Category: Reviews-HowTos

Our neighbors to the north have a long and colorful history of strong public funding of the arts, and NFB StopMo Studio from the National Film Board of Canada demonstrates that a government agency can indeed create something of true value for the creative minds of the world. It’s perhaps the single most usable, slick, and capable stop-motion creator we’ve seen on iPad, and it’s a truly unbeatable value for aspiring movie makers.

StopMo Studio is very obviously designed by animators, as the interface makes the process of grabbing consecutive still images effortless. An onscreen grid helps with aligning elements, and the implementation of the “onion-skinning” feature is clever, with a slider fading between the last captured frame and the current live one coming in via either iPad camera. While we wish we could visually overlay more than a pair of frames at a time, it’s a minor quibble for anyone but the most seasoned cel animation fanatic. The time-lapse feature is perfectly suited for creating stuttering video clips, with fixed choices ranging from multiple frames a second to snapping a single shot every 24 hours. We like the fact that you can do such long intervals, but it would have also been nice to include the ability to precisely specify a custom time period.

Besides capturing images from either camera, you can also import images, as well as create frames of solid color, add text cards, or even use a very decent set of painting tools to draw on top of captured or imported frames. And the inclusion of a basic layering ability lets you keep your graphics separate from the main background image. The lack of a graphics text tool means you can’t easily create word balloons—another minor omission we’d love to see addressed in a future update.

Beyond the one video “track,” NFB StopMo Studio also features four audio tracks for adding music and recorded sound effects, plus a separate FX track for inserting audio effects from a built-in library. Final animations can be saved as video files to your gallery, and then you can freely share your mini masterpieces as desired.

The bottom line. While some minor tweaks and additions would sweeten the pot, NFB StopMo Studio is the iPad cel animation tool to beat, with a wide array of abilities and total ease of use.

The latest iOS devices are capable of producing amazingly high-quality video footage, but the resolution tops out at 1080p HD. Thanks to Ultrakam, a new third-party camera app, the iPhone can squeeze out even more pixels—even if the current hardware isn’t quite up to the task. Ultrakam is capable of shooting video with up to 70{813a954d5e225a1509f22204ece89c855080ce25555f20805f61bed63cbfde3b} more pixels than standard HD. Although Hollywood may be pushing 4K Ultra HD as the next big thing, many Blu-ray masters continue to be sourced from what’s known as 2K, which typically boasts 2048 x 1556 pixels.

While there’s no denying that Ultrakam manages to cram in a whole lot more pixels into each frame of video—and the additional detail is certainly noticeable—there are too many tradeoffs made to get there. The most glaring are the non-standard frame sizes captured by the app (maxing out at 2240 x 1672), which requires rendering in order to be used in 2K-compatible video editing applications such as Final Cut Pro X.

Audio is another headache, since it’s recorded separately as a QuickTime-compatible CAF file that then needs to be manually synced with picture. Sound recording is absent entirely from Ultrakam’s time-lapse and slow motion modes, which otherwise do a respectable job of capturing video, although the latter is limited to 720p HD resolution.

Otherwise, the addition of independent focus, exposure and white balance, and the ability to record in multiple frame rates bring a pro touch to the app. We were disappointed to discover the app is locked to a single landscape mode, however, which winds up being the opposite of how users now hold their devices. No matter, since the volume button can’t be used as a trigger to start or stop recording. Ultrakam also includes a built-in media player, but the app warns that audio playback is for reference only, and we found playback at the highest 2K resolution too choppy to be of much use.

The bottom line. Ultrakam feels like a proof of concept, but does produce videos packed with extra resolution—assuming you’re willing to put up with its (many) idiosyncrasies.

Your challenge is simple: fly a wedge-shaped spaceship around an orange slice of space, collecting circular coins. All you need to do is grab 15, and each successful pick-up increments a circular score indicator at the center of the screen. How hard could that be? The twist is that your actions are cloned and represented on screen by an increasingly large robotic swarm of black ships. Collide with one of your echoes and it’s game over.

Fail at 14 coins and you at least earn a cheekily named achievement, thereby stopping you from yelling at your device about the inhumanity of it all. Actually, that’s fairly unlikely to occur, because 15 Coins on its easiest difficulty isn’t all that tough. With the assistance of freeze squares, you can obliterate temporarily stationary clones; therefore, with some savvy flying and a modicum of arcade smarts, a reasonably adept gamer will have beaten 15 Coins within about 20 minutes.

Two options then remain available: grab the coins more quickly and thereby climb the Game Center leaderboards, or venture towards a tougher difficulty level. At that point, the game starts to unravel. On the fastest speed especially, 15 Coins feels like trying to coax a drunken fly to do your bidding, as the ship jerks around the screen in tiny arcs; neither the touch nor tilt controls felt tight enough for our liking.

With some titles of this ilk, a game throwing down the gauntlet sometimes makes us all the more determined to continue and give it a slap. Here, though, we felt oddly satisfied when we’d collected our 15 coins on the slowest mode and made a decent stab at doing so on the faster ones. It was more a conclusion than a comma. There was also a nagging sense we could be playing other (and better) titles instead: the more varied Don’t Shoot Yourself!, avoid-’em-up classic Bit Pilot, or the wonderful and demanding trio that is Super Hexagon, Impossible Road, and Boson X.

That’s not to say 15 Coins isn’t worthy of consideration—it’s sweet, simple, and quite fun—but it’s very much a title that will make you smile and gnash for a few hours over a few days, rather than one that will remain forever welded to your Home screen.

The bottom line. A minimal, fairly effective, and initially compelling arcade experience that lacks the depth and pulling power to keep it around for the long haul. Still, it’s worth a look for a buck or two.

There are many features we take for granted on Mac OS X that remain absent on iOS, such as the ability to “print” to a PDF file from any application. Luckily, this is easily added with the purchase of a third-party app, and one of the best options available—Darsoft’s PDF Printer—just received a shiny iPad makeover. The tablet-only app (a separate iPhone version is available) lets you convert virtually any kind of document into an Adobe PDF-compatible file. Although many apps can now export such files natively, PDF Printer is unique in its ability to turn web pages, photos, clipboard contents, contacts, SMS messages, and even emails into high-quality PDFs.

Due to the relatively closed nature of iOS, the steps to accomplish these tasks will vary. PDF Printer includes a rudimentary built-in web browser and can directly access most other kinds of device content, but emails (which can include either text or attachments) require an awkward, multi-step process. Documents stored on Dropbox can also be directly imported and converted to PDF, but we were disappointed by the lack of integration with other popular cloud storage services. Thankfully, PDF Printer shows up as a “send to” option in nearly all of the apps we tested it with, and once converted to PDF, documents can be likewise exported as well.

The actual process of converting to PDF is a dream—it’s fast, and new conversions can be quickly added to existing documents. Once converted, individual pages can be deleted or rotated, although the app doesn’t allow for more full-featured editing or annotation like that offered by Readdle’s free Documents app. Like the iPhone version, PDF Printer for iPad benefits from a unique drag-and-drop “VisiTouch” file manager that makes the app feel more like desktop software. Unfortunately, the slick UI of the iPhone app (which also now matches the flatter look of iOS 7) isn’t quite as intuitive on the iPad, where it feels clunkier.

The bottom line. PDF Printer for iPad quickly gets the job done, but loses some of its user interface panache in the transition to tablet.

We don’t have fond memories of our college math courses. Learning the intricacies of geometry or figuring out the infiniteness of pi weren’t exactly recreational activities, and it was all we could do to keep our eyes open while studying for midterms. But if we had something as cool as Incredible Numbers in our backpacks, things might have been different.

Despite a plethora of fun and colorful interactive elements and engaging animations, Incredible Numbers isn’t a dumbed-down app for the digital generation. Rather, Professor Ian Stewart uses the iPad’s boundless teaching tools to take the mystery out of some of mathematics’ most difficult concepts, including factorials, Fibonacci numbers, and heptadecagons. An attractive menu of eight circles—plus a bonus section dedicated to brainteasers—guides you to your chosen lesson, but the simple one-word headings hardly prepare you for the wealth of information inside.

Tap on the red Music circle, for example, and you’ll learn about vibrations and patterns, watching as sound affects sine curves and experimenting with how complex waveforms are split into harmonics. It’s all very elegant and relatively easy to follow, and we quickly became engrossed in the numerous interactive theories and activities. Each lesson is more stunning than the last, and there’s even a breathtaking beauty in doing something as simple as sorting a list of prime numbers.

Incredible Numbers has a bright, animated interface that seems like it would educate and entertain a school-aged child for hours, but make no mistake: it’s not an app for young minds (at least not average ones). While there’s a certain face-value enjoyment in manipulating the various charts and graphs that are sprinkled throughout each chapter, many of the lessons are extremely advanced, and we found ourselves wanting a bit of an elementary discussion of some topics before we dove into the harder stuff.

The bottom line. Incredible Numbers is a beautiful tool for learning mathematics, but you’d better be wearing your thinking cap.