The DC storefront in ComiXology's Comics app for iPad.

DC Comics recently began selling digital versions of its new comics on the same day that print editions show up in local comic book shops. It’s a move that coincides with, and helps promote their “New 52,” a complete re-launch of all of their monthly titles beginning at issue #1, but its effects are already being felt beyond even just its own stable of properties.

Beating out books

Last week, three of the top five most popular iPad apps in the Books category were comics apps. Comics by ComiXology came in second overall to Al Gore’s Our Choice, followed by the official Marvel and DC apps at numbers three and four respectively. Note that ComiXology’s tech powers both the Marvel and DC apps, and its own app offers titles from both publishers, as well as a number of others including IDW and Image comics.

But the successes for digital comics on the iPad don’t end there. Comics by ComiXology also became the second highest grossing iPad app — all categories included — as of Wednesday night this week (it’s still at number three at the time of writing). ComiXology CEO David Steinberger directly attributes part of the reason behind his app’s good fortune to DC’s decision to go digital:

[W]hen you look at our success as one of the top grossing iPad Apps and then take in the news about DC Comics going back to print on almost all of The New 52 comics, you can see that digital distribution is growing both the print and digital comic book market. DC’s daring move going digital the same day as print with all their print publications this month in combination with the great buying and reading experience our App provides is a tide that lifts all boats.

A page from Grant Morrison's Action Comics #1, part of DC's "New 52."

It sure does look like the changed approach to digital comics is lifting all boats. Consider that Marvel beat DC itself in terms of gross last week and continues to ride high at number 18 overall among iPad apps, despite having yet to offer its own blanket approach to same-day digital. It is headed in the right direction, however, as it announced in July at San Diego Comic-Con 2011 that it would be rolling out simultaneous digital and print releases gradually for all X-Men and Spider-Man titles. Image is likewise testing same-day releases through ComiXology with at least a few titles.

Same-day digital definitely delivers

Same-day digital appears to be the magic ingredient that was missing from the iPad comic mix. If you’ve ever tried reading comics on the iPad, you know that it’s an almost-perfect delivery method. The screen size and resolution are both good enough that you should be able to view full single-page layouts without zooming or squinting, you can carry an entire library on a single device, and you don’t have to worry about dog-earing the corners. Seriously, though, for all but devoted collectors, it’s a nearly ideal alternative to paper, and digital editions are also often cheaper.

One drawback to digital is load times, but you can view content as it downloads, one-page at a time.

Regardless of what you think of DC’s decision to relaunch its entire line (I’m not that impressed by what I’ve seen so far, with the exception of Grant Morrison’s Action Comics #1), you can’t deny that the bold decision to make everything available digitally on the same day will help push the industry forward. Marvel will likely have to speed up its rollout of day and date iPad releases now that DC is seeing big dividends in terms of gross revenue, and partners like ComiXology will be pushing them to follow suit, because, again, doing so would “lift all boats.”

One more key ingredient missing

There’s still one piece missing for digital delivery, however, and I wrote about it back in May: subscriptions. Comics should be leaving behind the idea that they can still become valuable collector’s items, and same-day digital is one step towards that. But making titles available digitally on a subscription basis is the next, and possible the more important step.

If I could buy an Uncanny X-Men auto-renewing subscription through my iPad, I’d probably never turn it off, whereas I’ll only pick up a print or digital copy maybe three or four times a year these days, at best. An automatic digital pull list of an iPad owner’s favorite titles is bound to be a hit with fans who enjoy comics for the sake of their content, and not for what they might be worth on eBay in 20 years time (hint: it’s nothing).

DC is already talking about introducing value-add elements to digital comics, sort of like DVD special features, but if Netflix has taught us anything, it’s that the only special feature most media consumers care about is reasonable subscription-pricing that delivers just the good stuff. An all you can eat publisher-wide subscription for digital comics would be amazing, but I’d settle for per-issue monthly or yearly pricing. Let’s hope comics don’t take as long to warm up to that idea as they did to same-day digital.

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You get a new Mac and even though you know you should, you don’t want to start over from scratch and reload the whole system. To make matters worse, you have Boot Camp installed and really don’t want to start over on the Windows side. So, here’s how you can image both OS’s to a new machine using free tools.

You need to download the Carbon Copy Cloner and Winclone software packages. CCC was created by Mike Bombich and has been used for years to clone Mac machines. It is the standard tool for this job. Winclone is made by Twocanoes Software and this is what we will use to image the Windows Boot Camp partition.

Let’s Get Started

Lets start off with Winclone first. After you install the app and run it for the first time, it will tell you it needs to download and install NTFSProgs. Click the download button and install NTFSProgs by following the wizard. The NTFSProgs software allows Winclone to properly read NTFS formatted partitions.

Now run Winclone again and select your Boot Camp partition in the Source dropdown. You can write some notes in the Item Description field if you’d like. When you’re ready, click the Image… button.

It will prompt you for a name and location to save the image to.

Now we wait for Winclone to do its work. When it’s completed, this dialog box will appear. You can now quit Winclone.

Carbon Copy Cloner is a little different in that it can image from your old machine to your new one using a Firewire or network connection. For this tutorial we’ll use the Firewire method. Setup your new machine and connect a Firewire cable between the two Macs. On the new Mac, hit the power button and hold down the “T” key on the keyboard until you see the Firewire symbol on the screen. This boots it into Target Disk Mode where it will act as if it’s just an external Firewire hard drive. On your old Mac we need to launch Carbon Copy Cloner. Your Source Disk drive is your local drive and the Target Disk is the Firewire drive. Click the Clone button and off we go.

After CCC is finished, reboot the new Mac and it should be identical to the original. From here on out, we are done with the old machine. When we imaged the Mac partition, we also brought along the Winclone image with it so now we can restore that image on our new Mac. Launch the Boot Camp Assistant in the utilities folder to create a new Windows partition.

Launch Winclone and click on the Restore tab. Click the Select Image button and browse to your Windows image. Mine was in the Documents folder.

Restore it to your newly created Boot Camp partition.

You know have a new Mac that’s a complete clone of your old one, Boot Camp and all. Windows will probably complain, as it always does, about drivers. Just insert your OS X DVD while in Windows and let it re-install the Boot Camp drivers for you. Of course, starting over from scratch is cleaner but sometimes you just don’t have the time. Proper cloning offers a reasonably quick solution.

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The seven apps are all new to me, but they seem to have garnered favorable reviews and even some official accolades from Apple itself. They also cover quite a range, meaning that no two really duplicate the functions or features of the others. Here’s a brief rundown of the apps you get in the bundle.

• GraphicConverter – Does what it says. You can open basically any image file, and then save it as another. You can also do some light editing, organize your photos, run a slide show, and automate your image processing to make working with large batches of files easier.
• Picturesque – Provides a lot of easy, 1-click or simplified image enhancement abilities. Great for those who don’t have the patience or time to learn more advanced programs like Photoshop, or who want really quick turnaround times for time sensitive activities like blogging.
• ImageFramer – Add frames to your pictures. A little weird, in my opinion, but if you’re looking for something different for your photos, this could be it.
• Funtastic Photos – Photo correction and enhancement which automatically preserves your original. Also packs a number of sharing features, and a rich print layout system.
• Graphic Designer Toolbox – Combine building blocks to create crazy new graphic effects and images. You use the unique interface to marry various elements together in a non-destructive process that is both deceptively simple and incredibly deep. Weird but cool.
• DrawIt – A vector image editor and drawing app. Tons of shapes are included in the default set, and there’s support for user-created ones, too. A nice little app that will have you creating Mac-friendly icons and more with relative ease.
• HoudahGeo – Add geolocation data to your photos. HoudahGeo lets you specify information like latitude, longitude, altitude and viewing angle in an image file’s EXIF, XMP or IPTC tags.

All of the apps included in MacGraPhoto have apparently been Apple Staff Picks except for Graphic Designer Toolbox, which won a Think Different award for graphic image editors. At the very least, you’ll probably shave a few steps off of your current process for doing light image editing by picking up the bundle. Plus, if you tell three people about the deal and they buy the pack as a result, the price of your purchase is refunded and you get it free. The bundle pricing expires in a little over five days.

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Movies, created by French developer, Olivier Bernal, went live at the App Store on December 19. The app, retailing at $2.99, allows users to grab essential information on the latest box-office releases.

The icon for Movies clearly features a watermark from iStockphoto, a royalty free image library, implying that rather than purchase the master image, Bernal has pilfered the preview sample.

This particular iStockphoto license (including the ‘Electronic Items for Resale’ addendum) is available for 115 credits. At 95 cents per iStockphoto credit, this would be a one-off cost of $109.25. Bernal would therefore need to generate only 37 sales of Movies to cover the cost of the image license.

Achieving just 37 sales is hardly a difficult objective when you also consider that, in order to maximize the potential customer-base for his app, Bernal has created several iterations using the same icon, including Cinema and Cinema UK.

It seems that this may not be the first time Bernal has pilfered from iStockphoto. There are two more highly suspect app icons – TV Shows and Week Number of the Year. The TV Shows icon features a white diagonal line, quite possibly from an iStock Photo watermark. The latter of the pair, clearly uses an iStock Photo sample, titled Calendar – icon idea.

It’s not as immediately obvious as our prime suspect, but enlarging the app icon and then comparing it to the iStockphoto sample image, the original watermark is easily visible.

Sites such as iStockphoto provide a valuable service to organizations with limited design resources, allowing independent creatives to distribute royalty-free visual assets at reasonable rates. It’s therefore somewhat disappointing to see independent developers effectively stealing — surely they should understand the value of content generated by fellow independents?

Furthermore, setting aside development time and cost, distributing via the App Store is hardly prohibitive in terms of initial outlay: Apple charges a one-off fee to developers of $99. It seems that either saving a few bucks or just downright laziness on Bernal’s part led him to grab the sample imagery from iStockphoto.

The question is, now that Bernal has been called out on his immoral icon antics, what will his next move be? It’ll be most interesting to see how he handles the designers whose creations he has illicitly profited from; ideally, after a hasty apology, Bernal will be compensating them for their contribution to his App Store products.

Note that we’ve tried to reach Bernal for comment on the story but have yet to hear back. We assume he was too busy shoveling a mountain of coal from his stocking, stealing bonbons from children and kicking puppies.

UPDATE: We heard back from Mr. Bernal:

For [your] information, I bought the right to use the pictures this morning. You were right, at the beginning I first started with nothing and can’t afford to pay for the pictures, it’s perfectly normal to pay if I intend to continue to use it.

He says the updated, non-watermarked icons will be implemented with the next updates to the applications sometime in January.

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Global Delight has recently announced their release of a public beta for Viola, an image capture and annotating tool for Mac.

Voila features the ability to capture a region from the screen in a variety of different shapes as well as take a full screen, timed or menu capture — significantly broader functionality than that built into OS X by default. After taking a screen capture, Voila includes annotating tools (text, arrows, callouts, sprays, stamps etc) to make editing simple and, after you’ve completed your annotation, a variety of different export options are present.

When installed for the first time, the application asks whether you’d like to use it as the default system screen capture utility, making it easy for new users to switch.

The software has a whole range of different annotation facilities, such as:

• Arrows: Rounded, straight and double ended
• Line: Curved, dotted, bracketed and zig-zag
• Shape: All manner of squares, circles and squiggles
• Brush / Spray: For freehand drawing
• Callouts: A particularly versatile range of shapes and styles
• Stamps: Novelty stamps, such as ‘OK’, ‘Approved’ and ‘Denied’

Mr. Rohith Bhat, CEO of Global Delight, notes that “currently, the Mac platform offers a few image capture tools, none of which have the capability to have multiple capture options along with a good blend of annotation tools. This makes Voila very unique and different from the rest of the tools out in the market.” While competition was indeed scarce a few weeks ago, Voila has been released at a very similar time to Little Snapper – a competing screen capture and annotation utility. It will be interesting to see how competition in this software area develops, as demand certainly exists for a more full-featured screen capture utility.

Voila is a great tool for those being required to create screenshots for the web, with a comprehensive range of export formats available: PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PDF, GIF and BMP. Captures can also be exported directly into an email, or sent to iPhoto for further customization.

However, the software is not without limitations (although none which seriously hinder the usefulness of the app). It isn’t possible at this stage to capture more than one monitor at a time, and the software is lacking slightly in explaining how to use the annotation tools. It’s easy to be confused as to whether a single or double click is required at times.

The beta version of Voila is available for immediate download and is free at present. Pricing information will be released when the app comes out of beta. It runs on Mac OS X 10.5.2 or later, and supports any Intel-based Mac running 1.25Ghz and above. iPhoto v6.0.1 or later is required for exporting captured or annotated images.

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For years, FTP applications have been a genre of software that has overrun itself with options. Generally I believe competition to be a good thing but there really just comes a point where another FTP application in the mix really doesn’t help anybody. As of right now I’ve counted over 100 different FTP applications available to the Mac. Seriously…why?

Today Gruber posted a quick link to a new image editor supposedly making it’s way to the Mac in the coming months. Just yesterday Acorn was announced and just a few weeks ago the highly anticipated Pixelmator was released in to private beta. For the mathematically challenged, that is three new image editors that have come on to the scene in the past month or so and that doesn’t even include all the other image editors that have been around for ages.

I think what really turns me off about all of this is that all of these image editors do, more or less, the same thing. Sure, they each have a different UI and will each perform tasks a tad different than the other but for the most part they all just edit images.

Do all of these developers really believe they are bringing something new and beneficial to the table? Or is it simply a case of jumping on the bandwagon?

Again, like I said, I believe competition and choice are a good thing. But at what point does it actually start hurting the community by flooding the market with sub-par applications?

UPDATE: Let me make something clear. I’m not saying people should never develop for the Mac after there is already an industry standard for an app. This post is merely for conversational purposes as all these new apps started my wheels turning on the subject. Of course I don’t think apps like TextMate or SubThaEdit should have never been written. I’m just curious if there is a point where enough is enough. If not…fantastic. But I do think it’s an interesting point of conversation.

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