OmniFocus for iPad, chatting with IM+ and using the calendar (naturally synced to Google Calendar) for booking appointments. It’s now an essential part of my daily life. I’m also starting to hate the noise of my Macbook. With the iPad, it’s really quiet.

Problem with flickering screen on iPad fixed in iOS 4.2 beta 2

Jacken — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 22:23:07 +0000

I’ve had problems with my new iPad, where the screen would flicker when the brightness was set to a low setting. Very irritating. My first fear was hardware problems but after upgrading to the latest beta version of iOS, 4.2 beta 2 the problem is fixed! Yay! No need to replace my beloved iPad.

Update A bit too fast, the problem remains.

DNS problems with Snow Leopard 10.6

Jacken — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:49:28 +0000

I’ve had some bizarre problems with my DNS today. I checked /etc/resolv.conf but everything looked ok. Checked the settings dialog for my network and at first glance, that one seemed ok as well.

But normally there should be a dimmed version of the DHCP assigned values there.

Just select the empty one and press the minus sign. Sneaky little bug there!

Save your settings and you should be good to go.

Time to try blogging from ipod

Jacken — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:57:30 +0000

Well, the iPad version seems to work ok. It’s actually quite nice to be able to write in landscape mode.

GPS tagging on the cheap

Jacken — Sat, 09 May 2009 19:58:49 +0000

I just love gadgets. That’s why it’s nice to find that I bought a Garmin eTrex a long time ago. Haven’t used it in years, but then when Apple released the latest version of iLife 09 with the map function in iPhoto I realized that it is very cool to have all the images geo tagged. So I found a program called GPSPhotoLinker, a program that downloads GPS data and pictures and by the date/time on the pictures manages to add longitude and latitude information in the picture info. When you import pictures with this information iPhoto can use that to show it on maps and make it searchable. And when you upload pictures to Flickr, it also uses the location information place your picture on a map. Very cool.

The software is free to download here. If you have an old GPS receiver like me, you need a serial cable (I made my own because of the very high prices for ready made cables), just check eBay. You also need a USB to serial converter, like the “Keyspan High Speed USB Serial Adapter.

To start tagging, just power on your GPS receiver when you start (I just put it in my shirt pocket) and then photo away). Set the clock in your camera (check the GPS clock, it’s VERY exact ) because this is information that is used to sync position information.

Download all your pictures in a folder, connect the GPS, start GPSPhotoLinker and download data from the GPS, and then select the folder with pictures you took. Press “batch” and your done!

iPhoto 09 map showing my short walk today

Map with my pictures in flickr

Facebook and Twitter is actually getting fun to use

Jacken — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 23:27:45 +0000

As soon as it was possible to remove those annoying messages with drinks, cuddly bears requests and shaved midget tossing games, facebook is getting fun to use.

I’m also starting to like Twitter. I bought this little program called EventBox to replace Twirl because I’m always on a laptop so anything that use up to many cycles on the cpu goes to the dustbin. The program looks nice but takes a bit to get used to. The only gripe I have is that it doesn’t show replies on Facebook status changes. But it’s still beta and only costs $15 during the beta period. And kids, you have to support independent developers!