Reduce for Photographers

I’m not a photographer. I don’t take photos daily; not even with my iPhone. I believe photography is one of the activity that can develop one sense of beauty. The art of composition in expressing the moment from a single image is brilliant. It’s a craft which requires thousand hours of practice to be good.

One of the iPhone application I’ve discovered recently is designed for photographers. It’s called Reduce. It’s designed and built by Tobias Wiedenmann, an independent designer and developer from German, who also creates Taskpaper. The interface is beautiful. His cartoonish detailed design can be seen throughout this application which define the overall aesthetic beauty. Every features are aimed to provide simple and fast image processing on trip.

There are several basic features I think you’ll need as a photographer. You’ll need a simple method to resize, cleaning Exif data, and adding watermark if you regularly upload your photos to services such as Flickr.

When you first open the application, you’ll realize that everything I’ve mentioned are presented in one screen. All the folders inside Photos application will be shown in a photo stack manner. Tapping the folder expands all photos within folder. Below you can find the option to toggle Exif data, image resize & sharpening method, including Jpeg quality adjustment.

Each feature is self-explanatory. You can adjust the width by using the slider for pixel size which comes in pre-determined value. It’s a good thing that you can choose image width without worrying the value might go past 1 or 2 pixels.

The setting button allows you to add a simple watermark. By simple, it means your watermark is only a text embedded into your post-processed images. Albeit simple, you can still configure how it is displayed. You can adjust the opacity and position the watermark. You can apply border for the images. You can determine the color of your text. You can pick the typeface out of 15 choices.¹

Once you’re done with the configuration, you can preview the image first. The preview doesn’t fit to screen; so aside from taking a good look at how your watermark will look like, it doesn’t provide much help. Batch processing images can be done by select multiple photos at once before tapping «Start» button. Selected images are indicated by the magnifiying glass used for preview. Processed images are saved inside the Reduce Export folder. If you’re satisfied with the result, you can also save it as preset for future use.

Conclusion

Reduce is a nifty and beautiful application to process photos taken with your iPhone. Although I use the iPad version in this review, I believe Reduce for iPhone is a perfect companion for your daily on the road photography. It’s designed with ease of use in mind. Give it a try and I think you’ll like it.

No Amount of Apologies Can Correct Misinformed People

As someone who check out¹ news from major tech blog regularly, the ability to filter and verify the validity of news is important. Blogging is easier with the access of information and the help of technology. One can write a summary of news from the press release or a thread in Reddit without confirming first.

Yesterday, we had a pile of false reporting from major tech blog. Most of them didn’t apologize for false reporting, or at least admitted that it was their fault.

I guess it’s a common occurrence in this field. Write a story, publish it, and correct it later if it’s proven wrong. Has the ease of blogging made writers to neglect the impact of misreporting?

Once a major tech blog publishes a story, especially the breaking one, their readers are going to share it to their social circle. It can be a tweet or just a casual conversation during lunch. The misinformed people will continue the cycle and spread the story, although not always, to their friends. As a result, we have a lot of misinformed people.

But wait. Didn’t they apologize and update the story to let their readers know there was a mistake? Yes, it’s still useless.

Unlike us who follow news regularly, some of those misinformed people don’t care which site they’re reading the news. They only care how popular the stories are. They see an interesting title and a link, click it, read the news, and leave the site. Do you think they’ll check the same story twice? Nope. I bet they won’t even know which site the story originated from.

See the problem? Information spreads. No amount of apologies can correct misinformed people. That’s why getting the story right in the first place is far more important than correcting it later.

To be fair, avoiding misreporting is impossible. Sometimes the problem lies with the sources, not the writers. This is where journalism plays its part.

There aren’t many effective ways to fix consequences caused by misreporting. The most common attempt is sharing the updated story through the social media. For a blog, writing a separated post to correct previously published post shows how much you care about your readers.

The Most Beautiful Folder Icons Replacement for Mac

I’ve never customized the folder icons on Mac. There is a reason behind this decision. Most of the icon sets take away the natural beauty of OS X. They usually stand out by themselves, ignoring other UI elements, and turn the whole OS X into a bizarre state.

De Anza is the latest folder icons sets designed by Louie Mantia, a former Apple and Square designer. Consisting of 2 color schemes with many sharp details, it blends well with Finder and OS X Mountain Lion. I can say it’s the most beautiful¹ folder icon sets I’ve seen so far.

If you’ve never customized your OS X before, I’ll give a brief tutorial on this. There are many tools you can use to get this done, but I’ll share the one I use to change the system icons. If you’ve never heard or tried CandyBar before, then go ahead and download a copy of it first.

There are many ways to replace system folder icons without the help of CandyBar. Using CandyBar allows you to restore everything easily without having to creep out when the next OS update breaks your system.

CandyBar used to be a paid app to customize Dock and various of icons. But the new regulation in OS X Mountain Lion has caused the team to stop the development of CandyBar, leaving it for the folks at IconFactory. They’ve made it the latest version that supports OS X Mountain Lion for free. The drawback is you can no longer customize Dock and applications download from Mac App Store with CandyBar. Fortunately, it can still be used to customize system icons.

The process to customize system icons is pretty straightforward. Move the downloaded De Anza icon set into CandyBar. You should see them in the sidebar and the preview of each icon underneath. Scroll down and find the list of system folder icons. The next step is to drag and drop De Anza folder icon into the system folder icons according to their type. Replaced icons will show a dim blue light around the container. Apply the changes and relaunch Finder.

For Dropbox users, some folder icons can’t be replaced using traditional copy-paste method. You have to open the Dropbox package and replace the actual icons in there. There are about 4 icons you need to replace with different filenames. I’ve included the renamed icons for you to download. Get it here: De Anza for Dropbox.