Maybe you’re a budding musician working at a nightclub and don’t know what to do with all the misplaced iPhones left behind. Or maybe you’re just brilliant and a wee bit inebriated.
Either way, we figure this is how you might be spending your time (uh, just don’t forget to activate “Airplane Mode” on ALL the phones). And unlike other hey,-watch-me-turn-a-phone-into-a-musical-instrument performances, this one doesn’t seem quite so much like a peek into Bizarro World.
Next up: Chef Ramsey hosts a Hell’s Kitchen episode where the only cooking utensils are iPhones.
“You know, if you saute scallops on a non-stick iPhone screen, they won’t stick. That’s why it’s called fucking non-stiiiiiiiick!”
There’s nothing better than gazing up at the stars on a night out. For $3, Pocket Universe: Virtual Sky Astronomy, using sorta-augmented reality, lets the astronomically impaired among us impress our dates.
This is what you’re about to ask: Is Star Wars: Trench Run so good that it’ll have you wondering how magically your iPhone becomes an X-wing fighter? Answer: No. It’s better — it’s actually so good, you’ll be trying to figure out why your X-wing looks suspiciously like an iPhone.
By this time next week, millions of American’s mouths will be watering in anticipation of turkey, stuffing and cranberry sau…oh, heck with that. What’ll really get the salivation going is anticipation of Black Friday.
So don the battle armor, lace up and get ready for the most brutal shopping day of the year. Oh, and you’ll probably want to arm yourself with the following pair of razor-sharp iPhone shopping apps.
Black Friday Wish 1.0 lets you create a shopping list, then receive details downloaded to your iPhone/iPod Touch on the best deals that the app’s human-powered research team has found for the items on your list.
Then Mall Maps will guide you to all the dazzling bargains through its mall database, listing of what stores are in each mall, mall floor plans and use of the iPhone’s GPS to tell you what malls are nearby if you suddenly find yourself mall-less.
Black Friday is a buck, Mall Maps is $3. Probably no Black Friday deals on these two, though.
By now you’ve probably seen the viral clip for the Nude It app originally posted at whoisthebaldguy.com (if you haven’t, brush off that cave dust and watch it now).
The clip shows a mind-blowing iPhone app being used that employs augmented reality to de-clothe unwitting victims being viewed through the iPhone’s camera. Seems like great idea, judging by the 650,000-plus hits the clip has garnered in the five weeks it’s been up on YouTube.
Cult of Mac spoke briefly with the the clip’s creator, Michael Krivicka, a video editor living in NYC.
This probably won't happen at the contest, but who knows. Photo: Donato Accogli/flickr
They’re calling it the first “iPhone reality show,” and it was likely inevitable; with TV saturated by the likes of The Apprentice and Biggest Loser, the genre of reality show had to find a new home somewhere.
So for one week, from December 6-12, Italian-based Command Guru will stream all the shenanigans that result when a bunch of iPhone app developers stop being polite and start getting real.
Contestants will assemble from all over the world with the goal of developing a free, open source social-networking iPhone app, from idea to final product at the iTunes App Store. The contest will also let developers from around the world can chime in at any time to help, which should prove interesting.
More pre-contest excitement can be found on the contest’s Twitter feed, where Command Guru says it’s giving away one iPhone 3GS per week till the contest begins.
From the press release:
“There are over 100,000 Apps and millions of users who do not have any idea of how they are developed,” said Alessio Zito Rossi, founder and CEO of Command Guru srl. “The stork doesn’t deliver iPhone Apps! We will show the world how they are really born – live and streaming!”
The app looks as if it has the bells and whistles of its standalone Roadmate brethren, like turn-by-turn directions, highway lane guidance and voice guidance with spoken street names.
In fact, its siblings might be a little jealous as the iPhone version adds a pedestrian mode, in-app music control and direct navigation to contacts on your address book.
The icing on the cake is an iPhone car kit Magellan is releasing in December with a GPS receiver that improves accuracy over the iPhone’s, an amped speaker and Bluetooth capability
The app costs $79.99 and the car kit will set you back a further $129.99
Eighteen-year-old English entrepreneur Ed Nash has come up with a 99-cent iPhone app that claims to use Fibonacci’s golden ratio to scientifically determine whether or not a face is aesthetically pleasing. Just snap a photo of the hapless subject, adjust the anchor points, hit the button and viola, instant decision.
Fit or Fugly’s App Store page suggests you use it “to break the ice at dinner parties.” Sure. But we’re going to suggest “the ice” isn’t the only thing that’ll get broken when your iPhone decides the girl sitting next to you is “fugly.”
You know how the new amazing new augmented reality concept, in apps like Bionic Eye and Urban Spoon, have you blindly following the screen’s marker and bumping into people? Or the side of buildings? No? Fine, maybe it’s just me.
Point is, it’s usually easier to navigate to the nearest Starbucks with a map rather than AR.
But using AR to predict the future — hey, now that’s a cool idea. Sun Seeker does exactly that, estimating where the sun will be in the future. hold the iPhone up the sky, and an overlay displays the sun’s current position (usually not too difficult to find, even without AR) and its predicted path overhead.
If you’re not into AR, the app has a more conventional screen that provides a top-down overview.
Who will use this? Like the app’s iTunes Store page says, Sun Seeker is probably a great boon for pilots, architects, photographers and the like. Or residents of London or San Francisco. Sometimes it’s just good to know the sun is still there.
I’m always wondering how many Onion vodcasts I’ll get though while waiting in line at the DMV before before my iPhone’s battery shuts down and leaves me staring at the back of the bald guy’s head in front of me.
Not only will Battery Gauge tell me that, say the folks over at Tap Mode, but it’ll also crunch the numbers and give you an idea of how long I have remaining for any of the other myriad activities the iPhone is good for, like audio playback, connecting to the Internet and yammering on the phone. It’ll also reveal how much standby time is left.
Battery Gauge figures all this out by monitoring your iPhone use, and apparently needs to watch you through just one single charge-cycle.
Not bad for a buck. Also works with the iPod Touch.
The package (ahem), available from USBFever.com, includes the scope, a stand and an iPhone hardcase that is used to attach the scope to the lens.
What could it be used for? A handy promotional video seems to suggest perhaps spying on your neighbors in the pool, and a Mashable post wonders if the telescope could be used by “predators with less-than-pure motivations.” Although with its bulky length — the scope looks like it’s almost the length of the iPhone (4.5 inches, in case you were wondering) — it’s probably not something a budding James Bond could easily…uh…whip out of his pocket.
The scope kit runs $28.99 and the site says it’ll ship “on or before 25 Nov 2009″
There’s also a 6x version available that’s $10 cheaper and ditches the stand. Although, with all the hand-shake jitteriness displayed in the video with the 8x, the stand is probably a good idea to save yourself an eyestrain headache — even though the 6x’s susceptibility to hand shake is probably reduced.
The V-Moda Vibe II with Microphone fits this explanation so exquisitely, you might well see them being whipped out as a teaching aid by your Latin instructor when the above phrase comes up.
Carpe diem. (Seize the day. Best way would be by clicking on the link for the rest of the review.)
We’ve seen this before: A company that’s built a reputation offering stuff to the budget-minded shopper suddenly does an about face and starts wooing the uptown crowd. Sometimes it works brilliantly; often it’s a misfire.
Earlier this year, it was iHome’s turn at bat. The company, well-known for their cleanly simple, inexpensive line of iPod/iPhone accessories, stepped in a bold new direction with the release of their flagship iP1 iPod dock, a product that costs double their previously most-expensive item.
Hit the jump to find out if iHome struck out or hit a home run with the iP1.
OK, I’ll be the one to step up and admit it: Some of us here at Cult of Mac have a… little problem with bags. We’re bagaholics — and I’m the worst. I even have a bag to hold all my bags. So when I say that Osprey’s Flap Jack Courier is hands-down the best laptop bike bag I’ve ever slung over my back, it’s a big deal.
Hit the jump to find out what exactly makes this bag so stupefyingly fantastic.
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