Between this site and my illustration blog theCarryAll, I often find myself creating posts on my iPhone during the down moments of a day: during a long car trip; on a lunch break; in waiting rooms or check-out lines. Because of that, I’ve developed a workflow that makes use of a range of iOS apps; some of them are workhorses that do many things well, while others are narrowly focused apps that excel in one or two areas. Here are a few of them.

Snapseed:
My everyday, go-to editing app. Absolutely amazing in both how much it does (color correction, crops, sharpening, center-focus, tilt-shift, filters, etc) and in how well it does it. Nearly every image on both my sites has passed through Snapseed at some point.

Photoforge2/Photogene2:
More complicated than Snapseed, I use these not for everyday edits, but for when I need something like Layer and Masks support (Photoforge2) or a Clone Stamp (Photogene2). I also use Photoforge2 for its Curves support—great for tweaking color images with fine control. Probably more complicated than most users want.

Phonto:
The only app you’ll need for text-on-photos. Add as much as you’d like, import your own fonts (a must for anyone with any interest in typography—no app will have it all), style your text, adjust kerning and line spacing, opacity, and more.

Screenshot: A bit of a specialty app, but one I use often when reviewing apps on my site. Both of these use your own screenshots and place them in an image frame for a device of your choosing.

Diptic:
Create photo sets of multiple images, using over 50 different adjustable layouts. Change border color and width, corner radius, etc. Great for side-by-side photo comparisons as well as more artistic collections. Often used in conjunction with Screenshot (see above) to produce the device images on jackjohnbrown.com

ToonPaint:
Create black-and-white line drawings from your photos (color can be painted back in later if desired). Great controls for adjusting line width, black/white/grey ratios, etc. Much more refined than most “cartoon-ify” apps.

Censor Pro: A pixelation app, Censor Pro was designed primarily as a tool for obscuring private information in photos, but I use it mostly to create abstracted versions of famous paintings. (A special thanks to Censor Pro developer Kevin Lawson for inspiring this post; a recent update to his app added a feature that arose from our correspondence, the new functionality made me realize how much I rely on mobile apps for my everyday creative duties.)

Superimpose: Similar to Photoforge2’s Layers/Masks options but easier to use in many situations. Most often I use it to isolate an image, delete the surrounding background, and place the remaining image on a new background. Many of the album covers at theCarryAll were done primarily with Superimpose before being further edited with the apps above.

And last but not least, Tumblita makes it easy to post it all up to Tumblr, where I host my sites. Support for multiple accounts and some extra features still missing from the official app make Tumblita a great app for anyone who needs a serious on-the-go solution to managing multiple Tumblrs.

Now available in Cydia, LS Frost is an iPhone 5 friendly port of an old favorite. My version resizes the original theme, but also adds a new twist: the secondary notification stack has been relocated to the top of the display so it doesn’t overlap the central display.

It’s out now in the ModMyi repo. For installation tips, have a look at the FAQ here. 

TypoClockClear combines a clean, stylish, typographic lockscreen clock with transparent lock screen alerts and relocated secondary notifications. By moving the secondary notification stack to the top of the lockscreen, incoming alerts will not block the lock screen clock.

Installation notes:

-This theme provides for transparent popup alerts; for transparent secondary notifications, you must also install NoLockNotificationsBG in Cydia.
-To hide your default lock screen clock, use Lockscreen Clock Hide. Using the “Hide Top Bar” feature in Springtomize 2 breaks this theme.
-This theme was built as an experiment using the official App Store app ClockBuilder by Gustavo Tandeciarz. Learn more here.
-Version 1.1 to include an alternate slider theme.
-iPhone 5 only.

Available now on the ModMyi repo!

For a long time, I avoided publishing my iPhone themes to Cydia—it always just seemed easier to build and use them myself. But lately they’ve been making the rounds in the jailbreak sections of reddit and iMore, and with that comes support questions. Rather than try to keep up with a bunch of different sites, I figured the time had come to let them loose into the world; publishing them to Cydia gives users a central place to reach out for support, if needed.

So over the past week or so I’ve released four themes on the ModMyi repo: ClearNotifications, ClearHighNotifications, ClearLowNotifications, and LS Nimbus Wide. Give them a look if you’re looking to change up your iPhone lock screen.

Designed specifically for use with the RisingBars lock screen theme, ClearLowNotifications (a variation on my earlier ClearHighNotifications) pushes Apple’s native alert sliders to the area below RisingBars’ lock screen elements. It includes a transparent background for the first alert (pictured here at right); for transparent secondary alerts, be sure to install NoLockNotificationsBG in Cydia.

Get it here and enable in WinterBoard.