QuickAdvice: Browse And Annotate Inspiration On Your iPad With Superstash
Superstash ($3.99) by Suburban Industries, Inc. is a browser app for your iPad that helps you take screenshots and annotate them for inspiration or notes.
Do you get inspired from the stuff you see on the Internet as you surf around? Browsing has never been as a pleasant experience as it is on the iPad. But with mobile Safari or other browser apps, how do you take screenshots and make notes on them without utilizing another app? With Superstash, you don't have to worry about that any more.
Superstash is a browser application for your iPad that provides a beautiful and slick interface and also has a few nifty features that make it a great tool for those that do design work or just need to annotate stuff they come across.
To use Superstash, use it like any other browser. You can go to your favorite sites, read the news, go on Facebook, and all that good stuff. But to make some real use out of Superstash, you probably want to find some inspirational stuff, right? The lightning bolt icon on the menubar will take you to a page from the developers that list several inspirational sites, including dribbble, the Beautiful Pixels blog, and others. If you get on a site you like and want to come back to, good news! You can add a bookmark to it for future reference.
Once you find something you want to make a note of, there are two buttons to the right of the address bar. One is to take a full screen capture and the other is for a cropped capture. For the crop capture, the screen goes dim with a lit up square that you can resize and drag around to your preferred selection.
When you get your full screen or cropped capture, you can use the pen to draw on the capture to make a note of something. There's a color changer for the pen, just in case you don't want bright red marks over your annotations all the time.
In addition to the pen tool, there is a Text tool to type out your note about whatever it is you need to make a note of. When the tool is selected, just tap anywhere to bring up the text box. Type your note, then hide the keyboard. You can then resize the box by dragging the corners out and move it around to your annotation.
If you want to change the text font and size, tap once on the text box. This will bring up a popup with these two options. Tapping on the text box once will bring the keyboard back up.
Like other drawing apps, there is an eraser tool for those mistakes and even a clear button. I hope that an undo/redo button will be added in the future as well.
Once you have your capture, you have the choices of saving or emailing them. When you save them, you can add Name, Rating (out of five stars), Notes (in case you need more description), Tags, and save it in a Folder in Superstash.
Unfortunately, these captures don't get saved to your iPad's Photo Library, which I initially thought it would. These get saved in Superstash itself, which you can view in the Folders screen, accessed by the button that looks like a bulleted list next to Crop Capture.
You can view all your folders, captures and information about each individual capture here, with the option for a full-screen viewing mode. You can edit, email, or delete any captures from the Folders view, which is pretty nice. Lots of captures? You can search for something too. When emailing a capture, it will be inserted as an image into an email, like all other apps.
For a 1.0 app, I found Superstash to be very well designed and polished, and provides a very sleek way to browse the web and take notes at the same time. I just would like to see support to save captures into the iPad photo library. For the introductory price of $4, I think Superstash should be something that everyone, from the casual net surfer to the media folk, should download.
