Charlie Sorrel - page 129

The iPad Mini is here, and it is lying naked and vulnerable on your desk/bed/lap/passenger seat. And that’s ok, because today is all about tweaking and configuring your settings, installing apps and seeing which of your pants have back pockets big enough to carry it (don’t sit down!)

But what of tomorrow? Soon you’ll start searching for cases, speakers, docks and other accessories for the latest tiny addition to your family, and that’s where we come in. Yes, you can use most of your iPad and iPhone accessories with the new Mini, but here are some add-ons which work particularly well with Apple’s littlest tablet.

I just switched from a giant, 27-inch iMac back to a little ol’ MacBook, and while my desk looks a lot bigger, my shoulders and neck hate me for it. What I might need, then, is the new HiRise for MacBooks from the fine folks at Twelve South. All it really does is raise the notebook up off the desk so you don’t get a crick in your neck from looking downwards all day long, but it does it with such style that it might just be worth the $70 asking price.

Especially if your whole reason for ditching a bigger computer is to make your office look cooler.

Evernote 5 beta, which was teased last week, has been launched to great success. In fact, it has been so popular that Evernote has had to shut down the option for Mac App Store customers to use it. Why?

This is due to large numbers of users re-syncing their entire accounts as part of the transition from a Mac App Store download to a direct downloaded version of Evernote

The iStabilizer is a combination monopod and camera/phone tripod adapter. It’s light, it’s sturdy, it’s mostly aluminum, and it’s pretty much ideal for occasional use. And it has one fantastic function which will probably get you arrested.

Paper is an iPad app which proves that you don’t need to add bells and whistles to your software if it’s well designed. Unless your app is a bell and whistle simulator, I guess.

But Paper, which won fans with its ultra-simple interface and amazingly natural brush-and-paint engine, really was a little too stripped down. The new v1.2.1 fixes that, adding custom color palettes and a very sweet new color mixer, plus support for a pressure-sensitive stylus.

Quick test: see if you can guess what the following product does, just by decoding its cryptic name. Ready?

Belkin NetCam Wi-Fi with Night Vision

The iPhone 5 is the best camera Apple has ever made (OK, maybe the second-best), so why not dress it like one of the best film cameras ever made?

That’s just what PetaPixel’s Leica skin will do, turning your long, thin iPhone into a long, thin fake rangefinder.

It’s November, and you all know what that means: No, not the growing of wispy, creepy mustaches. November is National Novel-Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for (almost) short.

NaNoWriMo is the annual attempt by many tens of thousands of people to finally get that novel out of their head and into the cloud storage option of their choice. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel by midnight on the 30th November, and you can get there by fair means or foul. The rules? It has to be a novel, it has to be 50,000 words (or more) long, and it has to be written in November.

The tools you will need most to write your NaNoWriMo novel are inspiration and a lot of perseverance. Luckily, apps can help you with both. Here’s the definitive guide to NaNoWriMo apps on the Mac and iOS. If you can’t drag that novel kicking and screaming into the world with the help of these apps, you can’t do it at all.

It turns out that the iPad Mini is the first Apple mobile device to ship with stereo speakers. Although Apple’s product page only mentions a “built-in speaker,” the two grilles on the new iPad’s bottom edge do in fact contain separate stereo speakers.

Unshielded, shoddily built and as close to dangerous junk as you can get without actually being dangerous. Today, this description happens to apply to these knock-off Lightning adapters from China, but it could equally describe any cheap no-name Chinese electronic accessories.

How does the new iPod Touch’s 5MP camera size up to the iPhone 4’s low-light-loving 8MP monster? IMore’s Leanna Lofte decided to find out, pitting the cameras head-to-head in a rather extensive test. The short form: if you were thinking of buying the iPhone 5 just for the camera, you could probably save yourself some money.

I give great, fluid, professional-appearing speeches. Put me up in front of a crowd and I’ll crow on all day log, with nary a stammer nor a hesitation. The problem? I have nothing to say.

Other people actually have interesting information to convey, and yet they’re scared stiff of public speaking. Speeches app is here to help. It won’t boost your confidence, but it will help you to remember what you’re supposed to be talking about.

Lookout is like Apple’s Find My iPhone app, only it adds a whole bunch of extra features. It’ll let you track your lost phone from any web browser, even when the battery has dies (kinda), and it also adds a slew of features that only the dumbest of people will need.

Earbuds and sunglasses, two things that sit up on your head and hang from your ears. If only there was some way to combine the two…

Oakley tried it some years ago with the Thump, which resulted in one of the most hideous product designs ever conceived — if H.R Giger had re-imagined between-toe fungus as an alien growth across your eyes and temples, it would have looked like the Thump.

Luckily, Sanpei Optics has come to the rescue with this gadget, which takes a normal-looking pair of shades and a normal-looking set of earbuds and simply sticks them together.

Google’s updated search app adds lightning-fast voice-controlled search, just like you get on Android. It’s simple, impressively fast and will run on just about any iDevice you might have, not just the latest hardware.

But it has a long way to go to compete with Siri.

There’s never been a better time to get fit, thanks to the wealth of fitness tracker options available to work with your iPhone. That’s not strictly true — first, it’s always a good time to get fit. And second, the more choices there are for fitness trackers, the more opportunity there is for procratination.

Still, the Striiv is a welcome addition.

Office Drop is kind of like a mission-specific Dropbox. It comes with Mac and iOS clients, and lets you upload and share your various documents between them. However, it has one big stinking extra which could be amazingly useful to some people: It performs automatic OCR (optical character recognition) on your stored documents.

Purple Haze, is in my brain… Ah, sorry. Just singing a little Hendrix there. But — completely coincidentally — this next app brings purple haze correction to the iPhone. If you want to listen to Jimi Hendrix songs as if played on an un-amplified classical guitar, then this may be the app for you.

Just Mobile’s new Alurack is a clever solution to the question “Where do I put my stupid MacBook while I’m using it with an external monitor?”

The Alurack’s answer is “Hang it,” either from the back of a Cinema Display or from your iMac.

Just when you thought an iPhone or iPad dock had been built into every possible household object, here comes the iRocking Chair. In looks, it's a pretty traditional rocker, but it has some surprises built in. Not least is the fact that it can charge an iPad 3.

Calling the new Livescribe Sky a pen is like calling your iPhone 5 a phone. Technically the Sky is a writing instrument, but it has about as much in common with a pen as your iPhone has with an old rotary dial telephone.

The Sky lets you write and draw on paper, and it then uploads your notes wirelessly (no computer required) to your Evernote account. From there you can immediately access them from your iPad, iPhone, Mac or any device with a browser.

I’m not going to write up every single photo gadget that gets updated for the iPhone 5 (I’ll stop when Olloclip ships an updated version of its clip-on accessory lens, I promise). But as iPhone 5 gear is as thin on the ground as the iPhone 5 is thin in your hand, then the new Holga Filter Case is worth a mention — not least because is also gets a new color.

These gorgeous wooden iPhone 5 cases come from the U.K, and look like they’d cost you an absolute fortune. Amazingly, for something hand-crafted and exquisitely designed, they cost just £35, or $56. Sure, it ain’t cheap, but neither is it crazy.

I will be ordering a Button 2.0 for every single one of my shirts. I will even be sewing them onto my t-shirts in order to make them more useful. Why? As you can see in the image above, Button 2.0 is a simple upgrade to boring old Button 1.0 which turns it into a grippy place to clip your iPhone’s headphone cable.

Libratone’s Zipp is a another AirPlay speaker, only this one has a couple of twists. The most obvious difference between this and the Big Jambox (its closest competitor) is the colorful wool felt cover. The other difference is in how it connects: The Zipp creates its own Wi-Fi access point.