Charlie Sorrel - page 113

I used to use a sleeve-style case with my original iPad, and I loved it. Sleeves protect the iPad while you carry it, and let you experience the full slimline awesomeness of a naked tablet when you take it out to use. Then Apple made the iPad 2 and the Smart Cover and that was it. The only time I change cases now is if I need something rugged, or if I’m testing one for review.

But I’m tempted by the Calypso Tab, a lovely leather sleeve for the regular iPad and the mini. It’s a softish hard shell, and it looks fantastic.

Got some old speakers gathering dust at home? Would you love to hook them up to your AirPlay network but don’t want to buy a) an amp and speaker cable and b) an Airport Express? Well, The Vamp is here to save you. It’s a tiny box that sits on top of your speaker and acts as both amp and Bluetooth receiver.

The Touch is a cool-looking new way to control Adobe Lightroom, either using your Magic trackpad or your iPad. It’s a small app that runs alongside Lightroom (or Final Cut Pro X) and lets you control it using all manner of gestures, taps, and swipes, letting you focus less on which slider to grab and more on looking at the image itself.

A picture is worth… $1. That’s what Printic will charge you for a single, Polaroid-shaped print, sent to your (or anyone else’s) door and ordered from the easy comfort of your own iPhone.

Digital Negative is a new iPhone app which promises to save photos in Adobe’s DNG format. That is, it promises RAW images from your iPhone’s sensor. Leaving aside the debate of whether or not this is a good idea (more on that in a second), can an App Store app really get access to the raw, unprocessed data from the sensor? The answer is no, but to the developer’s credit, it goes just about as far as is possible.

I don’t really care about measuring the wind – I prepare for a bike trip using WeatherPro, which tells me how bad the wind will be, not how bad it is right now. But the Vaavud wind meter is notable for another reason: it communicates its wind-speed readings to your iPhone wirelessly, yet uses no electronics whatsoever. How? Read on…

Soulver is pretty much the best calculator app on the Mac and iOS, mostly because it doesn’t tie itself to the UI of old pushbutton calculators. But Llumino will probably win the award for the best-looking calculator app in the App Store, coming on like a 1970s flashing disco floor and, uh, a pushbutton calculator.

Moshi’s Luna backlit Mac keyboard is a weird device. It’s a desktop device through-and-through, connecting via USB, but doesn’t have any USB ports itself – one of the major advantage of using a wired keyboard.

It also uses scissor-switched chiclet-stlye keys instead of something more substantial like you’d find in the Matias or DAS keyboards.

It does, however, sport Mac-friendly media keys, and packs a numerical keypad, perfect for moving your mouse further to the right and causing extra RSI.

Anyone who is serious about taking notes doesn’t use Apple’s Reminders app. Or at least, they don’t use it to store endless snippets of information (Reminder is fantastic for shopping lists, though). Note nerds use nvALT (OS X), the tricked-out version of Notational Velocity customized by Brett “I just built this. Again” Terpstra, in combination with Dropbox or Simplenote (iOS).

And Brett’s latest version, 2.2, is near enough release that you may as well grab it and use it. Hell, Brett himself says that it’s “more stable than 2.1 is right now.”

Say hi to the little Braven BRV-1. Take a while to get acquainted… You’re going to be spending a lot of time together this summer. Why? Because not only does this little fella sound pretty good, he can follow you almost literally everywhere you might go – beach, biking, even boating – without stopping.

If you had asked me yesterday what I thought a “couch player” might be, I would have guessed that it was some stoner kid sat at home in his parents living room, checking the price of Glocks online and listening to bad hip hop.

But that was yesterday. If you asked me right now, I’d tell your that Couch Player is an awesome new music player for the iPad.

The Bikespike is a GPS-enabled cellular device which lets you track your bike. And while you can use it as an iPhone-connected bike computer, complete with speed, calorie and location stats, its main purpose is as a security device.

Counter-intuitive though it may seem, taking a light source and putting it right up close to your subject’s face – as close as you can without getting it in frame – makes for softer light. Why? Because it makes the light bigger in relation to the subject. If that subject is a face, a bigger light can “wrap around” its contours and fill in its own shadows.

And the Photojojo Pocket Spotlight is a big light source for your iPhone.

Everclip is one of the most used apps on my iPad, despite being iPhone-only. Until now, that is. Along with an update to the regular iPhone Everclip, there’s now an iPad version. No, it’s not universal and yes, it’ll cost you another $6, but if you’re an Everclip fan, you really won’t care.

Regular readers will know how much I dislike iPad cases, and that I only ever subject my iPhone to the confines of a miniature straitjacket. They’ll also know that I’m a big fan of Skech cases in general. So what happened when Skech sent me some leathery iPhone covers to try out?

Surprise! I (quite) liked them.

Rego is an app that answers the question “How do I remember this place?” It’s a question partially addressed by Foursquare’s check-ins, and also by Evernote’s location-aware notes. But Rego goes further than both, letting you save places you’ve been to, places you find, and places you have never even seen.

Did you wake up this morning thinking that what you really need is a new, hard-to-navigate news app for your iPhone or iPad? Then you’re in luck: Reuters has announced just that. It’s called “Reuters,” and it mixes the seriousness of news with the fun of frustrating gestures.

There’s some irony in the fact that David Sparks’ (MacSparky) book on Markdown – a format dedicated to being as simple as possible – is published as an iBook which contains audio, video, screenshots and everything else, along with its text.

But if you are either Markdown-curious, or a hardcore Markdown user who just wants to nerd out for an afternoon or two, it’s worth checking out.

Oh man, this is what happens when companies don’t really know what to do with themselves. We’re familiar with Apple’s ultra-simple product lineup, a hallmark of a focused corporate mind. Canon, on the other hand, decided that — after stripping down the DSLR to make the mirrorless EOS M — it would take that stripped-down camera and, uh, strip it back up again.

So here we have the EOS 100D (or Rebel SL1, to further confuse things), billed as the smallest DSLR in the world, and essentially an EOS M with a mirror and therefore a viewfinder. And corporate confusion aside, it might actually be a cool little camera.

Looking for an alternative to Google Reader? The might I suggest Skimr, a rather minimal web app which will let you read your feeds right there in the browser. It shows your feeds in a big, bright and beautiful single-column list, and when you open a feed it shows you the articles in a similarly cruft-free view.

It’s just about perfect, as long as you don’t have more than a few feeds.

Withings, the mobile-connected health-monitoring people, have just announced a brand new bathroom scale. Only this isn’t just another scale that’ll Tweet your weight to a disinterested world. It has hookups to monitor not just your body, but also the home you live in.

Tap Tap See is a camera app for blind people. Sure, any partially or non-sighted person could just snap bad, out-of-focus pictures of their shoes, or of the backs of their friends heads, with any camera app. But only Tap Tap See will then say to them, out loud, “Shoes,” or “Head.”

You see, Tap Tap See is like a sighted assistant that never grow tired of you asking “what’s that?”

Wacom has announced a new baby Cintiq graphics tablet. The new 13-inch model joins the plus-sized 22 and 24-inchers in the lineup, and will let travelling designers and artists work on the go.

Gramatica is just about the nicest Instagram-browser app I have yet seen. It’s essential on the iPad mini, on which the official Instagram app looks hideous thanks to the mini’s refusal to display Retina assets. And on the iPhone it’s even better than the Instagram app, thanks to its full-width pictures and fantastic gestural controls.

If you ever tried to explain Instapaper (or any other read-later app) to a “straight” (non-nerd) friend or family member, you’ll know why Apple added a reading list to Safari. Even without the terrible experience of adding a javascript bookmarklet to Mobile Safari, Instapaper requires way too many steps: save page; remember to open Instapaper before the internet goes off to load that saved page; remember to read.

Safari, on the other hand, just saves the page inside Safari. That’s it.

And so Amazon is now simplifying Instapaper’s Send to Kindle feature, allowing you to send a web page to your Kindle with one click.