You all use and love Instapaper, right? Or perhaps Pocket, or Readability? These apps are the perfect way to put long articles aside for reading during downtime, or for browsing on a device better suited to the task than a desktop computer. But what about those times when you have a few moments and you just want to stop and read the website in front of your right now?
That’s where Read It Now comes in.
Do you know how to code a circle? If you’re a software developer, the answer is probably yes. But what about interface elements, complex icons and other fancy graphics? Sure, you could probably get it done, but what a pain. That’s what PaintCode is for.
PaintCode is a Mac app which takes your complicated vector-based designs and translates them into Objective C code, ready to be pasted straight into Xcode.
Just a few weeks ago, Lomo started selling craptastic 110 film cartridges so you could relive those bad old days of ugly, grainy photos you thought you’d left back in the 1980s.
Now, the horror is complete, for Lomo will also sell you a 110 camera to go with the film.
The iPad is many things, but one thing it is not is easy to hold. The Lady literally refuses to touch one when it’s naked (a sound policy in some other situations too), and even though I love the skinny feel of the iPads 2 and 3 in my hands, I too get a little nervous.
Higher Ground’s Protex is a case that not only protects the iPad, but makes it way easier to hold – and all without adding bulk or fugliness.
Take some iPhones (or iPod touches), a few tiny pico projectors and a whole lot of hard work and talent, mix with a Canon 5D and an HD cam, and you might end up with something resembling The Speed of Light, an mazing animation by The Theory.
Oh, and you might need a couple of toy cars, too.
An LED lighting panel to help with your iPhone photos. Sounds super-lame, right? Well, allow me to change your mind, because when you see the Kicker in action, you’re going to want the Kickstarter campaign to finish ASAP.
I love e-books. I love them so much that I’m considering buying a double-sided, sheet-feed scanner, chopping the spines of all my dead-treeware books and having an OCR frenzy on their asses.
What I don’t like is DRM. Not for any idealistic reasons (well, maybe a few) but for practical ones. My bookseller of choice is Amazon, as it has the best range and Kindle books work on any device. But the Kindle app for the iPad sucks, and with an update this week it is almost unusable. If only I could read my Kindle books in the beautiful iBooks app. Well, it turns out that I can. And what’s more, I can keep all of my books in a DRM-free format in the cloud, ready to be downloaded to any device, whenever I like. Here’s how.
Does Instagram really make your photos better? If you’re shooting them with the crappy camera in the original iPhone – for which the app’s grungy filters were designed – then the answer is yes. But what about the iPhone 4S, or any other camera – even film?
Allen Murabayashi decided to find out. He grabbed a handful of famous images from the web and ran them through everybody’s favorite photo grungifier. From Neil Leifer’s iconic 1965 shot of Ali vs Liston through Steve McCurry’s Kodachrome-tastic Afghan Girl to a shot from the royal wedding, all of them suffer from being Instagrammed.
Normally we leave camera rumors alone until the actual real thing is launched. But the stories whirling around the internet regarding the Nikon D600 are too much to resist.
The D600 is said to be an entry-level full-frame DSLR, coming in at a price way below the new D800, and also the amazing D700. This is a big deal as full-frame (35mm film sized) DSLRs have always been reserved for the high (and expensive) end of manufacturers’ lineups. And now, we have (purported) photos to prove it.
Writing Kit, every iPad-toting bloggers’ best friend, just got a small but significant update to v3.3. In addition to bug fixes (although not all of them) and some nice interface tweaks (sharing destinations now have service icons to help identify them quickly), the app now has support for URL schemes, letting other apps interact with it.
Aviary is a weird old service. It’s a web-based photo-editing suite that runs in HTML (and therefore the iPhone and iPad), but there’s no actual Aviary site where you can upload images and fiddle with them.
Previously, the easiest way to get access was to go to Flickr, but since nobody uses Flickr anymore, that was kind of lame. Now, though, somebody has licensed the Aviary APIs and made an iOS app. Right now it’s iPhone-only, but it’s pretty damn good.
It’s inevitable that any review of the Braven 650 portable Bluetooth speaker compares it to JawBone’s JamBox, and so will this one. Short answer? The Braven sounds better. Long answer? That’s a bit more complicated.
The iPad might seem to be the ideal tool for medical professionals — lightweight, always connected, reliable and with an all-day battery. But none of that will help you if you slip with a scalpel and suddenly have a gusher on your hands, or someone evacuates the contents of their ungrateful stomach all over your tablet.
What you need, doctor, is Griffin’s new AirStrap Mad.
It’s nearly Father’s Day, the time to say thanks to the man who took you fishing, taught you to ride a bike, built a radio for you from something called a “cats’ whisker” and was standing at your side when you killed your first deer. And maybe your second.
Or he just used to sit you in front of a DVD, while he microwaved dinner for both of you. Either way it’s time to give something back. And if you’re anything like us, that “something” will be an awesome iGadget. So sit back, add this page to your Instapaper, make yourself a bottle of milk with a tot of rum in it and enjoy the Cult of Mac Bumper Father’s Day Gift Guide. You’re welcome.
Imagine that you could just point your iPhone’s camera at your baby and it would immediately tell you his vital signs: heartbeat and so on. Or that you could fire up an app and it could pick out tiny, invisible movements from what looks like a still video. Using a process called Eulerian Video Magnification, boffins at MIT are doing this already.
Nikon has made two new lenses available for your photographic delectation. One is a dim superzoom for DX (crop-sensor) cameras — the 18-300mm ƒ3.5-5.6G ED — and the other is an equally dim short zoom for full-frame bodies, the 24-85mm ƒ3.5-4.5G ED VR.
The Kindle app has been updated to – supposedly – improve the reading experience on the iPad, and to add support for books with pictures: essentially kids books and graphic novels. And while the second is welcome the first – -to my eyes – actually looks worse.
We know that you Cult of Mac readers are also a bunch of photo nerds, so we thought that this week’s best-of list could be about cameras. You’re iPhone might be great (and even makes it into this list) but sometimes you need something more powerful, more rugged or just plain better. Here’s our list of the best cameras out these.
I suppose that product meeting for the V-Moda Vamp went something like this:
Designer: Here it is! The Vamp case. It’s a metal case for the iPhone.
Boss: What the hell is wrong with you? That thing is huge. It’s an embarrassment to the good name of V-Moda. My god. With a box that size you could fit in literally anything. ANYTHING!
(Light bulb goes off over designer’s head)
Man, is the Diff case a neat little iPhone case. It starts out as a tough case with a tripod mount (Zzzzz) but quickly picks up thanks to a clever cover and a pro-level lens mount.
You know the shutdown spinner on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch? If you own latest-generation hardware, it probably drives you crazy every single time you see it. Why? Because it is a lone holdout of non-Retina UI on Apple’s otherwise beautifully high-res OS. Now, in iOS6, this has – finally – been fixed.
Pris is a ridiculously simple new camera app for the iPhone which nonetheless manages to give you all the features you actually need, only without getting in the way. Shoot with the iPhone in portrait orientation and it’ll snap square photos and videos, ready for Instagram. Flip the iPhone into landscape and Pris will shoot super widescreen video and stills in a Star Wars-like 2.25:1 aspect ratio. There’s more, but in principle that’s the entire app.
These exclusive blurrycam shots, which I found on an SD card left on my kitchen table next to a half-empty bottle of scotch, show what we think is a prototype retina-display 13-inch MacBook. It seems that, along with the high-res retina display like that found on the iPad, it also comes with a large bezel and the option to buy the device in white.
With every new OS it releases, Apple manages to make some previously essential third-part apps obsolete. And iOS6 is no exception. In fact, the new iOS might even hold a record for the number of apps that it has rendered useless. Let’s take a look.
The new iOS6 Mail app gets a great new feature that isn’t obvious just reading the spec-sheet: Per-person and per-account alerts. Now you can let mail stay silent, and ping you only when a certain person sends you an email.