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Shift provides people with complex workflows requiring many apps a platform to combine them all. In this video Darcy showcases how to add accounts from Slack, Dropbox, Airtable and more into a streamlined interface, allowing you to increase ease of access between them and a more focused environment for your projects. Shift is a great way to declutter your desktop of windows by bundling them all together into one, with dozens of apps available to integrate. You also learn how to add extensions within Shift.

Retrobatch, from the creator of the well-known image editor Acorn, is a highly capable image manipulation tool that uses drag-and-drop nodes to build workflows. In this tutorial, Allison starts by making a very simple workflow that adds a border to a group of images very quickly, then walks through the interface using this as an example. You then go through a more complicated example with Allison of how Rules and JavaScript (part of the Pro version of the app) helped her solve a real-life problem. You will surely think of multiple ways Retrobatch can assist you in processing your images.

Midjourney is another AI-powered service that allows you to create a huge range of stunning images, including photo realistic landscapes, people, cartoons, sketches, logos and more. It's fairly simple to operate, but not as straightforward to get started. So, in this tip, Don walks you through the entire process of creating your Discord and Midjourney accounts, along with generating your first images.

With the recent updates across its operating systems, Apple have finally released Freeform, a new way to collaborate and brainstorm ideas on all devices. Don takes you through the basic concepts of adding and organising the various objects available on your Freeform board.

TouchRetouch is an iOS and Mac app that is designed to help you remove unwanted objects from your photos. With a touch-first interface, it is trivially easy to remove things like power lines, smudges, and even fences forming a mesh. In this video, Allison shows you how the app works, mainly on iPad, but also on iPhone and the Mac. TouchRetouch is an amazingly capable app and worth well more than its $4.00 price tag!

Xnapper (pronounced "snapper") is a new utility for grabbing free-form selections and full window screenshots on macOS (with an iOS version coming soon). Having recently come out of beta release—and now a part of the Setapp collection—Xnapper has some useful features which make it stand out from its competitors, such as the ability to locate screen captures' version history as well as exporting for a variety of specific social media formats. Lee shows you all of it in his screencast.

If you find yourself having to teach friends, family, or co-workers how to perform functions on their computer, you know how powerful sending screenshots can be. We have a lot of options for taking and annotating those, but when you need multiple screenshots to explain a longer process, a specialized tool might be in order. In this tutorial Allison shows you a dedicated program on the Mac (and PC) called Folge. You learn how to create guides using screenshots and an exhaustive collection of tools to enhance your instructions. Once your guide is complete, Allison shows you the different export formats, including her favorite, Rich HTML.

In the second part of this series, Lee continues his walkthrough of OmniGraffle on the Mac. Where the first video looked at the basics of the interface and populating the canvas with objects, Part 2 introduces topics like Object Stacks, Layers, using Stencils, as well as exporting your finished product.

OmniGraffle is a diagramming and visualizing application from the Omni Group that is used by web designers, architects and project managers the world over. It's a feature-rich application with a fairly steep learning curve.

In the first of this two-part series, Lee breaks down the interface into four distinct sections to make it easier to understand. You also learn about objects, how to get them on the canvas, and how to format them so they look just right.

Despite having used Acorn for many years, this is the first time Don has covered it on ScreenCastsOnline. Acorn is a powerhouse of an image editor but is also capable of doing some simple, basic functions, which is how he tends to use it.

In this episode, Don takes a look at some of the basic features of Acorn 7 and how he uses it for some typical image editing tasks.

In this tip show, Rosemary shows you how Annotable, a flexible annotation and markup utility for iOS. It offers a variety of useful tools, from a simple crop to a flexible loupe, as well as the ability to obscure parts of your image with blurring or pixelation.

Logoist 4 is a vector design program that helps you create unique art for logos, business cards, and more. In this project-based tutorial, Allison Sheridan shows how she used the software to create the cover for the Taming the Terminal book, available in Apple's Books Store. She explains how the templates in Logoist 4 give inspiration and walk you through the vast array of modification options available that allow the user to customize their design.

This week, Allison dives deep into screenshots and the Markup tools on iOS and iPadOS.

After going over the various ways to take screenshots on iOS devices, you learn how to annotate them together using the various tools Markup has available. Allison also shows you how to take screenshots of long-form content, like webpages or Keynote documents, and save them as PDFs.

draw.io is a fantastic diagramming app that runs either through your web browser or as a standalone desktop app. It's cross-platform and easy to use, but with a lot of depth. It also has great resources to get help. On top of all this, it's free and open source. The developers have their own enterprise business model incorporating draw.io, so they don't sell or store your data.

This week, Allison is your guide on a draw.io expedition, where you learn how you can use this app for various types of diagrams. She also shares a few real-world examples of her own.

Update: August 2023 - Vectornator Pro has been rebranded as Linearity Curve.

Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer are the big names in vector design programs. These are highly capable, but highly complex programs. Affinity Designer for iPad just came out and it's also highly capable but with a steep learning curve. If you want to learn to design with vectors, or you only need to make simple designs, these programs can be overkill.

The free Vectornator Pro for iOS might be just what you need. While an Apple Pencil with an iPad Pro is a fantastic way to create artwork with Vectornator Pro, it also works well on the small screens of the iPhone.

Don't be fooled into thinking Vectornator Pro can't be used for more advanced design. Allison demonstrates Bezier curves, gradients, layers, and more. Vectornator Pro even integrates with Adobe's Creative Cloud and has built-in assets for building artwork for mobile applications. And did we mention that it's free?

This week I take a look at two stunning iOS Apps: Linea and Plotagraph+ Photo Animator

Linea is a simple but powerful sketching package for the iPad. There's no need to learn lots of controls or gestures; just fire it up and start sketching. I also show you Linea Link for the Mac, a companion app that gives you access to your iPad sketches on your Mac and export them in different formats or handoff to more complex apps.

Plotagraph+ Photo Animator is a unique application for the iPad and iPhone that allows you to animate static images. Create amazing effects and add life and dimension to your still photos. You can animate any image in seconds to produce some really spectacular results. Once animated, Plotagraph+ allows you to export your masterpiece in up to 8 different formats.

Although both apps are optimised for use with the Apple Pencil on the iPad, your can use both apps with touch only.