MonoPhix HD for iPad submitted to App Store

Today, after a long silent period for product releases we finally released our first iPad app. MonoPhix HD is the bigger brother of our black & white picture processing tool MonoPhix for iPhone.

The new MonoPhix HD is fully adapted to the iPad’s screen and features a whole busload of improvements. Only one concept remains intact from the iPhone version and that are the two sliders, one to intensify the bright areas of a picture and one to intensify the shadow areas.

Another features taken from the original version is the ability to recolor your black & white image, in the iPhone version you can generate sepia and antique versions in addition to the default black & white. In MonoPHix HD you can select whatever color you want by using a pop-up box with 3 sliders to set the RGB values of the desired color.

Other interesting new features include the ability to open tremendously huge pictures. In tradition to our iPhone apps, we try to enable people to edit their pictures at full resolution as good as possible without straining the system too much and although the iPad just slightly more powerful than an iPhone 3Gs, we managed to make MonoPhix HD support huge pictures and operate faster and more reliable than his iPhone colleague.

This also brings a few more possibilities into the mix, because we saved on performance we were able to add more powerful filtering features. Therefore MonoPhix HD also supports the ability to enhance the exposure to create a very worn out B&W look and enables you to set an alpha for the B&W filter, which means that you can choose to merge it with your previous image to obtain very pleasing results.

Perhaps the most important feature for some will be the ability to set adjustable vignetting for your monochrome pictures. You can choose between 2 types of vignetting, to make the edge of your image either lighter or to burn it and make it darker. The intensity of your vignetting can be completely controlled with the slider.

MonoPhix HD “should be” available next week in an App Store near you and will cost 1.99$ or the equivalent in other currency. Another blogpost will follow as it becomes available.

To end with you can find a gallery of screenshots in the bottom of this article.

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36-image converter video tutorial for people who fail to convert

I’ve been getting a lot of complaints lately <sarcasm>always from nice people who don’t insult me or anything</sarcasm> that 36-image converter is hard to work with and that they can’t find any info on how to convert an image or even open one. So I created a tutorial on how to open images in 36-image converter and convert them. In the tutorial we’re going to convert a DNG raw camera image to PNG in 2 minutes.

A few remarks :
-The version used in the video is a development version of 36-image converter 4.7 Beta which hasn’t been released yet. So you won’t be able to filter filetypes in the open-dialog.
-In versions older than the newest alpha version of 36-image converter 4.7 you won’t be able to open and convert DNG or other raw filetypes. You can download 36-image converter 4.7 here>
-My voice is no opera baritone so I still suggest reading the help file instead of listen to me for 2 whole minutes

I hope everything is clear now and that I don’t have to hear another. “It can’t convert images, this is stupid!” in my whole life.

iDuelpro Mobile for free, birthday present round-up

Today our iDuelpro Mobile (Yu-gi-oh! TCG lifepoints aid) was free because it was my birthday. All and all it was a success with over 200 downloads, we’ll know the final amount tomorrow.

We’ll probably do this for other apps in the future, but there’s only one problem. Free apps attract the wrong kind of people.
Many iPhone/iPod Touch users download anything that’s free only to find out that they don’t need it and to rate it 1/5. So this is a major drawback. Hence, our promotion stunt increased our amount of 1/5 ratings by 2, but still someone who was really interested rated iDuelpro Mobile at 5/5.

You can still find it here (it’s still cheap at only 0.99$) : http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=299220306&mt=8

iPhix 1.2 for iPhone released, new icon, sliders, better filters,…

The newest version of our iPhix image editor for iPhone is released to the iTunes Store. This newest version is one of the last versions of a resizing and cropping iPhix, the next version (2.0) will support full resolution images.

The changes include :
-New icon
-Added Brighten/Darken Filter (comparable to flash-simulator apps)
-Added ability to adjust the color gamma
-Added slider to control “Egalize”-filter
-Added Ability to select more than one filter
-Added ability to remove filters
-Added Solarize filter
-Improved reliability
-New Help file

Screenshot iPhix

iPhix to support full resolution images in iPhix 2.0

We are currently developing the newest version of our image editor for the iPhone iPhix. The biggest issue was that it didn’t support full resolution pictures, everything was resized. And since many people think they are professional photographers operating the iPhone’s cam, this was absolutely necessary. An iPhone image editor must support 1.600×1.200 pixels images or it is useless apparently. So now iPhix will trade the advanced filter system, where you can select and test images before applying, for the ability to edit images at full resolution.

We weren’t able to maintain the advanced filter manager together with full resolution images since the filter system stored cache copies of the image in the memory and since there is only 16Mb of video memory available this was an issue. So we are going to do what all other image editors do in the App Store, make a crappy app with full resolution instead of an advanced photo editor which is suitable for a smartphone.

From this evolution in version 2.0 we will continue development to bring back a few of the lost features. Avoiding memory issues.

iDuelpro Mobile still most downloaded yu-gi-oh! app for iPhone

Even after the 2 months since we began charging for iDuelpro Mobile, we still have the top marketshare of all yu-gi-oh! LPC’s on the iPhone. iDuelpro Mobile takes credit for 52,40% of all yu-gi-oh! related downloads. That’s even more than other apps which are currently free. We owe this large amount to a whole bunch of features combined with a decent price.

Here’s a marketshare chart for all Yu-gi-oh! apps in the iTunes App Store :

Marketshare chart App Store

This new revelation brings our total marketshare for all Duelpro derivatives on any platform to 72,47% of the total market if just divided by 3 (Windows, Mac OSX, iPhone). If we take the importance of all operating systems (incl. Linux/other platforms) into account we see a marketshare of 95,55% (Linux users running Duelpro on wine not included).

iPhix 1.1 released to the iTunes App Store

v1.1 of the iPhone/iPod Touch image editor iPhix has been approved to the iTunes App Store today. This update essentially fixes a whole bunch of issues people were experiencing. The added functionality is minimal, but the update is essential to clear out all child diseases.

iPhix 1.1 has the following changes to version 1.0 :
-Improved engine to prevent crashes and fix random resets
-Masks are now improved to fit the image’s dimensions better
-Recolored background to match the rest of the interface
-New mysterious solarwind filter (solarW)
-Add confirmation messages for save
-Added save warning to “Web” and “Help”
-Fixed bugs with which crashed the application on use of multiple masks

So iPhix 1.1 is a lot more stable to work with. Of course v1.2 is already on its way and submitted to the App Store.

Now we are just waiting for Apple to place iPhix in the top of the new releases listing, where it belongs as it has a release date set to September the 4th but is hanging out between apps who were updated the 24th of August.

You can still download iPhix here>

36-image converter downloaded 100.000 times on CNET

We know that all together from various sources 36-image converter is downloaded about 600.000 times, but we only take one result as official and untampered with measuring tool, CNET. And this night, the 100.000th download of 36-image converter was confirmed.

36-image converter is around since februari 2006 and has been listed on CNET since July 2006, it took off quite fast quickly bringing it to 20.000 downloads and to one of our most downloaded applications. Later in 2007 we started seeing the potential of 36-image converter and we started building other more advanced tools and version, thus even increasing the amount of downloads even more. In 2008 came 36-image converter 4.4 “Ninja” and this has put us on the map as the most popular real image converter and one of the top 20 most popular image editing tools in the world. And today, we have 100.000 official downloads.

I can only say one more thing : Bring in the 1.000.000!

iPhix 1.2 for iPhone finished and Apple still reviewing v1.1

Last Friday we finished v1.1 of our iPhone photo editor iPhix, adding some new filters and fixing a whole lot of bugs. With that solid base we created a new folder and started messing around with some filters, eventually trying out the first idea a reviewer delivered us. One thing led to another and today we have finished iPhix 1.2.

iPhix 1.2 brings a new icon which actually looks good, adds a brighten/darken filter which can be compared to many flash apps which are most of the time more expensive than iPhix. But well how much an application is downloaded doesn’t depend on quality anyway, it’s just what trick you use to stay at the top of the listing that does it. But anyway, the brighten or darken function works with a slider control with the far left being “dark as the night” and the far right being “heavily backlighted picture of the sun”. Another new filter-function is the function to control the RGB values or Gamma of an image with 3 slider controls, one for red, one for green and one for blue.

You can now also remove filters from an image as long as they weren’t saved and apply more than one filter to an image by saving the filter to the image first with a simple function. The slider control was also applied to the egalise function, in which you can now specify an amount of colors the picture can have. 1 more filter was added called “Solarise”, bringing the total amount of filters to 18.

A final improvement comes with slightly improved code reliability and a new icon, which according to some who have beheld it, looks amazing.

iPhix 1.2 was planned for late September but will be submitted for approval whenever Apple plans on approving v1.1. So the release date will probably be somewhere mid-September.

iPhix Gamma Function

iPhix Brightness in Action

Release : 36-image converter 4.7.1 Alpha build 140 (“Tiger Chameleon”)

As promised we are releasing the first development alpha of 36-image converter 4.7 “Tiger Chameleon” to the world. It has been in development for 3 months yet and includes many interesting changes especially for people with advanced camera’s. This is also the first public version which includes the new Core Image Processing Unit.

36-image converter 4.7 is far from finished but the current release already shows huge improvements, but still isn’t stable yet. We could say that it’s already 20% finished. Here’s a full list of all changes in this build :

-Improved performance
-Reduced memory usage
-New conversion engine (Core Image Processing Unit v0.3.1)
-Support for the RAW formats of over 300 digital camera’s (List)
-Faster filters handled by CIPU
-A bunch of new filters
-More stable write support for TGA, TIF, TIFF, Portable Bitmaps (raw), ICO, CUR, PNG, JPEG, JPEG2000, PCX and EMF
-Added write support for RLE, 256-colors (8-bits) and 16-bits BMP, ICB, Portable Bitmaps (raw),
-Tweaks to convert menu UI
-New splash screen and icons
-Added install welcome screen

There are still some bugs and therefore we can use as many feedback as possible.

36-image converter 4.7.1 build 140 Alpha Download>

36IC 4.7.1a Build 140 screenshot