YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – It’s really strange. The rainy season ended a few months ago, but it rained a few times last week. And the latest weather forecast suggests that it will rain daily for the next 7 days or so. Although I don’t like the scorching summer, when the month transitions to August to September, I feel as if the year were almost over. That’s why I don’t quite like September. Yet, since it’s been raining, there’s no indication that the last summer ended just a few weeks ago.

Anyway, I have double releases to announce today. The first software title to introduce to you is an iOS app titled Nopac Mobile.

Nopac Mobile is an iPad-only iOS app that is designed for college students who use their devices to regularly take notes during lectures. It has basic writing style features such as bolding, italicizing, underlining, colorizing a text segment. Nopac Mobile also supports the Undo/Redo stack such that you can tap the Undo button to undo the last text style change.

Nopac Mobile isn’t just a simple word processor for mobile devices. When you register a course, you can create a list of keywords for all sessions so that you can tap one to insert the selected keyword to the note document of the selected session. Additionally, you can attach one or more photos to each document by tapping the Add Image button.

If you have multiple devices, Macs or iPads, you can share your notes among them. The desktop counterpart is Nopac Desktop. You can push data on your iPad so that you can read and edit the same notes on your Mac. With the tap of a button, you can fetch notes that are pushed on other devices of yours as long as they all share the same iCloud account. No, there is no special account required to share data between your devices. Just make sure they are all logged into the same iCloud account.

With the tap of a button, you can export selected lecture notes as a PDF file or an RTF file. The export options are available in the Settings sheet. Tap the Settings toolbar button at the Startup screen for more information.   Continue reading →

YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – This is another day of double releases. It’s quite tiring to release macOS application and its iOS counterpart because you have create all metadata images and preview videos. If your iOS app supports both the iPhone and the iPad, you have to do the same twice. Anyway, the second release is called Notes2Me Mobile.

Notes2Me Mobile is an iOS app for iPhone and iPad users with which you can exchange data with other devices of yours even with a Mac as long as they share the same iCloud account. The desktop counterpart of Notes2Me Mobile is Notes2Me.

The startup screen is divided into two parts, the receiver side and the sender side. The left pane lists the records you have received from other devices. The right pane lists the records you have sent to other devices. A record you have received may contain one or more files.

Just like the desktop counterpart, when you send a record to your iPhone or iPad from another device (Mac, iPhone, iPad), the app will not automatically fetch records. You can subscribe to record creation so that your iOS device will receive a notification whenever you push a new record to the iCloud server.

In order to fetch records from iCloud, simply tap the Fetch toolbar button. And Notes2Me Mobile will only download unique records that don’t exist locally. With the tap of a button, you can remove the original record from the iCloud server. Similarly, you can remove all records in the iCloud server with the tap of a button.

A record you have received from a Mac or another iOS device may contain one or more attachments. Regardless of the OS difference, you can save these attachments through Files.app by opening the Files disclosure view and tapping the orange button with the downward-looking arrow.   Continue reading →

YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – For the past several days, it has rained almost every day in this Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area. It looks to me that we are back to another rainy season. I know what I can do when I cannot go out jogging. So I spent several days, not stepping out of my house much, developing a new iOS app. This new release is called Speed Shoots.

You seldom get a second chance when you miss a great moment of a camera shot. Fortunately, iOS comes with a camera shot feature that lets you take several, consecutive shots per second. It’s a great feature but not free from criticism. Some people say it can clutter the Photo Library with a lot of unwanted, near-identical photos. Others say its slide gesture control to initiate the feature is unintuitive.

Speed Shoots is an iPhone-only camera app that lets you take consecutive photos so that you won’t miss a great camera shot moment. Because it’s only designed for you to take consecutive camera shots, there is just one circular camera shutter button you need to tap unlike Apple’s Camera with a hidden gesture control.

Speed Shoots has usual suspects as a camera app. It comes with the camera flash feature with three different modes (auto, on, off). You have options of delaying in taking consecutive camera shots by counting numbers to 1 with or without a voice. You also have options of overlaying the camera screen with a color grid or a color square. Also, you can adjust exposure compensation (brightness) with a horizontal slider. Additionally, you can pinch-zoom the camera screen.

When you hold your device in the landscape orientation, the camera visible area will become very small because of the control cover. In this case, you can long-press the camera screen itself. And the app will hide the control cover, and the camera visible area will increase.

After you take a lot of rapid shots, they won’t be immediately added to the Photo Library. Review them one by one and tap Save to send the current photo you see to the Photo Library.

When you open Photos, what you see is only the one you decided to save, not messing up the Photo Library with several other near-identical photos.   Continue reading →