Charlie Sorrel - page 150

Of the many keyboard options available to the iPad-toting traveler, one that is often forgotten is Apple’s own aluminum Bluetooth keyboard. It is light, tough and slides easily into a bag. But if you want it to last more than a few trips, you should probably use a case.

This last weekend I did what every good Englishman should do and returned to Blighty to get drunk in the name of the Queen. And as I figured there might also be some work to do, I packed my keyboard in Waterfield’s $29 Keyboard Slip case.

Cult of Mac’s favorite iPhone case for photographers — the Gizmon Rangefinder Case — has just been improved with new functions, plus a leather strap. And what’s more, it’s actually cheaper than it used to be.

Love the idea of a Thunderbolt docking station but hate the idea of paying $1,000 for an Apple Thunderbolt-equipped display? Then why not save yourself $750 and opt for the Matrox DS1?

I test a lot of gadgets, and so I inevitably have stacks of USB cables left over. I’m pretty sure that a geek like you also has more than his or her fair share of wires. But I’ll be that none of them is as handy as the Twig, a bendable, pose-able iPhone cable that doubles as a tripod.

Along with Instapaper, the iPad gets another big app update today. Comic Zeal — long my favorite comic-book reader — has gotten Retina support for the new iPad, along with a few interface tweaks which makes organizing your comics easier and sometimes a little less confusing.

Instapaper just got yet another update (developer Marco Arment seems to be on roll these last couple of months) and it brings a very neat new feature – when you arrive at any chosen location, Instapaper will automatically update your articles in the background. This should mean that never again will you be without your latest saved articles when you rush of to catch a bus.

When the folks at CanvasPop emailed to tell me they wanted to print one of my Instagram photos onto a canvas and mail it to me, I felt a little like I was being stalked. They’d even picked out the photo ahead of time – one I took while I was testing out the excellent TIFF-shooting 645 Pro app.

Still, I wasn’t so creeped out that I wouldn’t send my address, so a week or so later a huge package arrived with the picture inside. And it’s pretty neat.

Photography is one place where older is definitely better — for now at least. We take amazingly high quality photos with our digital cameras and then add filters, grain, vignetting and all manner of other imperfections to make those pictures look like they were shot on film cameras. And not even good film cameras: pretty much all of the effects we use mimic defects in the photo processes of old.

Now, with Osmo Leaker, we have an app whose sole purpose is to add simulated light leaks to our photos. Tap the film-cartridge icon and random orangey strips will be added to your photograph, just as if you had accidentally opened the back of the camera before you rewound the film. Don’t like the result? Tap again. Decided you actually did like the previous leak better? No problem, you can go back (in the Pro version).

When you’re done, you can export to the usual places — Facebook and Twitter — and also save to the camera roll or open the image in Instagram. And that’s it: Osmo Leaker is a one trick pony, but it performs that trick very well. There are two versions available, a free version and a $1 pro version. The Pro app has more effects, full-res export and no ads, as well as the back button for fickle mind-changers.

All this has me wondering how ridiculous this retro-fication might be if applied to other technology. Low-res movies with barrel distortion to replicate the crappy picture of an NTSC CRT TV? Crackles and pops applied to lossless music to simulate vinyl? Wait, that last one actually exists!

Source: iTunes

Via: iPhoneography

DC Copy is a new app that does one thing. It lets you copy your photos and videos to your iPhone’s camera roll via iTunes? "What?!" I hear you shout. "We can do that already!"

Well, yes, you kinda can, but it’s a testament to the true horror of using iTunes that this app exists at all, and that — furthermore — you’ll probably be downloading it by the end of this short post.

Why carry just a tiny iPad charging brick and a few miniature USB cables to juice all of your gadgets when you could instead schlep this huge "Portable Charging Station with Cable Rack" along with you instead? That’s what AViiQ hopes you’ll do, and it also wants you to pay $80-$100 for the privilege.

Face it. Your Apple TV is boring. It looks just like every other Apple TV, everywhere in the world. Sure, you might say it doesn’t matter, that the whole point of the little puck is to get out of the way and let you watch TV shows and movies, but that shows a lack of imagination. What you need, my friend, is a set of decals. And not just any old decals. You need decals that make your Apple TV look like a NES console.

We all know that the best cable management system is a Thunderbolt-equipped cinema display, but it is also just about the most expensive way to wrangle all the wires you need to support the life of your MacBook. So Rockpool Designs’ CableStrip might be the next best thing, and it costs just $10.

If William Blake was alive today, and was pitching an iPhone case on Kickstarter, he might have called it The Trygger. Alas, he dies in 1827, long before either the iPhone or Kickstarter were invented, leaving the fate of the Trygger in the hands of Scott Phillips and Joel Kamerman.

The Trygger is a bumper-style case with a very clever sliding back which houses a polarizing filter. And if you have a nagging feeling that polarizers are the new fisheyes in the world of iPhone accessories, you’d be right — we covered a clip-on polarizer just last week.

“If you see a stylus they failed.” That might be everybody’s favorite Steve Jobs quote about touch screens, but the fact is the finger is terrible at both drawing and writing — just look at your kid’s scrawlings up on the refrigerator door if you don’t believe me.

If you want to make pictures and words that the rest of the world can recognize as such, you need a little help. Luckily, iPad accessory makers also ignored Jobs’ complaints and set out to fill the world with wonderful iPad pens. Here are the best you can buy.

iStorage 2 in action

IStorage 2 is the coolest iPad file manager I have yet seen. It has a bunch of missing parts, and a few UI weirdnesses, but this DropBox-and-iCloud-connecting app uses the iPad’s touch interface and graphical horsepower to bring us the iPad file manager we always wanted.

Problem: Your iPhone takes amazing pictures, but when the sun is shining, you can’t see the damn screen. Solution: a giant eyepiece that sucks onto the iPhone’s screen and offers you a viewfinder shielded from the light of the sun. It’s called the Daylight Viewfinder, and it is coming to you via Kickstarter.

Imagine a JawBone JamBox, complete with its cute combination packaging/display case. Now imagine that it has been shrunken down into a two-inch cube. Further, try to picture a box that has had the Bluetooth radio extracted and replaced by a high-end DAC (digital analog converter) and a quality headphone amp. Now, keep this picture on your head as you reach around and pat yourself on the back and hear the theme from Rocky in your head.

Congratulations — you have successfully imagined the NuForce Cube, whilst simultaneously engaging all three of your main sensory systems.

This is an article about using BitTorrent with other OS X apps to automate the downloading and converting of TV shows, adding metadata and then transferring them to your iPad to be watched. Some of you will rage that this is immoral, illegal (in your country) or both. Others will say that BitTorrent is, like, totally legit and is used every day for, like, downloading Linux builds, man.

I don’t care. What I do care about is watching TV Shows on my iPad, complete with subtitles, metadata, cover art and converted into a format that won’t kill the battery whilst playing back. I would buy these from the iTunes Store if I could, but as I live in Spain, I can’t. Here’s how to do it yourself.

Case manufacturers are finally realizing that we don’t want to smother our skinny iPads inside fat, padded cases. And now even high-end, “luxury” accessory makers are offering slimline covers which are not only lovely to look at but also practical enough not to tear off the iPad and toss away in a fit of rage.

Today we take a look at Pielframa’s Smart Case, a rather hot take on Apple’s own Smart Cover.

One of the hallmarks of great Apple software is that it makes you smile like a kid when it does something unexpected and undeniably cool. The first time you pinch-to-zoom, for example, or when you swipe over a picture in iPhoto for iOS and it automatically applies a correction depending on what’s under your finger.

The other hallmark of Apple’s apps is that they look great.

Scalado’s PhotoBeamer manages the first of these things, appearing to work as if by magic. On the second, though, it fails somewhat.

Imagine the scene: You’re in the middle of a particularly intense iPhoneography session, and the photos you’re getting are gold. You snap one keeper after another and then shift over to SnapSeed or some such app to really spice things up. But you’re so engrossed in the process of editing that you don’t notice your iPhone’s battery is almost dead until you get the dreaded pop-up warning.

If you are equipped with Photojojo’s keychain backup charger, then you needn’t worry. Just flip the top, plug it in and continue working.

The Halopad is — not surprisingly — an iPad stand in the shape of a halo. Not that you’ll find this halo floating over the heads of saintly prophets — instead it is simply a chunky, lightweight plastic ring which has slots cut into it for propping the iPad at various angles. It’s simple, it’s cheap, and it’s not ugly.

Another day, another neat, camera-like iPhone case. But I promise you that this one is different. First, it manages to be highly functional without doing very much at all. Secondly, it’s actually a case you will want to keep on your iPhone and carry around with you all day.

Vowels are dropped from names so commonly these days that it can only end with the leftover consonants becoming so jammed together that they will densify and densify into some kind of alphanumerical black hole, dragging in all words until us humans will be rendered mute, and I will be forced to shut up once and for all.

And if you thought that paragraph had nothing to do with the next gadget, you’re dead wrong. It’s called the Statc (missing vowel) and it’s a camera “tripod” consisting of nothing but a big lump of super-strong magnet (black-hole-like attraction).

It looks like somebody finally answered my prayers for an iPad 3 case which would let me take photos without dropping the thing or looking like a complete dork. Instead, I can look like I’m some kind of clipboard-wielding
corporate drone taking a photo with an iPad.

The case is called the SlateSHIELD (I think you’re supposed to shout the last part whilst punching the air with your free hand) and it has a rotating handle on the back, as well as a flip-out kickstand. And crucially, it isn;t huge and fat.