Charlie Sorrel - page 114

Say hello to CubeSensors, sensitive little cubes that detect pretty much everything and tattle to your iPhone about it. The cubes are internet-connected, so you can get their information anywhere, any time.

File under the ever-growing list of “things Android does better than iOS.” Today it’s Gmail, which now lets you reply to, archive or delete your messages right there in the notification. Meanwhile, us schmucks with iPhones and iPads are stuck digging into preferences just to toggle Bluetooth on and off, and waving a freshly-slaughtered chicken over our heads as we try to make Photo Stream work again.

There are a handful of apps that I have to have on every Mac I use, or things quickly start to get annoying. Launchbar is one. Dropbox is another, and TextExpander is one more. TextExpander is sold as a way to expand a short string of text into a longer string of text, so I can just type, say, “aadd” and my address magically appears. I use it all day long on both Mac and iOS for adding Markdown and HTML code to my Cult of Mac posts, and even to the the name Cult of Mac (shortcut: ccom).

But there’s a lot more in there, as this example will show. BEcause TextExpander can run scripts, it can query all kinds of neat stuff — including finding out about your Mac.

According to those dandruff-shouldered, bad-breathed “experts” at camera clubs the world over, converging verticals in a photograph are “bad.” Converging verticals are the effect you see when you tip your camera back to capture to top of a building and the verticals appear to point towards each other instead of straight up.

Amazingly, these “experts” never complain about converging horizontals.

So if you are planning on entering a competition at your local camera club, and there will be buildings involved in your pictures, then you might want to take a look at Perspective Correct, an app to — you guessed it — correct perspective.

Mailbox might be getting all the e-mail press these days, but there’s a long line to get in, and it looks terrible on the iPad. Incredimail isn’t anything like Mailbox, but neither is it like any other e-mail client. Think of it as something like Flipboard fro you e-mail and you” get the idea.

As a reader of Cult of Mac, I’d say it’s a safe bet that you have a whole bunch of 30-pin docks around your home. And that those docks have been rendered useless by Apple’s evil insistence on equipping all of its new devices with smaller, tougher, easier to use Lightning plugs.

Now, we bring good news. With just €13, you can resurrect your pointless plastic paperweight.

You know what you need when you go away on a weekend trip? Along with your two suitcases worth of clothing, a laptop, a pair of iPads, a speaker maybe, plus case of shoes (rain or shine… Who knows?), chargers, your own personal pillow and, well, you get the point. Now you can add to that list the Traveler Laptop Stand from Magma. That’s right: a folding, portable stand for your folding, portable computer.

There are many, many ways to keep a journal using your various iDevices, or paper, or even — if you’re desperate — your Android phone. (Kidding — a sharpie turns the back of any Android handset into the perfect paper-emulation device.) But they tend to be either high on effort — manually writing up everything yourself — or somewhat proprietary, keeping all your info inside an app or service.

But thanks to the ever-amazing internet automating service IFTTT (If This Then That), and some new channels, it’s now possible to roll your own plain-journal, pulling from various sources automatically. And it even includes pictures, which is quite a trick for plain text.

The Rocksteady XS is meant to be a tough, loud outdoor speaker. And it is. But how does it stack up, sound and feature-wise, against some rather stiff competition?

Fingers is a concept design, but it’s so simple and clever, and so easy to make for yourself with just a piece of stiff card and a pair of scissors, that it seems worth taking a look. It’s yet another desk-tidying cable manager, but you’re going to love it, I promise.

MyEditor is another iOS text editor. It works with iCloud, it’ll export to Dropbox, yadda yadda yadda. But this one has a couple of very neat features that might just be enough to make you forget the plain and frankly ugly user interface. It has a clipboard history, it can capture your clipboard whilst in the background, and it can run your text through Javascript, uh, scripts.

Remember Unbound? I called the iOS app “the best dropbox browser I have ever used,” and it’s still up there in the top two (the other is the excellent Heliog). Now — or at least soon — Unbound will be coming to the Mac. What’s more, it’ll be compatible with the neat little Leap Motion box that lets you control your Mac with wavy hand gestures.

My 27-inch iMac hangs on my wall, freeing up desk-space and terrifying me that it will fall off as I sleep and crush me in my bed. To get it up there I had to hit up Amazon and order the VESA wall mount, plus an adapter to replace the iMac’s huge foot with a VESA-compatible set of holes.

The result is very sturdy, and very neat. But there’s one problem: where the hell do I put that giant (and heavy) aluminum foot? If I were buying new iMac, I could just order a version without the stand, and instead equipped with a built-in VESA mount.

I thought I’d heard everything there was to hear from wireless speakers. I have tested everything from the smallest, crappiest pocket speaker to the big booming Big Jambox. Then I “hooked” the Libratone Zipp up to my iPhone, and I started to enjoy music again.

Repix is a universal app for editing your pictures. Stop me if you’ve heard that before. But even if you were to just on level of polish alone, Repix is already way above the competition. And if we take a look at what it does to your photos, we’ll see that the developer, Sumoing, has a potentially huge hit on its hands.

Fans of the great B&W-shooting iPhone app Hueless will be happy about the launch of Huemore, a color version of the app from the same developer, Curious Satellite. Huemore takes the simplified yet powerful, pared-down interface of its older brother and turns the color back up.

You know how much you hate table drummers and air-scratchers (those morons who tilt their head to hold their air-headphones to their ears while spinning an imaginary vinyl record with their fingers and saying “wika-wika-wik” as they do it)? Well, don’t ever let one of them near Urbanears new Slussen. It’s like giving crack to a baby… Or something.

After more than 14 months of watching the clock in tense anticipation, today I finally downloaded Super Stickman Golf 2, the sequel to the fantastic physics puzzler/golf game Super Stickman Golf.

If you are a fan of the original, you’re likely hitting the App Store link right now. If not, read on.

I hate taxis. I hate having to find one. I hate having to talk to the driver. I hate paying them, and then worrying about how much I’m supposed to tip them (presumably spending the entire journey chatting to their cousins via Bluetooth headset counts as “service.”) So I’m very happy to have Taxi Turvi in my arsenal. It’s a weapon to be wielded against dodgy cabbies.

Piikki is a fairly average receipt-scanning app with a couple of standout features: One, it auto detects the receipt in the camera frame and then – once it has a lock – auto-snaps it. And second, you can have the result uploaded directly into your Evernote notebook of choice. I would suggest the “receipts” folder, but I’m not so original.

These days my desk is my lap. My work machine is an iPad, and my iMac is hanging on the wall, acting as little more than a BitTorrent machine and photo store. I still have a desk though, but it is useless for most of the year thanks to a marble top which sucks heat from my hands and wrists like a prisoner sucks on a cigarette after a week in solitary confinement.

Fortunately, there’s an accessory for people who – like me – love both felted wool, and their carpal tunnels. It’s the Desk-Pad Classic, and I will probably have ordered one by the time you finish reading this post.

I love being able to whisper instructions to Siri as I walk along the street. My favorite trick is to get her to play a song, album or playlist. “Play something by Daft Punk,” I order, and off he goes. The problem is that I use Spotify and Rdio for most of my music, and Siri doesn’t talk to either of them.

But this neat hack will get her most of the way there.

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?

Everyone knows that Apple’s maps suck, right? After all, they were pretty poor at launch, and anything to do with Apple never changes: Apple gear is overpriced ($330 for an iPad!), Apple should license its OS (Android is open! And winning!). Etc.

Except that maps have gotten a lot better in the intervening months. The app mightn’t have gotten an update, but arguably its the same old app that used to use Google maps anyway. But the software and map tiles behind the scenes? Oh boy.

Fact: wearing accessories and gadgets on your belt makes you look super cool – just like Batman. So if you buy a few Spider Monkeys, then your utility-belt cool-factor will shoot through the roof so fast that you’ll be sweeping up broken shingles for weeks.

The Spider Monkey comes from the folks who make the camera-holding Spider Holster, and it works with pretty much anything that isn’t a camera.