I almost never (except when shooting video) wish that I had a wider angle lens – it would just mean that I have to poke my camera even closer into the face of my subject. But I do often reach for the telephoto lens that isn’t there. After all, apart from a long lens’s ability to squish elements together in a picture, sometimes you just can’t walk any closer to your subject.
At those times, you can now reach for the iPad Telephoto lens for Photojojo.
Back in February, I reviewed the The SurfacePad from Twelve South and called it the “Best iPhone Case Ever.” And had it stayed pristine and continued working like it did for the first few weeks, that would be it.
But it didn’t. The lovely, minimalist leather cover certainly kept working, but while it might be a great design for something like an iPad, for an iPhone – which is constantly being shoved in and out of pockets – it’s just too fragile. That, and it sucks for taking photos.
Evernote has just updated Skitch for both the Mac and iOS. And what an update! The headline feature is PDF annotation (premium account required, 30-day trial for new users), a feature which could make the app useful to more than just bloggers marking up screenshots.
Ka-chunk, ka-chunk. Ker-Ching! That’s the sound of micro budgeting, and doesn’t it sound like fun? That’s because it is – with Cents, a super-simple new iPhone app for tracking your daily expenses.
Slugline is a new app for screenwriters from Stu Maschwitz (movie maker, visual effects superstar and guy named Stu). It’s a Fountain-based app for writing movies and outputting them in industry-standard Final Draft format, but in use it’s more like a simple plain-text Markdown editor.
Got one of Fujifilm’s shiny new X100S rangefinder-style cameras? Or another of the company’s digicams with the fancy X-Trans sensor inside? Then go hit up your Software Update and install the new Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update.
I was going to ditch the standard review format for this post and instead make a gallery of different objects hung on my belt Using the neat little Spider Monkey accessory holster.
That was until I discovered that the adhesive tab that helps hold the Monkey’s Tab onto the target accessory is not reusable. Well, that might not be strictly true. It might well be reusable, but I will never find out because it is almost certainly unremovable.
Despite its obvious problems, it’s hard not to love this little iPad lap desk from Kikkerland. It’s not just that it would look so cute perched on your thighs with a snack and a suitable beverage, but that somebody thought to update the TV dinner for the internet age.
The Intimo Secretary Desk might sound like a place your assistant would keep his or her sexy underwear, but it is in fact a modern bureau-style desk for your MacBook (or any laptop, I guess – not that PC owners would have this level of style).
It’s gorgeous, and when you’re done working for the day you can close it up and grab your iPad for some light reading.
Check out Adobe’s amazing new blur-reduction tool. Likely coming to the next version of Photoshop, the feature examines your shaky photo, analyzes just how badly you screwed it up and applies a fix to clear things up again.
The video below shows a quick look at it in action.
My favorite read-later app, Pocket, has revamped its sharing options to make it way easier to send articles and snippets to other people. It’s powered by email, although once you’ve set it up you wouldn’t know it. And yes, for those who have been following along, it totally lets you save your favorite passages as highlights, although you’ll need to hack things to get that working.
The DeskRail is a desk-tidy for the digital age. Whereas I spent hours in my school shop class cutting, glueing and painting acrylic tubes to hold pens, paperclips and other desktop detritus, the DeskRail is made to organize the junk we use today.
And by junk, I mean Moleskines, USB cables, iPhones and… hipster plastic-framed glasses?
I have used Mailplane on and off for years. I love that it turns the great Gmail interface into a proper desktop app, complete with drag-and-drop attachments, notifications and an icon in the dock and tab switcher. But I never liked its super power of spinning the CPU of my Mac at all times, even when supposedly idle.
Now v3.0 is out, and it seems to have solved the latter problem, while adding a few new features.
Got a few minutes to read something? Not sure which of your saved Read Later article to pick? Then you need Readtime, a new iPhone app which picks articles based on the time you have available. Dial in the length of your coffee break or the average time taken to clear your bowels in the morning, and Readtime will return a list of appropriately-long articles.
Who knew there was room for yet another iPhone currency converter in the store? The folks behind Currency, that’s who, a conversion app that is as minimal as its name.
It’s gotten to the stage that I’m so loaded up on cloud storage for my photos that I could toss my iPhone into the toilet and not lose a thing (well, apart from the action shot of the toilet bowl framing my shocked face as the iPhone shoots its last photo). But while Dropbox and Everpix are great, sometimes you just want to rock an old-school USB stick and transfer photos to and from you iPhone with a stick of plastic.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, all compact cameras looked like the Ricoh GR. they might not have been as sleek-looking, but they had big finger grips, a giant full-frame sensor (35mm) film and a fixed wideangle lens.
Now, proving that large sensors are the new black, the GR is packing a DSLR-sized APS-C sensor into its tiny body.
The state of iOS photo management is a mess. In typical Apple fashion, the built-in tools work fine, but if you try to add anything else to the mix things get messy, fast. And in “anything else,” I even include iPhoto on the Mac. If you want to have be able to see all your photos on your iPad, regardless of what gear was used to take them, you’re out of luck.
If you shoot with both an iPhone and a regular camera, things get even worse. Sure, you can suck it up and use Aperture or iPhoto, but Lightroom is (for me anyway) way better.
Photojojo’s Crankerator is a backup battery pack with a twist. Or rather, with a spin. You can charge it via boring old wall outlets, but when the juice finally runs low, you can reanimate it with a few twists of the crank-arm on the side.
I still type on my iPad, despite the gorilla-arm troubles that sent me back to the Mac for most of my work (I’m typing this post on an iPad Mini with a Logitech Easy Switch keyboard). But if I was still committed to the iPad-only working life, I’d be taking a long look at the Nomad Tablet Table.
Triage is an app which makes it easy to quickly whittle down your incoming messages using your iPhone. The idea is that you can quickly scan (or triage) your mails, archiving anything unimportant and saving the rest for later.
Triage doesn’t try to replace your desktop mail client. It lets you use your downtime to quickly remove the noise and stress.
Lightroom 5 beta has just been posted, and is ready for download and testing. Those of you who read my article last week about using a small, SSD-based MacBook Air for photos will be very interested in one new feature: Smart Previews. This lets you edit your photos using just the previews on your MacBook, and the changes all sync up to your actual photos next time you connect your big external drive.
And there’s more.
This is the Bison Tote, and it’s just about the hottest laptop/camera bag ever. Unless, of course, you’re a bison. Why? Because the bag is made from bison skin.
Lomo’s awesomely handsome Belair camera has some retro-tastic styling, and a clever-and-classical bellows system to allow it to fold flat for your (oversized) pocket. The rub was that it used 120 roll-film, the kind used by medium-format cameras in the olden days.
120 is great, and the big negatives give amazingly sharp and detailed prints. But 35mm film is both cheaper and easier to process. To address this, Loma will now sell you a replacement 35mm back for your Belair.
Ever wanted to save a picture of an entire webpage? I have. Last time I made a style guide for our Cult of Mac reviews, I wanted to take a picture and scrawl notes on it. Could I find an app to help? Could I hell. In the end I resorted to printing PDF on my Mac and…. I can’t really remember. It was so convoluted that my brain has repressed the traumatic memory.
If only I’d had Barry to help me.