I’m very pleased to announce that after months of hard work, and 3 almost sleepless nights over the weekend, Picturesque 2.0 has been released.

Picturesque 2.0 features an entirely new interface, has been totally rewritten for Leopard, and includes our 3 most requested features: cropping, presets and my personal favourite, the 3D rotation effect.

Lifetime license owners will receive their free upgrade by email today, as well as anyone else who purchased Picturesque in the last 6 weeks. Other users can upgrade for $12.95.

Welcome to the Acqualia Software Blog. Sorry for the lack of posts over the last couple months, we’ve been very busy. Over the last couple months, we have managed to accomplish a lot. As you can see, we now have a shiny new blog for all of our users to enjoy. Zac and Nik are both back from MacWorld now. They exhibited and heard a ton great feedback from Picturesque users, and they both had a ton of fun.




They also had the chance to meat up with the MacHeist Team over some sushi and talk tech (Photo by Austin Sarner, via Flickr).





We have also worked with Sebastiaan de With of http://cocoia.com/ on a new icon for Picturesque. Thanks for the great work Sebastiaan, we really enjoyed working with you on this beautiful creation.

We have also been working a lot on Picturesque 2.0, we can’t say much yet, but it’s going to be great. In the mean time, we have been advertising Picturesque quite a bit. Thanks to Dustin Schau for the great work with the advertisements that you may see around the internet. We are trying very hard spread the word about Picturesque, but if you wouldn’t mind, it would be great if you all could do your best to help us out.




We also wanted to show off our new site design, which was completed before MacWorld, with the help of Tom Stoelwinder! The Picturesque store has also been totally overhauled, now with javascript goodness, which should make purchasing Picturesque much nicer.

Thanks for your support!

The Acqualia Team

Like everyone else I use NetNewsWire, Transmit, Adium etc, but there are also a stacks of less well known indie apps out there that do what they do brilliantly, and don’t get enough recognition for their greatness.

Here are 5 of them:

MacJournal:



My favourite 3rd party application of all time. Hands down. I’m using it right now to write this. No other journaling, text-snippet managing, or GTD app has come close to tearing me away from my beloved MacJournal. Checkboxes integrated into text editing is simply an awesome idea.

TranslateIT:



Couldn’t live without it. If you are learning a foreign language (in my case Russian) TranslateIt is just invaluable. It’s just like Apple’s dictionary except for the language of your choice, and it also includes a cool scanning mode just like Apple’s mini-dictionary window for looking up words quickly on the web.

Typeset:



Apple’s Fontbook should be like this app. When I saw it, I gasped. Brilliantly designed and super useful for finding the right font for your project.

Physics 101:



I love physics and for anyone studying it or using physics related formula in school or day-to-day life, you can’t go past Physics 101.

PhotoPresenter:



Terrific app for making slideshows. Some of the effects this guy has created in Quartz Composer are just stunning.

In our rush to get 1.0 of Picturesque out before the close of the Apple Design Awards, we didn’t give the image resizing features the love and attention they deserved.

As a result, our current implementation of resizing is less than great, and images loose a lot of their quality when scaled down in Picturesque.

Resizing isn’t technically beautification, but it is one of those day-to-day tasks that people do a lot and neither Preview or iPhoto do it well. In the past I’ve used Photoshop for most of my image resizing, which seems like overkill for such a simple task.

So one of the most frequent requests we receive is for better resizing in Picturesque and we’ve been working on integrating a new resizing algorithm into the app, which will be part of the next update.

Here are some samples of the old resizing algorithm quality verses the new resizing algorithm quality:



As you can see the improvement is pretty dramatic:



Expect the update in the next week or two, and keep your improvement suggestions coming.

-Zac

I’m ecstatic to announce that Picturesque has won an Apple Design Award in the student category. Nik Youdale and I are at WWDC in San Francisco at the moment, and last night we were called up onto the Moscone stage to receive one of Johnny Ive’s gorgeous glowing cubes.

This is a dream come true for us, it’s just totally awesome and we’re over the moon.

We only learnt Cocoa last year and this year we get to go back to Australia with a design award.

We’d like to give a big thanks to the AUC for sponsoring our trip to WWDC, and thank you to everyone who has downloaded Picturesque and given us feedback.

I’m very pleased to announce we have a new application in the works. It’s called ‘Picturesque’ and it’s our most “delicious” app to date, with a very simple “drag and drop” style metal UI, a few animations, and a sleek black inspector.

The word “Picturesque” literally means visually attractive, and the point of the app is to beautify images (in batch too).

Inspired by Apple’s use of gorgeous images on their website, we’re kicking off with 6 tasteful effects in 1.0: Reflections, Shadows, Glows, Strokes, Curves, and Fades.

Here are some examples of images beautified with PQ (Picturesque acronym) and you can see a quick movie of PQ in action here.

What is Qualia?

Welcome to the Acqualia blog! I’m going to kick off by explaining what “qualia” actually means because I keep getting asked.

The cool thing about the universe and how we as minds relate to it is that each of us experiences things in the world in a totally unique way.

For instance, both you and I could eat two parts of the same chocolate bar, and yet the experience of tasting the chocolate will be subtlety for both of us.

I can never really know exactly how you feel about chocolate. You could try explaining it to me, but words will never convey the richness of the experience itself.

This is called the “qualia” of the chocolate, I have my own qualia of the chocolate which is completely unique, and will never be exactly the same as your qualia of the chocolate.
Everything that we can relate to has a qualia, an early morning sunrise, a piece of jazz music, the smell of baking muffins.

Each of these will be experienced by each of us differently. So what does this hae to do with software developing? Not much. I’ll post something on our upcoming application “Picturesque” next time.