Having grown up with Cubase on the PC, but recently transitioned onto Apple hardware, I was intrigued to see Apple’s music production workhorse, Logic Pro 9, available on the App Store. In the same way Apple has changed the way we buy music, it is changing the way we buy software. Inspired by the incredible success of the App Store for mobile devices, its latest foray in getting us to part with our hard earned cash is through the App Store for Mac. Initially, I was skeptical – after all, open source and other free software was gaining market share, and as consumers we were becoming accustomed to getting high quality, useful software for free. In the meantime, however, the idea of cheap and good value impulse-purchase software, as available on iPhone and iPad, was becoming commonplace.

On the topic of price – Logic Pro 9 is currently available on the App Store for $199. This is clearly in a different league to the average $0.99 iPhone app. However, it still represents astonishing value for money. By cutting out the distributers and retailers, as well as the cost of physical media such as boxes, manuals and DVDs, you can now purchase this accomplished, professional music production package at a fraction of the cost of its previous price. And if that doesn’t seem enough of a bargain … the app store license ensures you can deploy and use the software on all of your Macs – only one purchase required!

Logic Pro 9 as a DAW

The transition from Cubase was easy. The UI concepts are familiar, and we did not notice any significant missing functionality. In fact, we never looked back. I confess, it will take you a day or two to work out how to access all your favorite features, but trust us, they are there.

Logic Pro 9 as a sample library and collection of instruments

Logic. Wins. Hands. Down. The quantity and quality of the content that ‘ships’ with Logic Pro 9 is seriously impressive. Your $199 not only buys you a professional quality DAW, it also gets you an exciting and extensive collection of virtual instruments, loops and samples. Perfectly aligned with Apple’s philosophy of intuitive user experience, Apple Loops are the place to start if you’re new to computer music. Explore, audition, drag and drop. Whatever your chosen key or tempo, the apple loop will adjust itself to sit perfectly in the mix. What could be easier?

There’s plenty for the seasoned music producer, too. Pre-configured channel strips will save time and provide inspiration. The included sampler, the EXS24, is feature rich and will be all the sampler you will ever need. The included sample libraries are high quality and applicable to a board range of musical styles. For those of you who like to create your sound waves from scratch, the included synthesizers, such as the ES1, will not disappoint.

Want to record your axe? The electric guitar is another instrument which is incredibly well supported. Ready to rock right out of the box is an impressive array of amp simulations, stomp boxes, and full-rig presets. OK, so they don’t quite provide the accuracy of our Line6 POD HD Pro, but to all but the geekiest of amp technicians, your bases are covered – whatever the style.

Hardware

We have an envious home studio setup, featuring a 27″ iMac, a MacBook Air, Roland’s flagship XV-5080 synthesizer, a Line 6 POD HD Pro guitar amp modeller, a Gibson Les Paul Studio guitar, Edirol FA-66 FireWire audio interface, Tascam vocal processor, ART vocal channel strip,  TC-Helicon harmoniser, and numerous software instruments and effects from Native Instruments and IK Multimedia.

Everything simply worked, plug ‘n’ play. Even the MacBook Air (admittedly, a spec’d up 3 week old i7) coped with our most demanding productions with ease. For those with an Air wondering how well it will cope – the answer is very well indeed. No worries on that front.

This is where we noticed a huge advantage to using Logic Pro over Cubase – multiple audio interface support. On our old setup, Cubase, using ASIO drivers, would only support a single audio interface at any one time (some manufacturers offer support to daisy chain devices, but you’re screwed if this is not supported on your interface, or you want to use interfaces from different manufacturers). And here is where using Mac and Logic Pro holds the ace card.

Mac OS supports the concept of aggregate audio devices. What a godsend! This allowed us to combine our Edirol FA-66, withits 6 inputs and 6 outputs, with our Line 6 POD HD Pro guitar processor, to give us a total of 8 ins and 8 outs, as a single virtual device. We could use all 16 channels simultaneously! Beat that, Cubase!

The negatives

You can’t resize the mixer. It looks a bit too small on our 27″ iMac. Hand on heart that is the only niggle we’ve had with Logic Pro 9. Seriously.

Logic Pro 10 / Logic Pro X

We have found rumors on the internet of the launch of the next version of Logic Pro dating back to 2009. Admittedly, this is a concern as Logic Pro 9 has been around for quite a while now. In addition to this, Apple has not yet set a precedent regarding an upgrade path for App Store purchases for major new versions. There is a risk that you will have to fork out an additional $199 (or more) to get Logic Pro 10.

Our advice: get over it. Whenever you buy in to a technology, the next version is always around the corner. Remember that the original price for Logic Pro 9 was $499. You’ve already saved $300. Now is the time to buy.

Summary

Apple Logic Pro 9 from the App Store is an incredible bargain. This is a professional quality, fully featured software application. The only limitation is your creativity. We mean that sincerely – this thing is perfectly capable of producing industry standard professional results.

Think about what you’re getting. A pro quality DAW. Sample libraries. Virtual instruments. Guitar amps and effects. Apple Loops. Each one of these is worth the full asking price independently. All in all, there is around 20 gigabytes of pro quality content.

If you are tempted to take the plunge, our advice is to go for it, right now! We fail to see how you can be anything less than delighted with it. We’d go so far as to say this is the best value for money software package available on any platform, in any genre. Period. Set your conscience aside – this is legal daylight robbery.

Someone has been busy with Photoshop again

Here we go again with the iPhone 5 rumors. As if you aren’t all sick of the hype surrounding the 4S launch, some sites are starting to “confidently” report details of the inevitable iPhone 5 from “close sources”.

This article at BGR makes some interesting guesses revelations, particularly regarding the casework, which is boldly publishes under the “exclusive” tag. Ho hum.

Sorry, do I sound at all skeptical?

Unfortunately, the Apple development tools (Xcode, etc) are nowhere near as stable and bug-free as other platforms. Eclipse, Visual Studio, you name it – much better. Come on Apple, did you forget about the user experience for developers? We are users of your products too!

The bug reporter then throwing an error really took the biscuit …

When you download Xcode 4.2 from the Mac App Store, don’t be disheartened when you launch Xcode and it is still version 4.1. What Apple doesn’t tell you is that you need to run the installer you just downloaded. Go ahead, it is right there in your Applications folder.

Good luck!

I am extremely disappointed that you have removed multitasking gestures for ipad on ios 5. They have become such an integral part of the interaction with my ipad, that ios 5 really feels like a downgrade, and through missing this feature my ipad now feels slow and cumbersome to use.

We all know that ipad is perfectly capable of these gestures, and so i feel betrayed by you that you would remove this feature, in a way that i can’t get it back, thus forcing me to buy new hardware just for a feature that i used to have anyway!

Come on Apple, play fair. We (the world) spend a fortune with you – but only when you treat us like valued customers.

The Scatterpic Team

*** update: multitasking gestures are back for ipad 1 in the latest update to iOS5. I guess sometimes they do listen to us!

We are very pleased to announce the latest feature to be added to Scatterpic – Near Me.

Perfect for people traveling with their iPhone or iPad, the Near Me feature allows you to play Scatterpic with images taken near to your current location.

This feature relies on a feature known as geotagging – the act of associating a photograph with the geographic position at which it was taken.

Some modern cameras and phones can automatically tag the location of photographs using GPS – Global Positioning Satellites – the same technology that drives your in car sat-nav. Alternatively, photographers can manually add location information to their snaps.

Either way, the Scatterpic app for iPhone takes advantage of this information – combined with Apple’s in-built facility to determine your current location – to give you fun photo-based puzzles with photos taken near where you are!

How do we do it? Well, it’s all thanks to Flickr. Every time you play a Near Me game of Scatterpic, we search Flickr in realtime for photos taken near your current location, taking advantage of the fact that many photos on Flickr are geotagged.

We hope you enjoy this new feature – yet another way for you to discover Flickr content relevant to you!

Scatterpic is a novel iPhone app allowing you to play puzzle games based on interesting photographs. Scatterpic is fun to play, suitable for all the family and child friendly, and has fresh content every day! Scatterpic is available on the App Store.

Are you looking for new ways to interact with content from the web, such as photographs from Flickr?

In a world where more and more people are self-publishing content online, there is growing interest in finding new ways to consume or interact with this incredible wealth of artistic and creative material. New iPhone apps designed as “viewers” for such content are appearing at an incredible rate. Wonderful, right? Of course! However, we are a long way from realizing the true potential of this phenomenal repository of content. In fact, a large problem associated with such huge collections of resources is exactly how to go about finding and navigating the content.

Traditional approaches, such as searching by tag, are fine if you are looking for something specific and you are willing to accept that if the content isn’t tagged with the same words you use for your search (synonyms are not enough), you will never find it. One potential route for improvement is to develop search algorithms to understand the tags and then do a semantic search across the content (good for text searches). This helps a little with non-text content, such as images, video and music, but still relies on the content being tagged by a human.

A better approach for these types of resources would be to introduce automated recognition algorithms so that a computer can reliably tag the content. Some of these algorithms are approaching usefulness, such as object recognition in photographs. Facebook is even using face recognition to automatically tag photographs of its users these days. However, this is by no means the full solution to automatic tagging. We are a very long way from getting a computer to automatically detect and tag a location of a photograph, for example (although some cameras can tag the location at the time the photograph is taken thanks to GPS technology).

Advances in search technology are an important part of content discovery, but cannot address two fundamental issues. The first can be described by, to coin a phrase, searcher’s block. Similar to writer’s block, a phenomenon created by the human conscious whereby creative thinking is inhibited and the sufferer cannot conceive fresh ideas of what to write, or in the case of searcher’s block, what to search for. This limits the breadth of interesting or relevant content able to be discovered simply by not thinking to search for it.

The second issue is that the search space is limited to topics, subjects, concepts and ideas that are already known to the searcher. How can one search for a new genre of music when it hasn’t even got a name yet? Certainly not by tags.

Social media is having a huge impact on new content discovery. From Twitter to Facebook to turntable.fm (one of my current favorites), the idea of being able to receive recommendations from people who have similar tastes and interests to you is a very powerful one, and helps new concepts and content spread quickly.

Also, by opening up content to developers through the use of interfaces known as APIs (Application Programmers Interface), new possibilities are introduced for content discovery. For example, Flickr publishes, via APIs, lists of photos determined to be ‘interesting’. Although Flickr does not publish exactly how it determines a picture to be interesting, it does tell us that the social effect is central. It looks at how many times a picture is viewed, shared, commented on, liked, etc by its millions of users, essentially ‘crowdsourcing’ an opinion on how interesting a photograph is deemed to be.

This is an interesting idea, and one which inspired the creation of the Scatterpic iPhone app. Scatterpic integrates with Flickr to present its players with an endless supply of genuinely interesting images with which to play games. With future releases, we plan to augment this functionality by presenting players with even more relevant content based on personal preference.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the Scatterpic iPhone app Flickr integration. We trust you will discover many beautiful, breathtaking, and thought-provoking images selected by the world’s biggest collection of photography critics – Flickr users themselves.

Would you like to suggest new ways for Scatterpic to present you with content? We’d love to hear from you! Please use the comment feature below or contact us via our forum.

Well, there are a number of options open for iPhone app promotion. A popular choice seems to be advertising on websites that review apps. Other people go for spamming forums and blogs. Then, there’s a good old Google AdWords campaign. Each has their pros and cons, but our initial research shows that the cost of advertising would far outstrip the expected resulting direct sales. That’s probably because Scatterpic is such good value for money at just 99 cents!

Anyway, I digress. It doesn’t matter that we will loose money on a launch campaign. The important thing is to get the word out, and then let it spread. For example, if a few of you see the ad and purchase the app, hopefully you will do at least some of the following:

• Tell your friends about Scatterpic – they will then buy it too
• Blog about us or link to our website – increasing awareness and traffic to the website
• Write a review on iTunes – others will be given the confidence to buy, and Scatterpic will rush up the charts in iTunes and the App Store!

Thankyou for visiting our site. Scatterpic is a new app for the iPhone and iPad that will keep you entertained for hours. If you enjoy photography or just looking at beautiful and intriguing images on your iPhone, look no further.

Scatterpic is a game suitable for everybody. Deceptively simple in concept, the game is based around a jigsaw puzzle with identical square pieces arranged in a grid. You will be presented with a jumbled grid, all you have to do is complete the puzzle before the time runs out!

But wait: that’s not really the point. Scatterpic is fully and seamlessly integrated with Flickr. Scatterpic’s special algorithm finds and uses the most interesting photographs on Flickr, and turns them into a puzzle for you!

That means that every single day dozens of the web’s best photographs are seamlessly integrated into your game of Scatterpic. What a fantastic way to see some of the newest and greatest photography from all around the world!

As an added twist, you may also choose to use images from your iPhone’s own photo album in your games of Scatterpic. Turn your favorite photos into a puzzle in an instant, thanks to Scatterpic!