Dayta is a fresh new iPhone app, just released yesterday. The developer, Sahil Lavingia, markets it as being ‘one app to manage all your data tracking’. It was created for his One Week App project, where he created an app from scratch and submitted it to Apple within the space of a week. I’ve been playing around with the final release version and I have to say, it’s pretty slick.
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Review: Dayta
Friday, February 19th, 2010Review: Lego Photo
Thursday, January 21st, 2010When was the last time you thought to yourself, “I wish I could turn that photo I just took into a mosaic made from Lego!”? Probably never. But just in case you ever have the urge, now you can turn photos into Lego mosaics with the first official app from Lego. It’s called Lego Photo, and it’s free to download.
User Interface
When you open up the app, the UI is extremely simple; just two great big buttons, one with a camera icon and one that lets you open up your photo library and choose a photo. Obviously on an iPod touch there’s no camera, but you can still Lego-ify the photos you’ve added through iTunes. It’s also very simple to create a mosaic – either take a photo or choose one and it’ll automatically be changed. Once your mosaic has been made, you can just tap it to change the colour of the Lego used.
Results
In some cases, the results of the app are very good – the photo of the hand in the gallery, for example. The colours don’t come out matching the photo’s colours, but they’re not supposed to. As I mentioned before, you can change the colours used if you don’t like the random ones chosen at first. As you can see from the hand photo in the gallery, the app does a good job at picking out small details. However, sometimes this detriments the effect. In a complicated photo, such as the second photo in the gallery, the app can get a bit confused and colour things a bit randomly (That second photo is a house and garden, by the way). Once you have created your mosaic, you can save the result by tapping the ‘i’ icon, and then tapping Save at the bottom. This very quickly saves the mosaic to your camera roll, ready to send in an email, an MMS or however you choose.
Verdict
Even though sometimes the app doesn’t always give perfect results, and it doesn’t have an amazing feature set, but it is free, and so it can’t hurt to download it and give it a go.
App store link: Lego Photo (free)
Espresso: A bit mis…
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009That was my three-and-a-half word review of Espresso, the HTML/PHP/CSS/etc editor for Mac. That last word is supposed to say ‘missing’, but I left a bit out so that it would match the main point of the review. One of the main selling points of Espresso is the Live Preview feature, which is supposed to give you an always-updating view of the document you’re editing as if it was published. What it actually does is one of two things:
- If you’re working on pure HTML, congratulations! Live Preview will work perfectly fine. As you change the code, your view of the ‘published’ page will change almost as soon as you type!
- If you’re working on anything else, sorry! Live Preview will not work perfectly fine. As you change the code, your view of the ‘published’ page will stay the same until you press refresh. It will also show a plain text file instead of the finished page.
Of these two options, my Espresso workflow always involves number 2. I use it to edit the PHP and CSS of this site, so I’m not using any HTML. To edit any details I have to edit, save, refresh. It gets rather tedious, but I’m used to it because that’s what I had to do to create my fake websites, before Espresso. And yes, I was sad enough to type out all the code for a website, which to be honest were pretty rubbish, and open it in Safari to see what it would look like if I had a website.
The FTP features of Espresso also let the app down. There are approximately 70 folders in the base Wordpress folder. Using Espresso, FTP is meant to be simple – set up your server settings, then either click ‘publish’ or turn on quick publishing, which publishes every time you save. The first time I tried to upload my WP files, it sat there all night and still hadn’t uploaded any of them. In the end, I had to download a specialised FTP client to upload them. This is not what I expected from a program where “there is no need to leave the app when you need to do some serious remote file management” – I’d say 70 folders is “serious” file management. Once everything was uploaded, and I was down to editing one file at a time, the publishing started to work fine. It was just when uploading multiple files it was a bit flakey.
If that wasn’t enough, when you come across problems like this and want to see if there are any answers, there’s no help file. In the app’s words, “Help isn’t available for Espresso”. So there’s no file, but look! There’s a link underneath: Espresso Wiki. That sounded helpful – how wrong I was. The front page shows some good signs, but clicking a link in the sidebar makes it all go wrong. A lot of the pages show blank space, and there isn’t really a lot of help anyway. For example, I searched for ‘FTP’ to try and find a solution for the multiple upload problem, but all that brought up was a page detailing the release notes (that weren’t even for the latest version, by the way). Fat lot of use that was. The final link goes to the Espresso forums. Finally, someone was speaking some sense! There was no input from Macrabbit, the developer, but there were a lot of users in the same position as me – problems all over the place. It all boils down to one thing: Macrabbit can’t find solutions for the problems with their app, so they’re keeping quiet about it.
However, it’s not all bad, it has some very useful features that actually work. Auto-completion, for example – you type bac in a CSS document, for example, and it’ll pop up with background – just hit Return and it’ll complete the code for you and even add in the colon and semi-colon.
Espresso also has support for almost any language you can think of – HTML, XML, PHP, CSS and JavaScript are already built in, and you can add support for many others by installing plugins known as Sugars.
Finally, it colour-codes your code so that it’s easy to read, which is simple but makes it much easier to make sense of your code in your head.
I have Espresso for one reason, and one reason only: I was given it as part of the MacHeist bundle I got gifted. I wasn’t really on the lookout for a new web editor, because I didn’t have this site. In fact, I set up the site because of Espresso, in a way. Anyway, back to the point. Although Espresso is a great little editor, I wish MacHeist had chosen a more complete editor (Coda, anyone?) to feature in their bundle, because Espresso still needs some work.
