Hueless, the excellent monochromatic iPhone photography app, has just launched its v1.2 update. And despite the pedestrian-sounding version number, it packs in quite a lot of new features. Let’s take a look.
It’s official: Wi-Fi is the new megapixels. Or something. What’s certain is that the camera phone market has forever mixed up the regular camera world, and in order to offer some form of uploading and editing convenience for their dumb offline boxes, camera makers are adding Wi-Fi. Specifically, Wi-Fi that will connect to your iPhone or Android device.
The latest is the Fujifilm FinePix F800EXR, a compact superzoom which will cost you $380.
I’m totally against the wrapping of wires, ever since being shouted at on a movie location for over-enthusiastically coiling audio and power cables around my thumb and elbow. Apparently that’s not how it’s done by the pros, and the experience has made me wince every time I see somebody stretching their headphone cables around their iPod.
Still, I’m clearly in the (superior) minority, and the The Wrap proves it. It’s a plastic 3-D printed widget which wrangles your cable into order.
Replug is a gadget that could – if it had existed a few years ago – would have saved me a fortune; literally hundreds of dollars. It is a simple and excellent idea: a magsafe connector for your headphones, only without the magnets.
This smart iPad case from Aussies STM Bags is called the Half Shell, so let’s get the TMNT jokes out of the way now. Done? Good. Let’s continue, because this case has an interesting little secret.
A new update to the private social network app Path brings a curious secret feature: you can now automatically import your Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare updates without doing anything. But there’s a catch: you’ll need to sign up for a new account to do it.
This is the X-Cap, a prototype self-opening lens cap for compact cameras. It’s a straight replacement for the removable lens caps increasingly found on higher-end point-and-shoots, and turns them into low-end point-and-shoots.
If you have been desperately seeking a Bluetooth speaker which looks like a video projector, or a small, mains-powered electric fan heater, then your search is over! Behold: the Croon, the wireless/wired
speaker of your twisted dreams.
There are a few ways to keep your phone juiced as you ride. Those with foresight will have specced a wheel with a dynamo hub and USB adapter. Those who live in sunnier climes might opt for a solar panel. ANd those who lack both good weather and good planning skills can grab the Tigra BikeCharge, an iPhone charger that will fit any bike.
We showed you how to switch on Power Nap on your Mountain Lion-running, SSD-equipped Mac, but just what does this new feature do?
We know that you Mac enters a kind of robotic REM sleep, where it’s brain activity spikes and the network connections power up to download various bits of data, just like Newsstand on iOS. But a new Apple Knowledge Base article outlines the surprising number of tasks which are going on under the sleepy-lidded hood.
It’s not exactly hard to make a website these days, but Webr makes it just about as easy as could be. It’s a free iPhone app which lets you create and publish a website in just a couple of minutes, and it’s pretty impressive.
FileBrowser, the – uh – file browser app for iOS, has gotten a slew of new features in a recent update, one of which will make movie-downloading iPad owners very happy: Now the app can not only browse network-attached drives (like the Time Capsule), it can stream movies of any format to other apps on your iPad.
Before you go ahead and upgrade to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, spare a second to check whether or not your favorite and most essential apps actually work with it. Sure, it might be nice to have notifications, a VIP inbox and direct Twitter integration, but it won’t do you much good if your text editor or to-do list app won’t even launch.
Luckily, there’s something you can do about that.
Back in the time of the OS X Leopards, the Finder became a whole lot more useful for anyone with photos and videos on their Macs (ie. everybody)/ We got Quick Look, which let us watch slideshows and movies right there on the desktop, and the Finder itself was good enough to use as a lightweight photo viewer.
Then Lion came along and broke one essential tool: the little slider in the bottom right of Finder windows had its functionality removed. It used to let you zoom file thumbnails defaults write Finder trackpad zoom, but in Lion the tool remained, but did nothing.
Thankfully in Mountain Lion the slider now works again. And happily for the photographers out there, the Finder has some other new tricks you’re going to love.
“Welcome to the ultimate virtual cadaver dissection experience!” So begins the pitch on McGraw-Hill’s Anatomy & Physiology REVEALED app for the iPad, a teaching app which overlays photos of real dead people onto rendered models of the underlying gristle.
I might bang on a bit about manual knobs and dials, but sometimes they are the perfect and simple solution to a complex problem. Who wants to dig around in menus when you can just twist a ring and get immediate feedback on the result?
So it is with the Astro, a tripod-top time-lapse controller with all-manual – and all-awesome – controls.
Noteshelf? Evernote? Wacom’s amazing Inkling? Pah! These are all electronic pretenders to the crown of the real portable note-taking king: paper. And with the Binder Clip Case, you can add this noble, non-shareable, non-searchable technology to your iPhone 4/S.
I spent most of last week riding my loaded-up bike through the north of Spain, and as any self-respecting geek would do, I was carrying gadgets, including a power-hungry iPad 3, and a Changers solar-powered charger. I’m planning a longer post on how this worked out, but right now I’m going to tell you about a new accessory for the Changers charger which should make it even more effective on road trips.
NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY. You’ve all read that sign, and you have all likely – being good obedient citizens – abided by the wishes of the museum or gallery which posted it. But why is it there? Why can’t you use your camera’s flash to take a photo of a painting or a sculpture? The answer, it seems, is as depressingly wrongheaded as you might suspect.
If you have a huge stack of old negatives or slides, your best bet is to send them off to India. Seriously: there are services which will scan all your negs, let you choose which ones you actually want to keep via a web browser and then get the digital files returned to you. Apparently it’s pretty cheap.
Or you could do it yourself, with the iPICS2GO Negative to iPhone Scanner. It’s a black box which uses your iPhone 4/S’s camera to snap photos of your own old film and then feeds them into software to produce the photos
IFit may be a familiar name to those who weigh less than 200 pounds. Found in many fitness machines, the iFit service lets you plan a training regime via the web, and then carry it out down at the gym.
Now, iFit has released an iPhone app so you can continue training outdoors instead of holed up in that sweathole you pay $100 per month to use.
The Tablet Strap is exactly the kind of corporate-dorkwear iPad accessory I used to poke fun at. Now, though, having used an iPad since the first one launched all those moons ago, it’s the kind of iPad accessory I want to buy. Or I would, if it didn’t have that hideous pleather-look finish.
IGills is another waterproof iPhone case, but this one is a little more waterproof than the rest. It’s billed as a “smart diving system” which replaces $1,000s worth of specialist gear, and that’s not far off the mark.
If there was ever a company mired in Microsoftian corporate nonsense, it’s IRIS, the scanning and OCR company. Clunky, ugly and ridiculously overpriced software combined with hideous hardware, and a lame bird-based logo to boot – if IRIS were a human, it would be a taste-free middle-manager from the early 1990s.
The latest example is the IRIScan Book 2, a scanner which you have to drag over each sheet of paper by hand in order to digitize the letters thereon.
Finally! Canon has at last announced its answer to Micro Four Thirds and other mirrorless formats. And unlike Nikon, which was content to dash off a crappy toy in the shape of the “1,” the EOS M is pretty much exactly what we hoped for: an EOS SLR packed into a tiny body.