Flickr’s iPhone app has gotten big revamp, and if it weren’t for another great photo app release today (called Photoristic), it could actually become my new favorite iOS photo editor. But what the “What’s new?” section in the App Store doesn’t mention is the new UI that accompanies it.
You’re going to love this one. What if I told you there was an iPad accessory that combined a full-sized keyboard, a case, a desktop tray and an iPhone dock, plus a compartment for storing a whole mess of charging and connection accessories. And what if I told you this behemoth was styled into a package that would make a 1990s-era traveling businessman proud to use it?
Well, as you may have suspected, this absurdity does exist. It’s called the Modus III, and it’s all kinds of awesome.
Talking of taking your iPhone to the beach, here’s another way to keep it safe from harm: don’t take it at all. Instead of Instagramming the topless ladies down at your local sea’n’sand pit, you could roll your own analog Instagram. No, not a Polaroid, but disposable cameras, dicked with to make them take even worse photos than they already do.
Pan Am, a U.S icon that died in 1991, thankfully before it’s name could be ConCatenAted into PanAm, and not before some clever entrepreneur with an eye to the future squirreled away dome of the planes’ old life rafts.
Fast forward to today, when those rafts are being chopped up and made into cases for another American icon: the iPad. For just $20, you can wrap the back of your tablet in a strip of – uh, whatever life rafts were made of in the 70s.
I have been using one on my iPad mini for the last week or two. It’s fantastic, but I had to administer some tough love to get it onto shape.
Dispatch is the iPhone e-mail client I have been looking for for years. It’s kind of like Drafts for email, only in reverse – the emails come in from pretty much any service you like, then you quickly triage them. Then, you send the results off to another app or service on your iPhone.
YACReader, or Yet Another Comic Reader, is exactly what it says it is: a comic book reading app. Only it should be called TOCRYEL, or The Only Comic Reader You’ll Ever Need.
Last seen wrapping the iPhone in chopped-up fire hoses, the folks at Station Supply Co have expanded (pun most definitely intended) into recycled airliner life rafts. That’s right: now you can cover your iPhone or iPad with a swatch snipped from a genuine 1970s-era PanAm life raft.
I’m posting about this Android-based tablet for a few reasons. One, I want it, and as it’s crowd-funded, my chances of getting one are helped if you want it, too.
Second, I figure that if you love your iPad as much as I love mine, then you might miss it when you get all outdoorsy and go camping/hiking/biking.
And third? It’s just awesome: the Backcountry Tablet is an e-ink, solar-powered iPad. With GPS. What’s not to like? It’s even cheap, at $250.
Yeah, you could buy reams and reams of bound notebooks all pre-printed with iPhone-shaped templates for your UI-designing needs. But what will that get you? Boxes of crappy notebooks all filled with quad-printed paper and covered with little iPhone outlines.
Worse, you’ll have to carry these with you along with your proper Moleskine notebook if you want to do any real sketching or note taking.
But what if you could add an iPhone page to any book, any time you like? With this stamp, you totally can.
Concert Vault is a neat new iPad app which lets you watch and listen to music concerts. The free app has a slick interface which lets you search on your favorite bands and stream their gigs. It’s a deep catalog, too, going way back in time as well as offering newer content.
Ulysses 3, the awesome next-generation text editor from the Soulmen, has just landed in the Mac App Store. It's $20 for a week, going up to $40 after that, and is worth every damn penny. And lest you think I'm some pussy-assed blogger who gets everything for free, I'm not. I just dropped my $20 like everyone else. And this is despite the fact that, so Killian tells me, I have a quote right there on the MAS page.
Joby Ingram-Dodd is a lucky guy. First, he has an awesome name which sounds like he’s a successful gold prospector from the 1800s. And second, he bought a tough-as-boots iPhone.
Oh, and he has, like, the best job ever.
You see, Joby managed to drop his iPhone 4S 60 meters (almost 200 feet) from the top of a wind turbine onto a concrete parking lot way below. And guess what?
Wacom is readying a pressure-sensitive tablet of its own. The source of this “rumor”? Wacom itself, via its Facebook page. And being from Wacom, it’ll have a pressure-sensitive pen, plus multi touch and some more mystery features.
I love everything about Foldify, except that fact that it isn’t available yet. I love the name, the promo video, the only-possible-on-an-iPad interface, and even the icon (or maybe, especially the icon). Foldify is an app that lets you design and print 3-D papercraft models, but that description makes it sound a lot lamer than it really is.
The Projecteo is pretty frikkin’ awesome. It’s a teeny-tiny projector that throws an image from a little circle of film up onto the wall of a darkened room.
The interchangeable disks are loaded with cut-down 35mm film stock, and each one can fit on nine of your amazing Instagrams.
When the folks at Griffin were choosing a mythical creature for which to name their company1, they might have gone with Janus instead, to better reflect the schizophrenic nature of its offering: serious computer accessories vs. frivolous toys.
That’s not to say that the toys are bad. On the contrary, Griffin’s iOS-controlled choppers look amazing. And now they’re joined by these remote-controlled monster trucks.
When it comes to iPhoneography, “retro” usually refers to adding some light leaks, desaturating some colors or adding fake grain. But for Jake Potts, it means taking the iPhone’s rear glass panel, turning it into a wet collodion plate and taking a real photograph with it. And because he’s a true photo nerd, he also documented every step of the process.
If you thought that all apps that turn photos into “paintings” and “drawings” were total gimmicky junk, you’d be dead right. Applying a “find edges” filter and desaturating the result into grayscale doesn’t make a picture look like you drew it. It looks like you’re a dummy for even using it.
But things have changed: Glaze is an iPad app which actually makes faux paintings that look good.
Instaglasses. What a fantastic idea. Sadly only a concept (and surely destined to remain so), these special specs survey the scene before you and apply your choice of Instagram filter to the real world. You’ve heard the expression “seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses”? Well, these are retro-tinted glasses.
Take some iPhones (or iPod touches), a few tiny pico projectors and a whole lot of hard work and talent, mix with a Canon 5D and an HD cam, and you might end up with something resembling The Speed of Light, an mazing animation by The Theory.
Oh, and you might need a couple of toy cars, too.
Writing Kit, every iPad-toting bloggers’ best friend, just got a small but significant update to v3.3. In addition to bug fixes (although not all of them) and some nice interface tweaks (sharing destinations now have service icons to help identify them quickly), the app now has support for URL schemes, letting other apps interact with it.
Leica’s new rangefinder camera, the M Monochrome, is colorblind. That is, it will only shoot black and white images. What’s that you say? You can totally shoot color images with any camera you like and turn them into awesome B&W photos later? That’s true, but there are some advantages to doing things Leica’s way.
We met some amazingly fantastic people at our first-ever shindig (at San Francisco’s Il Pirata) and gave out a smorgasbord of smashing raffle prizes.
