Tones looks to be just about the coolest way to create custom ringtones for your iPhone that I have seen. Then again, I haven’t seen many as I’m not a thoughtless teenager who thinks that other people want to hear his crappy music every time a call comes in.
Better still, Tones puts iPhone ringtone editing just where it should be: on the iPhone itself.
“Dear Valued Customer” began the pitch e-mail for the iPhone 4/S microscope lens, and it looks as if just as much effort has gone into the product itself.
The lens will turn your iPhone into an examiner of the minuscule, promising 50x magnification for use in science, medical analysis, textile inspection “and more.”
How? Does it hook up the phone via dock-connector to an optically awesome array of magnifying magnificence? Does it put the iPhone itself at the center of a lavish layout of lenses? Not really. The “microscope” kit is instead something we’ve all seen before: a cheap plastic case to which you attach an add-on lens.
Let me tell you a story. Many years ago, I was a cocktail bartender in a busy London bar. I had just gotten a brand new dumb-phone (a Siemens if I remember correctly), a little silver candy-bar of crap, but it was my candy-bar of crap, and I’d owned it only a few hours.
On shift, I switched the phone to silent and put it in a rocks glass on the backbar, behind my station. The bottom shelf of the backbar had a small lip at the front. Partway through the busy shift I needed some Kahlua (for a Vodka Espresso, not a White Russian). I grabbed the bottle and the base caught the shelf-edge and sheared clean off. The Kahlua – of course – was dumped into the glass with my brand new phone.
I was lucky: this was before the days of moisture sensors and a quick wash later and I got a new handset from the store. Today, you might not fare so well.
Which is why I have mixed (no pun intended) opinions of the Cube.
Killspencer might sound like an order to murder somebody with a fancy name, but it is in fact just an innocent iPhone card-case made from Rosenkrantz*. No. Wait… I mean rosewood.
Do you use OmniFocus on your iPhone? Do you use Launch Center Pro? Then you need to watch the above screencast, put together by Michael Schechter of A Better Mess. It uses the latter to create shortcuts and snippets of text to enter into the former, and makes the whole thing way, way faster.
OK. You spent $100 on your iPhone 4 (plus the invisible $1 trillion your contract will extract from you over the next 24 months). What do you do next? How about dropping $160 on an aluminum bumper case? Thanks to the fine folks at ElementCase, you can do just that with the Viper Pro Stealth 2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YP5goKA4dQ
Blind? Then you’re most likely reading this post on an iOS device, because no other platform has quite the same great level of accessibility options built-in. But that still doesn’t help you when you want to write (unless using Voiceover to find the individual keys is your thing). But I bring good news! Fleksy is a new app which takes predictive text to a ridiculous new level.
As usual, Lonelysandwich (aka. Adam Lisagor)’s video is hilarious and makes you want to buy the product right away (remember the Jambox?). Checkmark is a soon-to-be-released iPhone app which makes setting (and forgetting – for now) location-based reminders easy, and effective.
Sick of forgetting to pick up that [insert household item here] every damn time you visit the grocery store? You need Checkmark.
I love having my photos on my iPad, but I hate using iPhoto to get them there. To be honest, I just hate iPhoto, along with its more complicated and even more sluggish cousin, Aperture. I use Lightroom, and up until last week I was exporting photos from there into iPhoto just to sync them. Not only was this a headache, but it was a waste of space.
Now, you can tell iTunes to sync any folder of photos to the iPad, but with a little bit of effort things can be made much more elegant. By setting up Lightroom correctly, we can have any changes to our photos mirrored to the iPad at the touch of a button, and the whole process is near-automatic.
Samsung’s new Wi-Fi-enabled EX2F compact is a nice example of Apple-like design thinking: In order to do some things really well, it sacrifices other options. Instead of the indecisive kitchen-sink approach of Microsoft to its Surface, Samsung has laser-focused the design of the EX2F. But that’s not to say it lacks features.
I’m totally used to the iPad’s soft keyboard, but when I go back to my iPod touch it drives me crazy. I miss the letters, I hit enter when I mean to hit shift, and I generally get angry. I would not, however, buy a phone with a keyboard ever again.
But I might consider the Spike, or more likely, the Spike 2. Both are iPhone cases with flip-open keyboards, but the Spike 2 improves on the formula by getting out of the way when you don’t need it.
In its first year, the Mac sold just 372,000 units. PC clones were reaching two million units, or six times the amount of sales of the Mac. And things got worse from there, climbing to a vertiginous 60x by 2004.
Now, though, according to everybody’s favorite Apple analyst and Christopher Walken soundalike Horace Dediu, the gap has dropped to just 2:1 – if you count iOS in with OS X.
You iPhone’s headphone jack is just fine for listening to your MP3s with the crappy Apple-supplied earbuds, but what if you want something a little, shall we say, less terrible? You could of course spring for a high-end headphone amp with its own DAC (Digital Analog Converter), and pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege. Or you could dig $11 out from under the couch cushions and buy CableJive’s LineOut Pro.
If Apple made an iCamera, it would look like this. The Iris, a concept design by Mimi Zou, is so pared down that it doesn’t even have one button. And like Apple’s designs, this minimal approach brings some compromises.
Bought a new shiny, silvery compact camera? Think that maybe it’s a bit too silver? Then why not make it less silver by covering up the silver with some non-silver grip-tape? That’s exactly what PimpMyDigicam is offering in its Leather Kit for the Nikon J1, which guarantees that you’ll see less silver.
Or not. In an exhaustive (and for him, probably exhausting) 2,700-word article, Chris Suave has compared the icons of many apps that have moved from OS X to iOS (and sometimes back again). The results show that Apple is one of the worst and laziest offenders in the game.
Finally! Sure, we use that word far too often, but for the iCade Mobile, the physical D-Pad game controller for the iPhone and iPod touch, it seems somewhat appropriate. After what seems like years in development, and months since we saw it at CES, the iCade is finally available to buy at everybody’s favorite nerd-o-rama, ThinkGeek.
Navigon has added Google Street View to its iOS navigation app, as well as a few other enhancements — including the dangerous sounding “cockpit” mode. This probably won’t be the last independent app to include Google’s essential service after Apple kicked it out of iOS6, but it does at least mean we can keep using it when the new iOS ships this fall.
If you have any interest in shooting black and white photos with your iPhone, you probably already have Hueless, the excellent colorblind photo app. If not, now is a great time to get it, as the latest 1.1 update brings some neat new features.
The Flea 3 is a weird little camera: at first glance it appears to be a 4K webcam, which would mean the ultimate in chats with mom should your internet connections (and Skype) support it.
I reality though, it’s a dirt-cheap way to start a 4K movie rig. I’ll emphasize the “start” in that, though, as you’re going to need a lot more gear than the Flea 3 itself.
You know your product is successful when somebody starts selling accessories for it. But what about when people start selling accessories for accessories, which work together with the original product? This happens: the New iPad Credit Card Dock, a perspex frame which holds both and iPad and a Square credit card reader.
Dateline: Instagram website updated to allow comments and likes. The system goes on-line in July 2012. Mobile requirements are removed from the service.
Instagram begins to grow at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, July 29th. In a panic, Facebook tries to pull the plug.
This photo, from a “leaked Microsoft Research presentation,” shows a one-thumbed soft keyboard design for Windows 8. And – if you’ll excuse the pun – it certainly looks handy. It also looks dead fugly, which is why we’ll never see anything like it on the iPhone, despite the rumors of growing screens in the iPhone 5.
Here’s the typical course of a couple of world-changing new technologies:
Printing press. Steve Guttenberg created the moveable type press back in around 1400, shortly after the invention of beatboxing. At first it disrupted the monks' monopoly illuminated manuscripts (books with built-in reading lights), then came the pulp paperback, then comic books, and then people started typing letters to prison inmates.
Postcard. This innocent vacation staple was introduced in the 1800s. It’s a letter without an envelope which can be read by anybody as it travels from sender to recipient, and in this way was the inspiration for the inventors of email. Later, it was used to mail contest answers into Saturday morning TV shows, and in England a smutty variety emerged which is still available today. Then people started sending postcards to prison inmates.
Today, we have the iPhone. I’ll skip the last five years of its history and arrive at today. Now, people can send paper postcards to prison inmates using their iPhones.
“You can’t take it with you.” This is a saying usually uttered by those people who are bitterly jealous of their richer friends' and relatives' success. It refers to the fact that your money is no good when you’re dead.
But it could equally apply to many external battery packs for the iPhone, which you can’t take with you because they’re too big, and you’re not carrying a bag.
Enter the Gum, a tiny 2200mAH battery pack which fits in your pocket, and while it won’t help you in the afterlife, it will help you where it counts: in the actual real world of too-short battery life.