Download Soonr Scribble and get a free stylus in yor mail. The App itself will allow you to take note and highlights different kind of documents directly on your iPad.

An App that can be used by students or professional people in the everyday work flow.

To get the free stylus you only have to download Soonr Scribble ($3,99 special price) and then fill in your address detail to get it.

The aim of Hashpix then is to bring those beautiful photos to reality.

How it works for a buyer

If you are looking for some great pictures to put on your desk or your wall, you just need to go to Hashpix’s website where you can look at their catalogue and chose between three different formats: 5×5, 8×10, 10×10 priced respectively at $20, $22 and $24. Done. It’s that easy.

How it works for a photographer

Becoming a seller is a little bit trickier at the moment. It’s not yet opened to everyone and it probably won’t be neither in the future. You can apply yes, but only “Instagrammers” with a huge followers base and with a very active presence on other social networks will be accepted into Hashpix community. If you meet those requirements you are on the right path to become a certified seller on Hashpix.

When you are accepted, you’ll receive a unique URL where your best picture will be featured to the public.

Earnings

We said that you can sell your pictures, but how much will you earn from it? There are no registration fees, you can only profit from this service. Using the same AppStore’s model, Hashpix will have a 30% cut on all the sales, giving the remaining 70% to the photographer. Not a bad deal at all.

My opinion

Hashpix aims to create a curated artistic community, where people can look for the excellence on Instagram. I like the way they are building this network. If you have ever used Instagram you’d know that there are good photographers among a lot of crappy ones. This service could also be seen as a way to discover new artist to follow, making once again clear that “curating” something is the best way to show the excellence.

How does Register works?

This free App will enable any merchant to recreate their store on the iPad, no matter how many items are sold in the store. With a very intuitive UI, Register will create a mobile version of your store, with categories and other clever ways to organize products.

Even better, the App can provide in-depth analytics that will help any merchants to improve their offering to their customers. Those analytics include among others: number of payments, tax, tips, subtotals, refunds.

An even better “Card Case” integration

Register allows a better integration with the existing Card Case smartphone App. Merchants can publish announcements that can be found through the Card Case while potential customers are exploring the surroundings.

In addition, Register features a new notification management that can alert merchants when a recurrent customer walks into the store or when a new one makes his first purchase.

These new features can create a better loyalty program which can be used by merchants to incentive new purchases.

Disrupt, disrupt, disrupt

This new Register App is a new step toward a total disruption of the POS business. Square is offering a new and powerful solution for merchants to abandon the traditional cash register, avoiding a huge fix cost.

Even the traditional cash/credit card purchase system is at risk with Square. With Register and Card Case, the purchase can be made automatically without any physical exchange between the merchant and the customer, creating an easy and better way to do some shopping.

A never ending growth

2011 has been a huge year for one of the hottest startup in the market with over 1 million merchants on board with $2 billion processed over 12 months. 2012 looks even better. A total of $4 billion processed payments is expected as well as new investments in the company that can help Square to make a big jump over Europe.

Yesterday they presented the next generation iPad in San Francisco. Despite huge speculations around the name (iPad 3, iPad HD, etc.)they ended up by calling it “The New iPad”. If this sound weird, wait until you see this picture.

iPad 2 alongside with “The New iPad”. How terrible does it sound?! Anyway, let’s forget for a second the name and have a look at what’s new.

They made some really nice improvements with the new iPad, starting with the much anticipated Retina Display.

Everything will look crispier and much more datelines of course. Photos, videos and especially texts will really pop out from the screen, making the iPad experience even better.

Under the hood there are some other nice improvements. The new A5X chip will deliver much more power graphics to handle the impressive amount of pixels at their best. This new chip is also used to better manage the iPad’s battery life, making possible to achieve 10 hours of continuos usage as before.

The back camera has been revamped with the introduction of a 5-megapixel iSight Camera capable of 1080p video recording. Those photos and videos should look great on the new Retina Display.

Now let’s talk about connections. The new iPad will feature several improvements on the antennas. The two major are Bluetooth 4.0 and 4G LTE capabilities for faster data download. In addition it still retain 3G worldwide capabilities so that you can always be covered, no matter where you are in the world.

Finally, there will be also a little taste of Siri inside the new iPad with the dictation feature.

Just speak into the iPad to see the transcript on the screen. Initially it will support English, French, German and Japanese.

Everything you saw above will be included into the new iPad that will retain the same price as the iPad 2, starting at $499 for the entry-level model. You can already preorder it if you are in one of the first 10 countries that will receive the iPad on the 16th of March. One week later they will bring the new iPad to other 25 countries for the biggest international roll-out Apple has ever had.

The old iPad 2 will stick around in the basic configuration only (16GB Wifi / Wifi+3G) with a $100 lowered price. A nice touch that will grant Apple tons of new customers and that will destroy once again their competitors.

Finally there’s still one question that needs to be answered. Should I buy the new iPad or not?

As always this is a tricky questions to answered. If you are still on the original iPad this should be a no brainer upgrade. Faster
processor, better screen and all the new features should make you do the jump.

If you are an iPad 2 owner, the argument is more complex. I’m in this exact situation and in this moment I don’t think I’m going to buy the
new iPad. Compared to the iPad 2 there are too few improvements. I mean the screen is great, but I can leave with the actual screen which is performing really well. Better camera. I never took a photo o recorded a video with my iPad. I always use my DSLR or my iPhone 4S. The front facing still remains a VGA camera so video call will look bad the same.

Bottom line: if you have an original iPad go preorder the new one immediately (stocks are still good at the moment. Delivery is still on 16th of March); if you have an iPad 2 you can easily stick with your device unless you are a super geek that needs always the latest model (as I will end up doing no matter all my arguments).

Anyway Apple has once again raised the bar for the competition in the tablet market making Android tablets looking more terrible than before.

The implication for this App are different. This will give you the chance to mirror your device without the necessity of an Apple TV in between. Pretty convenient and surely a cheaper option.

Once you’ve installed the app, you only need to launch it and then look for your machine on your iOS AirPlay menu as shown by the below picture.

From there you can start the magic. There are no further options to configure and the process feel very natural. It replicates the same process you would trigger when mirroring your screen using an Apple TV.

The screen of your iOS device will appear immediately on screen. This app can be really useful if you need to showcase your latest iOS app on a bigger screen, maybe during a presentation onstage. You just need the tools that are already in your possession. Just make sure that the Mac and the iOS device are running on the same WiFi network and you are good to go.

On your machine, instead, you will be presented with the following screen:

Your full springboard will be visible and ready to be shown (yes, I’m using the “iOS 86″ Winterboard theme). The app works both in landscape and portrait mode and it’s definitely very snappy and responsive. I was surprise by the almost total absence of lag when scrolling or changing pages. Everything happens in real time, a huge plus for this App.

On your Mac there are few options you can configure. As you can see you can chose to show or not the device’s frame, you can force a particular orientation and you can even go fullscreen on Lion.

Reflection is clearly a very well designed app that will help you in showcasing your best iOS Apps through your Mac without the need for a single cable. If you go to Reflection’s website you can download a free version of the App that will close itself after 10 minutes. A good way to evaluate all the potentialities of the Reflection before making a definitive purchase. If you try the App share your opinions in the comment below as always.

Let’s start with some bad news. The app is only compatible with the iPad 2 having on board iOS 5 or higher. All the owners of the original ipad won’t be able to use it unfortunately. It’s surely an “heavy” app in terms of resources usage and even on an iPad 2 I’ve experienced some lag sometime. So it’s an understandable choice the one made by Adobe.

Now let’s go to the main dish: Photoshop Touch. So, what we expect from this app? First of all this has nothing to do with the ridiculous Photoshop express app but instead it’s a very complete tool that has the majority of the function you can expect from a full Photoshop experience. The best part is that you can do everything with your finger, engaging even more with your work. There are also some limitations, but this is only version 1.0 so it’s normal to see some of these.

Tutorials

The application is completely user oriented, trying to provide the best experience possible. The first time you’ll launch the app you’ll find the following welcoming screen:

I highly recommend you to go through all the tutorials because they will teach you where to find all the tools, the effects and the tips to master the app. They are also important because you can learn how to create beautiful effects with few taps. It’s an effective first approach to Photoshop Touch. If you feel like you prefer to discover everything by yourself, just jump right into the app by starting a new project. Either way you can always go back to the tutorials from the home screen of the app.

The Canvas

Here we are in front of the first limitation. Any project you’ll create on Photoshop Touch is limited in size: 1600×1600. If you try to insert a bigger value it will be resized to this ratio automatically. It’s not a very big canvas, especially if you are working with high quality pictures or large pieces of art.

Right now I can see it more like a sketchbook where you can draft down some idea or you can experiment with different filters while you are on the, and replicate later the work in full scale on your main machine. For all the people outside the Pro world, it could be instead a very good approach to the world of Photoshop, giving them already powerful tools at a very accessible price.

UI

If you know Photoshop, you that the UI is complex because there are a lot of commands, tools, options and so on. On Photoshop Touch they did a great job in order to reduce noise, leaving all the important tools available at a first glance.

They also did a great job by really using all the available power given by the multitouch experience. Different tools are grouped together like in the desktop version of the app. To select them you just go through them with your fingers. The layer implementation is also done pretty well. You can reorder them as much as you want, hide them and you can control all the main features like opacity, blending mode and different merging options.

Photo Source

The photo management inside Photoshop Touch is one of the key point of the app in my opinion. Being able to get great images it’s always importan and can help you in composing a new project. When you start a new project there are different sources you can chose from: Local Photos, Creative Cloud, Camera, Google and Facebook.

Local Photos will look into your iPad to present all the pictures stores on the device. Finally they’ve been able to solve the problem of the small preview offered by the Apple standard system. Instead of a little preview you can go through your photos much like you were in Adobe Bridge, which is much more convenient (especially if you need to chose from similar images to import). That’s surely a huge bonus point for this app.

The second method requires you to have an account with Creative Cloud, which is the new cloud service offered by Adobe to keep all your work in sync between your different devices (desktop and mobile), plus a way to easy publish and share your work with the world. To read more about Creative Cloud you can click here. Just a quick reminder: Creative Cloud needs a monthly subscription that starts at $49.99.

Then you have the Camera option, so you can snap a picture and use it directly for your project (check the pirate tutorial).

Finally, two options to look for pictures on the web directly from the app. I can’t talk very much about the Facebook option because I still not able to make it works. After you insert the credentials and give access to the app you’ll get a blank page with a “Success” status on top. The reality is that when you close that screen nothing from Facebook will be synced to the device. In general I think this integration will give you the ability to use pictures you’ve uploaded to Facebook right into your projects. Probably the feature is not working at the moment because the app is not yet officially been released to the public. We’ll see.

The most interesting photo source is surely Google. This because there is a very clever way to search for contents. You can filter based on your need, focusing on key point you need from the results: by colors, by type (face, photo, clip art, line drawing) and you can even search by usage rights.

This last feature is super important especially if you want to later publish your work online. By filtering down by usage rights you are sure you can freely use an image inside your work and no one can come after you pretending rights on your project. Certainly a very clever filter to build into the app, considering how easy unfortunately is to steal other people work from the internet nowadays.

Sharing options

Now let’s talk about of yet another sore point  of Photoshop Touch. There are four ways in which you can share your project: Camera Roll, Facebook, e-mail or by printing it. Again, Facebook was impossible to test due to the lack of integration described above. The main problem is that you are limited to only to formats: jpeg or png. Where’s a PSD option?

This is really disappointing because it means I cannot start a project on the go and finishing it on my desktop or the way around. If I do export my work outside Photoshop Touch I’ll lose all my layers and the flexibility that a PSD normally gives me. This needs to be a top priority implementation in the next versions of the app. Only when I’ll be able to interact with my source files I can really see Photoshop Touch as a tool for Pro. Sure this limitation is linked with the 1600×1600 format but I think both are challenges that can be tackled. The iPad 2 has enough power to handle a bit more of processing power (if not the iPad 2, the iPad 3 will surely be able to handle it).

Presentation Mode

This is a nice touch by Adobe. In the settings panel you can enable the “presentation mode” that could be extremely useful especially if your iPad 2 is connected to a projector. A big fat red dot will appear everywhere you’ll touch on the screen, like on the screenshot below:

Useful to keep the attention precisely where you want it to be.

Pointing device

It’s an iPad app, so it has been built to work primarily with fingers. It sure works fine but I think sometimes a stylus can help, especially if you need to be precise with a brush. I’ve tried my Cosmonaut which has a big point and it worked just fine, giving me a higher level of precision with my work. I know some people really hate the word stylus but I think that in this case it’s worth thinking about one.

Conclusions

Adobe Photoshop Touch has a great potential. There is no doubt. All the most important tools are there, the app has a great computational power, being able to perform well also very difficult task. Being able to touch your work is always a great plus so I can give without hesitation the highest score to this app. There are of course some down elements but I’m sure they we’ll be fixed with incremental updates in the future.

Also, looking at its price ($9.99/€7.99) I think it will perform well on the AppStore and will be a huge success. If you are into photography or visual editing you would already know the power of Photoshop, so this touch companion will be a no brainer purchase for you.

As always, if you buy the app, share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.

Don’t worry, there’s an app for that: Technology Hub. The idea behind this app is simple, seek an answer from the web. Not just a generic answer, but one tailored on your needs. Post a question and wait for it to be answered by other users of the app.

Questions can range between different topics from home appliances to mobile phones, cameras or consoles. Pretty much anything technological you can imagine is included as a category. Once you post a question you can share it to Facebook, so you can try to look for answers also outside the app, among your friends there can be a potential solution. Unfortunately it lacks the sharing option to Twitter where you can potentially use a particular hashtag making your question available to a really wide audience.

Another problem of this app resides on its audience. In order to work it needs people that use it. For the moment there are still few questions unsolved and few answers, but as the app will get traction, more and more knowledge will be exchanged.

There’s also a bonus tab inside the app. It’s not only a place where you can look for answers, but you an also use it as a mobile news reader. Inside the news tab you’ll find the top tech online publication where you can stay up-to-date to all the latest technology reports.

A few cons: the app is still at its first implementation and sometimes it acts a bit buggy. I have to report few crashes especially when trying to look at my Profile tab, but overall the experience inside the app is good.

Think of Technology Hub as a Yahoo! Answers focused on technology, aimed at solving all the difficulties we encounter day by day with our gadgets.

Folks at MEDL Mobile have been kind enough to give me four promocode for Technology Hub. Here is what you have to do to get one:

• Tweet the following phrase before the 24 February 2012: Get your tech problem solved with “Technology Hub” and “Where Am I?” #giveaway #whereami @matteodallombra http://bit.ly/wAayGs
• Four winners will be randomly selected among all the tweets I’ll receive!

Enjoy!

This secrecy is going to end tomorrow, when abc News will post the entire tour they had inside that factory. Judging from the teaser videos and some preliminar images, this special is going to be insane. We are going to see the working conditions of the workers inside the factory as well their life when they’re not directly on the production line.

To get a first view at the special, have a look at the teaser video below.

A future that is always more and more directed towards iOS. Many other mobile features will be included in Mountain Lion such as reminders, notes, iCloud for documents, Messages (which you can already download as a beta for Lion), AirPlay and Twitter integration. As we’ve discussed many other times, it’s clear that eventually we are going to have almost one identical OS across different platform with the desktop version to reflect more and more its mobile counterpart.

If you have a developer account you’ll be able to download the first beta of Mountain Lion starting today, while the general public will have to wait until sometime this summer to get the update.

For the moment I can leave with a sneak peak video made by Apple to show us some of the new features of Mountain Lion. For more info you can check the dedicated page on Apple’s website.

The answer is simple: Clear is an easy yet powerful tool to keep track of all the things you have to do, with a bit of style in the UI.

In addition, all the commands are swipe-based, integrating the App perfectly in the iOS ecosystem. The first time you’ll launch the app you’ll be greeted by a quick walk through of Clear where you’ll learn the basic commands in order to use the app.

There are three different layers to navigate: on top there is the setting panel, then there’s a screen containing all your lists and finally there’s the list itself. To go back to a previous level you just need to pinch to close. To go back inside you can either tap on the item or you can pinch to open.

Once inside a particular list you’ll have all your things to do ordered by importance in a top-down sequence. A color map will help you remember this. Things on top are intense red, going down to reach a more relaxed yellow.

To add a new reminder you can pull down from top and a new task will appear or your can simply tap after the last item to bring up the keyboard.

I have few remarks about creating a new task. Many times when pulling from top I accidentally trigger the notification center, making impossible to create a new item.

Also, you can’t write too much. Every task has a limited amount of character. Your task needs to stay on a single row.

When you complete a task you can swipe left to mark as done or you can swipe right to delete the task from the list.

Inside the app there are some customization options. You can chose between different themes (with a bonus theme if you have Tweetbot installed), but only the default Heat Map will give you that sense of which is the most important task on your list. In the other themes there’s always a different scale of color but the difference is less evident at a quick glance.

You can add badges on the icon on the springboard that will always shows you how many things you have to do and you can add or remove sounds effects and vibrations (I personally disabled both because they were becoming a bit annoying after a while!).

I think Clear it’s a very good app. It’s both simple and useful and is very well realized in terms of UI. I think some improvements are needed in order to make it really perfect. The first is cloud backup. All my to-do lists should be saved online using iCloud so that if I accidentally delete the app or if I need to suddenly restore my device I won’t lose all my tasks. Furthermore a desktop companion app with cloud sync could help improve the work flow by enabling the creation of new tasks even without your phone.

It’s only version 1.0 so there’s plenty of time to make those and other improvements on the App. At the moment, also considering the $0,99/€0,79 introductory price, Clear is a very recommended app if you want a way to easily keep track of things to do.

Clear
Developer: Realmac Software Limited

Rated: 4+

Price: $1.99 Download

As always, if you download and try the app leave a comment below with your own experience!