"The only way to be truly satisfied, is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do." Steve Jobs
Once "inking" gets into your veins you will never be able to live without it. Frank J. Garcia

My Surface PRO 3 'Must Have' Accessories List

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Browsing in an iPad is terrible - Part V

For those iPad owners that participate in forums the experience with the iPad is at least challenging. Forget about uploading files. All those options asking you to select from your iPad what's the file that you want to upload do not work. If your forum is made in ASP for some mysterious reason pasting Text in the Post Editor does not work most of the time like it's shown in this short video.





Saturday, September 25, 2010

Flash is slow? And what about HTML5?

According to Steve Jobs some of the reasons why he does not allow Flash in our leased iPads is because the performance of Flash. Did Steve test HTML5 in an iPad? I don't think so because if he did he would have found this:
Link to video.





Friday, September 24, 2010

Artrage Studio released

ArtRage is one of the best programs to create art in a Tablet PC. Today I received the press release from Ambient Design with the good news of a new versions of this program being released and I'm really glad to see that the program is progressing and reaching new stages.




ARTRAGE STUDIO AND ARTRAGE STUDIO PRO
RELEASED BY AMBIENT DESIGN
New Digital Painting Products Provide Comprehensive Tools for the Skilled Hobbyist and Professional Artist

Auckland, New Zealand - Ambient Design has released ArtRage Studio and ArtRage Studio Pro. These new products in the ArtRage family contain all the tools found in the entry level ArtRage product plus dozens of added innovations for advanced users. ArtRage Studio Pro was created for artists who require a professional toolset while ArtRage Studio was designed for artists who don’t need the high-end features. Both products include an intuitive, scalable and customizable interface, a "Canvas Puck", which allows for easy navigation on the canvas, customizable keyboard shortcuts, an auto-smoothing inking pen, watercolors, flood fill, selections, a text tool that for live text editing on layers and the bitmap "Sticker Spray" brush. Hobbyist and professional artists, animators, illustrators, scrapbookers and manga and comic creators will appreciate the software’s power and its ability to allow for seamless, artistic expression.

Customers can choose the software that best fits their needs. ArtRage Studio Pro's more advanced features include: Real color blending, sophisticated color adjustment options, PhotoShop® filter support, a customizable Sticker Spray brush and an inking pen with opacity, blending and anti-alias control. 3D programs can also make use of ArtRage Studio Pro's exported channel maps to recreate the color, volume, gloss and reflectivity of paintings in their native renderers. ArtRage Studio and ArtRage Studio Pro support Windows® 7 touch screen capabilities. Watch a video of the Sticker Spray in action here: Sticker Spray Video.

Matt Fox-Wilson, Ambient Design's creative director said, "As we were adding features, we realized that one product with a large set of features wouldn’t suit many of our users so we decided instead to create a second product aimed more at the mid-level artist. ArtRage Studio is perfect for that group of users. It's not a "lite" version, but a version tailored specifically to their needs."

Both products include the intuitive, realistic behavior of the ArtRage toolset, such as sophisticated brushes, numerous stencils, blending of artistic media on the canvas, and easy-to-use, customizable color pallets. Users have many choices of paper varieties and paper grains and paint and drawing mediums such as oils, pencils, crayons, airbrush, chalk and markers. ArtRage provides Photoshop compatible transparent layers that can be used for advanced compositions and allows photos and images to be easily recreated as paintings.

ArtRage Studio Pro beta tester, Hans Deconinck said, "Everyone will love this software. Watercolor painters, oil and acrylic painters and the comic book and manga artists too."

Pricing and Availability:
ArtRage Studio can be purchased for $40.00 (USD) and ArtRage Studio Pro for $80.00 from the ArtRage web site: www.ArtRage.com. ArtRage 2.5 Full Edition is available for $20.00 and will be upgraded in the future. Some users of ArtRage 2.x are eligible for "Switch To Studio" discounts when purchasing one of the new products.

ArtRage supports popular pen tablets from companies such as Wacom® and Adesso® that allow the artist to draw and paint with a pressure sensitive stylus. New camera based touch screens like the HP TouchSmart allow the user to finger paint or use traditional paintbrushes for a unique digital painting simulation experience. Watch a Touch Screen demo video here: Touch Screen/ArtRage Demo.

For a complete list of new features of ArtRage Studio and Studio Pro, please see: New Features.

A PDF comparison chart for all three ArtRage product offerings can be found here: Comparison Chart.

A trial version of ArtRage Studio Pro can be download here: Artrage Studio Pro Demo.

For more information, or to purchase or to view the galleries, forums and tutorials, please visit the ArtRage home page: www.ArtRage.com

System Requirements:
Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7
Mac OSX 10.4 or later with 1GHz processor (Intel/AMD or PPC G4/G5)
1024 x 768 screen size, 512MB Memory, 100MB disk free.
Languages: English, French, German, Dutch interface. English manual.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

The iPhone 4 performance is pathetic

No, I'm not the one that say that. DailyTech has performed a series of test using HTML5 and Flash 10 running in an iPhone and a Nexus ONE and this is what they say:

A recent benchmark by web developer Chris Black shows that quite the opposite might be true. Mr. Black benchmarked the iPhone 4 running iOS 4.1 and Google's defunct Nexus One running Android 2.2 "Froyo".




Thursday, September 16, 2010

Browsing in the iPad is terrible - Part IV

I was fixing a few minutes ago my previous post about how terrible is browsing the WEB with an iPad when I discovered that the editor of Blogger does not recognizes Safari in my iPad as a valid browser. As result I can't use the Rich editor and I'm forced to use just the HTML browser. Hum... Another example of how "magic" is the browsing experience with an iPad.





Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Browsing in an iPad is terrible - Part III

Today I received a text message of my daughter asking me to pick her from a car repair business. I'm an old guy so every time I drive to a place that I don't know the first thing I do is to check the address in Google Maps. And I'm glad that I did it. From the satellite view of the address I noticed that something was wrong because that place looked to me like a house not like a business. In these cases and to be sure I check the place using the option Street View of Google Maps. But... Why this option is not in my iPad? The answer is simple. This feature uses flash.



Come on! I have this feature running in my Nexus ONE! Why I can't have it in my iPad, the same one that was supposed to bring me a "magic experience"! In a bigger screen!

Well thanks to my phone again, I checked the address and found the right address.

Now, my question to Steve Jobs is how long he thinks that will take to Google to switch that feature to HTML5. Of course, knowing Jobs I know his answer: Ask Google. And if I was Google I would be thinking, why I should change it if it's working fine in the way it's.

So here we are iPad owners no enjoying fully or at all that magic experience promised to us by God Jobs.

Note: if you use the Maps application included in the iPad there the Street View option works. The case I'm referring to is when you are using the browser.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Browsing in an iPad is terrible - part II

I did not have to wait too much for the second part of my Series "Browsing in an iPad is terrible". I was reading my RSS feed a news posted in Gizmodo about a hologram created using ironically in an iPad. I opened the link to watch the video in Safari and this screen shot shows all I got.




The Beauty of the Web

There is a lot of excitement at Microsoft and the reason is the release of the first beta of Internet Explorer 9. Starting the next September 15th anyone willing to test this new version can download it following the instructions from the above link.

Internet Explorer 9 offers substantial improvements the current version including: a streamlined interface, full hardware-accelerated HTML5, modern SVG and native JavaScript integration, support for the Web Open Font Format as well as faster overall performance. The new Internet Explorer 9 Beta provides a more secure, stable and fast browsing experience.



Browsing in an iPad is terrible - part 1

Steve Jobs keeps repeating everywhere that the browsing experience in the iPad is the best and that those asking for flash is because we are porno sites addict. Well, I gonna start posting all sites where I find problems when I visit them in my iPad. Just today,

- Netflix, does not allow me to rate movies.
- Live (Microsoft), I can't log out from an account to log back to another account.
- National Geographic, they have a section called the Picture of the Day. It does not work because the photo browser is made in flash.



So today I give my browsing experience in the iPad -3. Yeah that's a negative 3.

As you can see, Steve Jobs, there was not any Porno site and only one problem is flash relative. Of course, knowing you the answer is going to be a question: Did you contact these sites asking them to create iPad friendly versions? My answer is NO. I feel that is easy to change the ONE browser with problems than all sites that do not work in Safari but they do work well in all other browsers.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Avox AT11

Despite the popularity of Tablets there is some movement in the TabletPc market. This summer Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO announced that there were few TabletPcs coming this fall. I don't know if the Avox AT11 is one them but the fact is that Ruvo is showing it as coming soon in it's site.




The specification in this machine does not show anything out of the ordinary. The battery life is showing from 4 to 5 hours a little more than the average in other devices. Of course, if I'm calling it TabletPC is because it uses Windows 7.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Who owns my iPad?

I was watching TV few minutes ago and there was a commercial about TVGuide.com talking about the new search engine that allowed you to find your favorite shows episodes in any page of the web. That sounded extremely appealing to me so I grabbed my iPad laying near me and went to TVGuide.com to check by myself this new feature. Once there the site asked me if I wanted to switch to a version made for the iPad. Why not - I said. Well, it looks good, but... Hum... Where are the other features of the "normal" site? Hum... It looks good but it's not what I was looking for. So I went back to the normal site, I read one or two articles and photo reports that WERE NOT in the iPad site and later went and searched for my favorite show... N C I S... Enter. Hum... This sounds good. A behind scene movie about the new Season coming I believe this month. I clicked the Watch Now link that sent me to this page. Nothing is wrong with that page Frank! Probably are you going to tell me if you have been patient enough to follow me up to this point. Oh Yeah! Then... Something Is wrong with my iPad Steve Job! This is all Im getting! A F.... BLACK RECTANGLE!




A black rectangle and an ironic NOW PLAYING under that useless black box. Was not you selling me that picture of me laying in my couch browsing the web?


THE WEB! Because I did not hear you saying a FILTERED version of the web free of Flash. Why I have to jailbreak my iPad to get what I have in my Nexus ONE? Please old man, open your mind or just retire. You are holding back Apple. HTML5 is the answer but still far from being implemented everywhere and that process will take at least 2 years. I don't want to wait two years to navigate the web from my couch without any restriction on what I want to watch. I already invested in one of your iPad. I want to enjoy it. That's all I want. And you, STEVE JOBS, you are holding me to enjoy my investment though I'm about to start thinking that I just leased your company an iPad. I do not have any control on it. You have all the control. What I can play and what I can't. What I can watch in there and what I can't. What I can install and what I can't.

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Free Viliv n5

Here is your chance to win a free Viliv N5. All you have to do is to write a Haiku in Twitter. Did I say that the haiku should be about the N5? I'm sure that you had that clear.

The Viliv N5 is virtually a Pocket Pc... Hum... Let me clarify... A PC that fits in un pockets. Small yes, but powerful enough to run Windows 7.





Sunday, September 05, 2010

The top 10 Android Tablets

JKK at JKK Mobile has posted what he thinks is the list of the best 10 Android Tablets coming this fall to the market. These are in my own opinion the best of the best Tablets that have been shown so far.