Is a PL app coming?

[greenmorpher]

Better not miss the bus! (Well, it's hardly a bus any longer, more like a gigantic conveyor belt carrying hundreds of millions along.)

Photoshop Touch is now on iPad (it's been on Android for a couple of months) and Apple included a beefed up iPhoto in its iPad 3 launch.

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/898530 ... h-for-ipad

I have watched several Mac developers go into the app market with success.

The success if the iPhone and iPad, both with iOS has been such that Apple is now shifting the Mac to iOS -- OS X.7.x is a shift in that direction, and after less than a year, OS X.8 is in prospect which will be more of a shift in that direction. They are making money hand over fist from the iPhone and iPad and as a by-product, recruiting new Mac users from among their ranks. They are also steering the Mac to being more of a fun machine than a hard worker.

Cheers, geoff

Geoffrey Heard
The Ad-Doctor-Online
http://www.ad-doctor-online.com

[toyotadesigner]

Would it be useful to edit images on a Mickey Mouse screen? What will be the real benefit of an 'Äpp'? Or is it an ape? Hm, inquiring minds want to know...

Maybe people in the new world think different and feature a more childish mentality (that's at least my impression when I see this nonsense)?

One or two years ago some guru in the new world declared that the future art directors will have their office in Starbucks Cafés, editing their images and graphics with Äpps on smartphone displays. How wrong this guru was... but never mind, that's the new world on the fast lane.

I don't think we'll see a PL Äpp too soon.

[greenmorpher]

Much as I am not interested in either smart phones or tablets personally, the reality is that lots of people are interested in them and do editing on them -- often to a significant level -- before posting stuff to the Internet, or saving it off to their silly Cloud thing (I wouldn't touch that with a 40 ft barge pole, personally), or saving it for transfer later to their main computer, or all three of the above and possibly some more as well.

I reflect that my workhorse computer is a two year old laptop. Five years ago, I was just contemplating switching from a large desktop tower. A couple of years before that, the notion of having a laptop as my only computer was laughable. Laptops just didn't have the computing power.

Today's smart phones and tablets are vastly more powerful than early laptops and so far ahead of the desktops I first did DTP and later edited photos on that any comparison is laughable.

In addition it is just plain good marketing to produce an app. More and more people are shifting work or starting work on their phone or tablet, and for many, that is the entrée to computing. When they move up to a lap top (or bizarrely, a desktop) obviously they will go with the name they know. iPhone and iPad users are buying Macs, and they are installing on those Macs the programs they are familiar with in the form of phone and pad apps.

The problem with the projection regarding producing stuff using a smart phone or tablet t Starbucks is not the phone or tablet, it is Starbucks. It serves standard American coffee, and that is not coffee, it is crap! As a result, Starbucks is contracting (including, thankfully, here in Australia where we take our coffee seriously) while Apple is expanding, and has now become the richest corporation in the world.

And lots of developers are doing very nicely surfing along in Apple's wake, producing apps.

Cheers, geoff

Geoffrey Heard
The Ad-Doctor-Online
http://www.ad-doctor-online.com

[akeller]

Hi,

Would it be useful to edit images on a Mickey Mouse screen?

Somehow this was also my first idea. On the other hand I don't have such a Mickey Mouse device and who knows maybe I would like to have good SW like PL on a tablet.
Maybe you and me think that serious photo retouch is only possible on a Superman display but there seems to be the need to retouch photos taken by a Mickey Mouse camera of a Mickey Mouse device
Finally it depends on the developers if they think it is worth to develop an app with reduced abilities. It seems that others (Adobe/Nik) believes that they can make money with such a SW.

Only my 5 Pfennig,
Andreas

[OldRadioGuy]

I, for one, am not "going ape" over apps -- photo and otherwise -- for smart phones and tablets. I still have a cell phone that doesn't have a camera, and I don't own a tablet. Yeah, I'm an old, retired guy. However, Geoff is right, there is a growing market there, and several of the major software companies and new app writers are seeking to fill the niche. A small, single-product company like Computerinsel is not positioned to take on this onslaught.

This is a new market, and I'm not sure what the impact will be on traditional photography. I'll leave that debate to you who are professional photographers, publishers, graphic designers, etc. I have observed here in the US our newspapers -- what's left of them -- now publish smaller images (cheaper, lower-quality cameras will suffice) and television networks and stations carry amateur video shot by smaller and cheaper cameras than those once required for "broadcast quality." But the cell-phone camera needs something more than an app to eliminate BAD photographs.

To me, a greater threat to the publishers of traditional photo editing software is the growing reliance on non-destructive photo editors which are also digital asset managers. Once those companies finally get it right with full-layer support, non-destructive use of external plugins and speedy management of thousands of images, they will take a big bite out of the market share now held by traditional photo editors.

Bob

[toyotadesigner]

Apps are hype and bubbles, smoke and illusion. They don't feed any hungry child, they don't change your images (real photographs).

I know there is a lot of life on the fast lane in the US, but I am not sure about Europe. The world is huge, and yet just a tiny part is connected to the iNet, but who is connected to a Telco with mobile phones? The absolute minority. So it doesn't make any economical sense to develop something for a marke the size of a fly shit on the wall...

[greenmorpher]

Here is the best argument I've seen for PL to get on the iPad and the Android tablet -- a cogent professional argument.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read. ... e=40841637

And I speak as a non-iPadder and someone who has curled the lip at them just a bit! I carry my 13" MBP around in my backpack.

Toyotadesigner, you say only a minority of people have mobile phones. That sounds odd to me. I know two very poor countries intimately; mobile phones are ubiquitous -- the take up is extraordinary. Huge amount of texting. The technology is very cheap to set up and once in place, can just keep running at a cost of pennies.

11-11-02 From Karai Komana1 small.jpg

11-11-02 From Karai Komana1 small.jpg

Cheers, geoff

[greenmorpher]

Huh? One picture is showing up twice but only shows one copy of the link in the text.

Cheers, geoff

[akeller]

Ahoy Geoff,

just some seconds ago I found again an interview with the Huber-Bros and there is already the answer to your question:

Do you ever thought about to port PL to Linux of iPad?

We thought about this a couple of times. But according our experiences we can only provide a product for an OS we are using by our selfs. We are two and can only support two OS.

Cheers, Andreas

[greenmorpher]

There you go, then. Like many small software developers, and like Apple in its early Mac years, they are product driven, not market driven. That's how Microsoft won out -- it produced software to meet the market.

But look at Apple today -- it’s market driven, not product driven. OS X.7.x and the upcoming OS X.8.x for laptop and desktop computers are larger versions of he iOS because that's where its customers are coming from. And when they move on to the computer and sand to the "big" iOS, they are going to want the "big" versions of the software they've become familiar with on their iPhones and iPads.

Stone (he of Stone Create -- it almost made it as the create integrated app for Mac) has moved entirely to apps. So have many others. It’s going to be interesting with Stone to see whether he now does something with Create and it's associated bits again to follow his Apps users into the Mac market now that Apple has so clearly indicated the path.

Cheers, geoff

[greenmorpher]

Reinforcing my statement that power users are doing serious editing stuff on iPad.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read. ... e=41408443

Ray is a serious photographer, a prolific photographer. He was away from home for a month taking a bazilllion pix in New York, which he loaded on to his iPad, stored, and processed. He had to use Snapspeed for want of something better.

On various forums, I've sen pro photographers talking about a work flow that includes iPad for showing and quick editing of their work.

PL would do very well to get onto the iPad and iPhone. They are where the action is. As I've said -- Apple has recognized that to the point of restructuring the OS X to mimic iOS. PL should do the same. iOS is the cool end of the market where vast numbers of customers live, work and play; we computer types are now old fogies who have fallen off the cutting edge into the most ordinary technology!

Cheers, geoff