Hasta La Gadget!

The Moleskine iOS app ignores everything that is good about the original paper notebook

If the Moleskine notebook is simple, well made and very easy to use, then the Moleskine iOS app is the opposite: confusing, hard to fathom and almost impossible to use quickly.

The Moleskine app is a note-taking app, with a wealth of features. To get an idea of how it works, let me walk you through opening the app and creating a note.

Launch the app and you get a vertical splash screen that looks like a Moleskine notebook cover. This can not be viewed horizontally and you have to touch it to access your notes. Every. Time. You. Open. The. App. Next, you see a list of your “thoughts”. Touch the little plus sign to create a new one. You are prompted to give it a name. Do this.

Now, the screen darkens and a band covers it, like a paper barrier. Here you see buttons for “categories”, “new” and “assign”. New? didn’t we just create a new note? Worse, the first two of these words have arrows underneath. “categories” has a left-pointing arrow, and “new” has one which points down.

Touch “categories” and you come to a full, lined page surrounded by yet more cryptic icons. Could this be the actual note page? Then why did I tap the word “categories”?. You can insert images, change categories (via two more button presses, one of which duplicates the one you made to get to this section) and change the paper style. What you can’t do is start writing. Or can you?

Press the back button and you are sent to the beginning, the list of your “thoughts”. Let’s try again. Tap one of your “thoughts” and it opens. Maybe I should double-tap to start writing? It works! At last I am writing. Now, what was it I wanted to say?

There is plenty more here. You can, as mentioned above, insert images. You can also draw on the page, add your note to a map, and browse by those ever-important categories. You can also shop online from within the app and buy real stationery. But of course, all of this is as convoluted as just starting a note.

The app does have one big advantage over the expensive paper notebooks: it’s free. I’m sure it will be the perfect app for for some people, but it just frustrates me. Add to this that there has been a spiritual equivalent of the Moleskine in the app store for a long time. It’s called Penultimate, and it does one thing: lets you write on the page with a finger or stylus. It has the elegance of a real Moleskine, and is beautifully made. Better, it costs just $2. You should probably check it out.

Moleskine app [iTunes]

App for iPhone/iPad [Moleskine]

See Also:

• Bamboo Makes a Moleskine-Style Case for Your iPad
• The Case: Another Beautiful Moleskine-Like iPad Case
• Finally, Official iPad and iPhone Cases from Moleskine
• iPad Case Smackdown: Dodocase Vs. Pad & Quill

Postagram takes pure pixels and lets them slum it in paper form

Instagram is pretty cool if you have an iOS device. The community photo-sharing service can be browsed through the official app (still the only way to actually upload photos) or viewed with various third party apps and sites. But what about those losers who can’t — or worse, won’t — look at your amazing, grungified photos? Perhaps these luddites, probably your family members, don’t even own an iPhone or an iPad, or a device with an internet homepage browser. What do you do?

You will have to descend to their technological level and send the photos by snail mail. Thankfully, you won’t have to get analog dirt on your hands to do it. You can use the Postagram app.

Postagram takes your Instagram photos, lets you add a message (up to 140 characters) and then mails a printed copy to anyone, anywhere in the world. The picture is printed at 300 dpi on heavy photo paper and comes surrounded by a postcard, from which the print can be popped out. Each picture costs $1 to print and send, and you have to do nothing but choose the picture and pay.

I can see this becoming as addictive as Instagram itself. I would even use it to mail my favorite photos to myself, if only I hadn’t had my mailbox sealed up years ago: The only things I ever received were junk mail and anthrax. The spores I could deal with, but the junk mail? No frikkin’ way.

Postagram [Postagramapp via iPhoneography]

See Also:

• DIY Retro Ikonette Lens Is an Analog Instagram
• Instagram for iPhone, Like a Lomo-Twitter for Your Photos
• Analog Instagram
• Print-Sending App Turns iPhone Into a Photo-Booth

Adobe’s new Photoshop-connected iPad apps show what can be done with multitouch.

Forget Flash — Adobe’s latest iPad experiments are way more interesting than a plug-in to let you view restaurant websites. The three apps — Eazel, Lab and Lava — all link to Photoshop Creative Suite 5 running on a Mac or a PC, and let you use the multitouch display to control various functions.

Eazel lets you finger-paint on the iPad and then transmits the results to Photoshop. You can use wet or dry paint, control the size and opacity of the brushes, and a “particle-stroke painting” engine lets paint spread out for a few seconds before it dries. The most amazing part, though, is the control UI.

Plop down five fingers and a control appears at the tip of each. Move the appropriate finger to adjust color, opacity, settings and brush size. flicking your thumb left or right will undo or redo. This looks like something that should be in every app, not just drawing apps.

Next up is Nav, which puts the Photoshop tool palette on the iPad’s screen with big, easy-to-hit icons. The 4×4 grid is customizable, so you can pick your 16 favorite tools, and touching them selects the tool on the desktop machine. It also lets you browse and duplicate open documents on the iPad’s screen. This one is simple, but may turn out to be the most useful.

Finally, Lava is a color-mixer. Anyone who has mixed oil or acrylic paints on a palette (or an old piece of wood, or plastic or whatever) will know that it is far more intuitive than sliding widgets on-screen. Lava lets you do this, interacting with colors directly and using the results in Photoshop.

All of these apps, which aren’t yet available, use Adobe’s new Photoshop Touch SDK. This software development kit lets anyone write iPad apps that interact with Photoshop.

But it’s not a big deal just for iOS developers. The open SDK means developers working on other platforms — like Android Honeycomb and the forthcoming BlackBerry PlayBook OS — can begin coding their own apps based on Adobe Touch. Considering that tablets produced over the last year have been generally considered content-consumption devices, Adobe’s SDK release invites the possibility of a new wave of content-creating users.

These apps show what Adobe can do when it’s not fighting with Apple over Flash. They also show what multitouch can do when you stop thinking in desktop metaphors. I can’t wait to try them. They may even make me start using Photoshop again.

Nav [Photoshop]

Lava [Photoshop]

Eazel [Photoshop]

Mike Isaac contributed to this report.

See Also:

• Photoshop Crashes onto iPad
• Video: Adobe Shows Photoshop Concept for iPad
• Photogene 2.0 for iPad: A Desktop Photo Editor on a Tablet

Android app developers can test in-app billing before it debuts next week

Developers and mobile gamers alike will be happy to learn that in-app purchasing for Android will be available starting sometime this week.

The Android Market’s in-app billing system is currently available for developers to test, but apps using the service won’t be able to publish until it goes live.

Android’s in-app billing will handle financial transactions and provide a standard purchasing ecosystem across all apps, while giving developers the freedom to control how virtual goods are purchased and tracked.

“This new service gives developers more ways to monetize their applications through new billing models including try-and-buy, virtual goods, upgrades, and more,” Eric Chu says on the Android Developers blog.

Until now, developers wanting to include in-app transactions in their app needed to go through PayPal, Zong, or develop their own solution, like Angry Birds did. Google announced its intention to provide an in-app billing service in January. Apple has offered in-app billing on its iOS devices since October 2009.

Perhaps the in-app billing system will help rejuvenate Android’s historically sluggish app sales. By lowering the barrier to entry — offering apps for free or at significantly reduced prices — more users may be willing to download apps, then make additional purchases within the app later on.

“I’m incredibly excited as a developer and a user because it opens the door to another avenue for revenue. This will increase the quality of apps you will see on Android and create more incentives for developers who aren’t targeting the platform to give it a shot,” said Andreas Schobel, CTO and co-founder of Catch.

Many iOS developers who have held off from committing to Google’s OS due to monetization concerns may also finally port their apps over to Android, so we could be seeing a slew of new apps in the coming weeks.

Android devices running 1.6 or higher will be able to access the new in-app billing system when it’s available (possibly tomorrow, according to AllThingsD). Apps in both Google’s Android Market and Amazon’s App Store will have access to the service.

“Some of the great free apps on iPhone are solely supported by in-app purchases of virtual goods. This will be another avenue for developers to make money,” says Schobel.

For detailed information about the release, visit Google’s In-App Billing Dev Guide.

See Also:

• Android In-App Payments Begin With Angry Birds
• App Sales Sluggish, Despite Android’s Popularity

The iOS platform isn’t the only way to make money on the mobile apps scene.

Tech news site Electricpig took a look at eight groups that have made it big — more than six-digits big — with hit Android apps.

Better Android Apps, for example, has made approximately $1.34 million from purchases of its hits Better Keyboard and Open Home. Yongzh created emulators for the PlayStation, Sega, Nintendo and Atari systems, and gathered about $1.81 million from sales of these apps.

“Conventional wisdom told us that to be successful, we had to focus on iOS. Conventional wisdom was wrong,” said Gary Gattis, CEO of Spacetime Studios.

That certainly seems to be true with the tower-defense game Robo Defense. It has also been a big winner, netting creator Lupis Labs more than $2.09 million.

An estimated 3.7 billion Android apps have been downloaded to date, according to AndroLib. Many developers wish that number would rise at a faster rate and are counting on tools like in-app payments to spur app purchases and developer earnings. However, that hasn’t stopped developers such as Eddie Kim, creator of Car Locator, or almost anyone else on this list, from netting big profits.

These high sales figures illustrate that Android’s app market is finally coming to fruition as a solid distribution platform, where software programmers can make good money. Within months of the opening of Apple’s App Store in the summer of 2008, a few lucky programmers quickly struck gold with hot sales of their apps.

Android has been around for about the same time, and only now are we beginning to see comparably high sales figures for Android app makers. Though Google’s app market has been slower to mature, these success stories should give programmers more incentive to make killer apps for Android-powered tablets and smartphones.

Beautiful Widgets netted its maker, LevelUp Studio, more than $934,000. Halfbrick Studios (maker of Fruit Ninja) has netted more than $242,000 after porting its iOS favorite to Android.

Other big winners, thanks to pop-up advertising, include Rovio, for (what else?) Angry Birds, and Arron La for Advanced Task Manager.

Spacetime Studios‘ Pocket Legends, a 3-D MMO, has managed to garner profits of $8,000 per day from in-app payments, making it a shoo-in for six-figure earnings in the not-too-distant future.

“The Android platform has seen phenomenal growth, and it’s great that new avenues for app distribution are opening up,” Rovio CEO Mikael Hed said in a recent news release.

The addition of new marketplaces like Amazon’s App Store is proof, showing that Google’s OS has the potential to be just as lucrative as Apple’s, and companies want to get in on the action.

Spacetime’s Gattis summed up the Android app scene pretty nicely: “In some ways, it’s kind of like the wild, wild West,” he said, “but that’s where the Gold Rush people made their claim.”

Image: Bad Piggy Bank (Rovio)

Meet The Android App Millionaires [Electricpig via Android Guys]