Hasta La Gadget!

Oddly, the Silhouetter app for the iPad and iPhone doesn’t mention its “inspiration” anywhere in its description. But then, it doesn’t really need to, so obvious is the “homage” to the iconic iPod ads.

That said, the app is actually pretty cool in a single-serve kind of way. You choose a photo from your camera-roll, pinch to crop and then pick one of nine juicy colors. Wait for a second or ten while the app cranks away and works out which parts of the picture need to be colored and then you can tweak things. Standard mode gives two sliders: one to fade the effect between a full-on silhouette and the original image, the other adjusts the contrast.

Opt for “expert” mode and you can tweak highlights, mid-tones and shadows separately before moving into the basic mode screen to finish things off. Images can be saved or sent to the usual places: Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.

The app has some quirks in action. It seems to have a mind of its own when it comes to cropping, zooming in from your own chosen setting (although your settings do stick when the image is output). And when you’re done with an image, you get bumped back to the instructions screen, which you surely don’t need to read every single time you choose an image. Finally, there is a lag every time you move a slider, but that’s likely to be processor and memory limitations.

It’s a fun, single purpose photo app, and it does what it says it does. I doubt Apple will be using this for iPod ads in the future, but who cares? Silhouetter costs a buck. Surely a half hour of entertainment is worth that?

Silhouetter app [iTunes. Thanks, Jeshua!]

Essay is a rich text editor for the iPad. Apple’s tablet has plenty of plain text editors, with all manner of special features, but unless you go for the more complex apps like Pages, or entire office-suites like Documents To Go, then you can’t add simple things like italics or headlines to your work.

Enter Essay, which bills itself somewhat ambitiously as “the iPad word processor”. It’s an ultra-simple text-editor in the vein of Plain Text or iA Writer, only it lets you format that text.

Essay syncs with the iPad’s de facto file system, Dropbox, and stores its files in HTML format, readable by just about any desktop text-editing software. You can also get documents out via iTunes or email. And as features go, that’s about it.

The real decider in these kinds of apps is the interface, and Essay gets the job done admirably. Open the app and you see a list of documents in a column on the left, with the document panel alongside. On the far right there is a small bar with some controls: mail, print, full-screen-view and edit. Edit (in the shape of a pencil) brings up a panel with buttons for bold, underline, italics, strikethrough and highlight. You can also convert a paragraph into a “section” or a “subsection” (or back into body text). This panel can also be accessed by swiping it in from the screen-edge, which hides the source-column, keeping the main section the same size.

It works very well, and looks a lot like Hog Bay Software’s PlainText, with extras.

The problem comes when you use an external keyboard. You can type, but almost no keyboard shortcuts are supported. You can’t italicize, embolden or otherwise tweak your text. Neither can you cut, copy or paste. Some keyboard navigation is supported, but frustratingly not all. Whilst shift plus an arrow key will select letter one at a time, and alt-arrow will let you skip a word at a time, alt-shift-arrow (which should select a whole word) only works occasionally, and Command-arrow (or Command-shift-arrow) for skipping around a line at a time (or highlighting a whole line) don’t work at all. These are serious omissions for “the iPad word processor.”

Right now, Essay is worth a look, but for serious writing it still needs work. In this aspect, it’s like pretty much every text editor on the iPad: almost there, but missing the one or two features that would kill the opposition. We’ll stay tuned for v1.1. $4.

Essay product page [iTunes]

Essay [Essay App]

See Also:

• PlainText: iPad Text-Editor from the Makers of WriteRoom
• Writer for iPad Aims For Focus, Beauty, Simplicity
• iWork for iPhone is Coming: Pages Gets a Closeup

Take this for what it’s worth, but the schedule for Google’s 2011 I/O conference includes a little session called “Building Android Apps for Google TV,” as well as “Building Web Apps for Google TV.” That’s certainly interesting, as Google’s reportedly asked TV manufacturers to delay (or at least downplay) their smart TV products at CES until the core software is revamped, and we’re hearing that the relaunch will focus heavily on apps. We’re also told by a trusted source that there’s a big performance boost coming as things get more optimized, comparable to the jump from Android 1.6 to Android 2.3 on phones, and that future input devices will be more streamlined and simpler to use than the current Logitech and Sony affairs. That’s all good news, but, um, I/O isn’t until May, so we’re hoping all this stuff comes true much, much sooner than that.

[Thanks, D.]

Google I/O includes Google TV app development session; software speedup in the works originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Jan 2011 21:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Google  | Email this | Comments

First, the Mavericks Civilian Space Foundation tested a Nexus One’s ability to deal with the stress of a rocket launch. Then, Google floated seven Nexi to the edge of space to see if the phones could cope with the void. Now, Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) is looking to launch a satellite into orbit and use a ‘droid — much smaller than the Astromech variety — to control said satellite. SSTL, who is helping build Galileo (and is acutely aware of its cost, no doubt), views smartphones as a way to democratize access to space because they are far less expensive than purpose-built control systems. The company hasn’t said which handset will be used in the satellite, but they chose Android because it allows engineers to easily modify the phone to do their bidding — from controlling pulse plasma thrusters to handling the advanced guidance and navigation systems of the foot long satellite. Additionally, the open source OS means that they “could get people to develop apps” for the satellite. We’ve seen plenty of Android apps, but we’re really hoping this venture is successful so we get to see apps… in space.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

SSTL using Android handsets to control satellites, conquer the final frontier originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Jan 2011 06:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink BBC  |  Surrey Satellite Technology Limited  | Email this | Comments

There are some messages that are just too embarrassing to dictate to a human being. Lucky for us and the retired circus contortionist we hired to type up our missives, Nuance is expanding the reach of its transcription software by making its Dragon Mobile SDK available to developers for use in iOS and Android applications. The SDK, which is free to members of the Nuance Mobile Developer Program, sports speech-to-text capabilities in eight languages and text-to-speech in 35. There are already apps out there that can do the job, including Nuance’s own Dragon Dictation, but we welcome new advances in automated transcription. You know, it’s not exactly a walk in the park dictating an entire Clay Aiken Fan Club newsletter to a guy named Sid the Human Pretzel.

Nuance opens Dragon Mobile SDK to app developers, we see end to embarrassing dictation originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 23 Jan 2011 07:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Mashable  |  Nuance  | Email this | Comments