I scoffed whan I first saw the PR e-mail for this Bluetooth iOS remote. Literally: I made a weird, half-snoring, half LOL-ing noise into my coffee. If that doesn’t count as a “scoff,” I don’t know what does.
Anyhow, after my initial (and messy) reaction, I quickly changed my mind. This thing packs in so many useful funcions, and does it in such a (fairly) handsome package that now I’m considering buying one.
Not only do Gizmon’s Clip-On Lenses offer a smart and speedy way to mount them on your iPhone, but they also break with the now-common fisheye-telephoto-wideangle triumvirate (mostly at least), instead coming in fisheye, polarizer and “3-image mirage filter” flavors. Better still, they will also play just fine with your iPad 2 or 3.
Tivoli, maker of fine old-fashioned radios with new-fashioned guts, has finally got with the game and added Bluetooth to its classic Model One and PAL lines. So now, in addition to beautiful, warm-sounding (mono) radio and music piped in over the wire, you can also hijack grandma’s favorite program wirelessly.
Take one look at my cellphone and you’ll either laugh at me, pity me or envy me. It’s a Sony Ericsson P900, a brick of a smartphone introduced in 2003, and I got it when my P800 was stolen from my bag in London’s Soho (at that time, Orange in the UK gave you free insurance for your phones — go figure).
And after a few years of struggling with various dumbphones and the execrable Samsung Behold, I’m back to the P900 and I love it. Why? Because it was designed to be used like the iPhone, not crippled by carriers like everything else these days.
Apologies in advance for yet another camera adapter post, but this one — as you’ll see — is a biggie: The Fujifilm M-Mount adapter. But first, a short bit of history.
Sony has long had an inexplicable love affair with proprietary connectors, accessories, anything. From Memory Sticks to ATRAC Minidiscs to annoying headphone sockets on phones, Sony’s philosophy seems to be “if you can piss off a customer, why not do it?”
And so it is with the NEX mirrorless cameras. Excellent devices in almost every way, unless you want to use a flash, in which case you have to spring for one of Sony’s own specialty units. Still, this customer hatred is at least good news for third-party accessory makers, and NEX Proshop will now sell you an adapter that adds a proper hot-shoe and PC socket to your NEX camera.
You know how in many Google web apps you can just press CMD-? to bring up an overlay containing all the keyboard shortcuts available? (you did know that, right?) Well, now you can do the same with any app on your Mac using the sweet and simple CheatSheet, a free app with this one single purpose.
Ever notice that Instapaper never seems to switch off your iPad or iPhone’s display while you’re reading, no matter how long you get distracted while reading, nor how slowly you read a page, whereas iBooks and Kindle regularly go dark if you don’t keep up a good pace? No? That’s because you’re not supposed to, even though Instapaper developer Marco Arment spend quite a lot of effort tweaking the app to do it.
The Pebble watch is pretty neat and all ($10 million can’t all be totally wrong), but even with e-ink and low-powered Bluetooth it still needs charging way more than a regular watch. It’s also rather plasticky and dorky-looking.
The Cuckoo might not be able to fix the second part, looking as it does like a rather dull take on a Swatch, but it can certainly fix the first.
Protection doesn’t have to be bulky. Think of an cardboard egg box: barely bigger than the eggs it contains, but tough enough to stop its precious cargo from breaking even when stacked up on shelves in a supermarket, or when (presumably) mis-treated by that same supermarket’s delivery drivers.
So it is with Greatshield’s VIES case, a zip-up slip cover that is slim, weighs next to nothing and yet offers a decent amount of protections for your iPad 1, 2 or 3.
Ideally, we’d all carry our iPhones as God intended — naked. But just as our pink and delicate human bodies need protection from the elements, so does the iPhone. Sometimes all it needs is a skimpy Speedo, other times a full suit of body armor, but you can be sure there’s a case for every occasion. Here’s our roundup of the best iPhone cases out there.
Joby’s can-do, go-everywhere flexible Gorillapod now comes in a range of hot, hot hues to match your camera. As long as your camera is lime green, fuchsia, sky blue or charcoal in color, that is.
Speaking of Lightroom and iOS, what if you could take the beautifully shot RAW files from your SLR, bring them into Adobe’s super-powerful processing app and… apply Instagram filters? Now you can, thanks to a $5 set of presets from Casey Mac Photo.
Lightroom-using iPad owners, get ready for some good news: Photosmith 2 has just launched a few hours early, and is just as amazing an update as we hoped it would be.
Photosmith is a combination of iPad app and Lightroom plugin (Mac or PC) which will sync photos between the two machines, and let you edit metadata, add keywords and otherwise triage your photos on your iPad before sending them off to Lightroom for editing.
V2 adds batch tagging, two-way sync (for sending photos from your Mac to the iPad), smart groups, metadata presets and a lot more. A full review will follow, but our first impressions are below.
Pentax new K30 SLR might be just the camera for you if you a) have a collection of K-mount lenses knocking around and b) you like to knock your camera around. The headlines: The K30 is a tough, weatherproof DSLR with a 16MP APS-C sensor, a top shutter speed of 1/6000sec, 1080p video (at 24p and 30p) and a maximum ISO of 25,600.
Russian news website The Village got sick of douche parking (apparently a big problem there) and decided to do something about it. How? By using an iPhone app tied into social media sites.
The app lets users snap photos of badly parked cars and upload them, but what happens next is pure genius.
Pssst! You there, the one just about to buy that Airport Express for your AirPlay setup. Don’t waste your $99 on that plastic wall-wart. Come over here and I’ll sell you this nice white plastic AirPlay brick instead. How much? Well, seeing as it’s you, just $199, although it normally goes for $275.
Oh, by the way. It’s called the playGo AP1. You’re welcome.
You know the Pebble, that iPhone-compatible wristwatch which raised ten million dollars on Kickstarter? Turns out somebody else made one already. It’s called The Meta Watch, and has been available for Android for more than half a year.
Of course, being an Android accessory means that nobody has heard of it. That’s about to change, though, as a new Bluetooth 4 update means it will also work with the iPhone and new iPad.
If I was to ask you what kind of product is the PlugBook, what would you say? If you guessed that it’s a power adapter in the shape of a book, then congratulations! You just won today’s Cult of Mac Cup Of Awesomeness, which means you can go have a drink alone in your local bar.
“Oh. Oh. Oh!” was the ejaculative ‘sentence’ I uttered when I saw the press release for this new Micro Four Thirds lens. It comes from Panasonic, and runs from 12-35mm, or 24-70 in old money, and also packs in image stabilization.
That’s fine. But the reason I’m excited is that the maximum aperture is a constant ƒ2.8 along the whole zoom range — a first for mirrorless systems says Panasonic.
Finally, a magnetic iPhone mount that won’t embarrass you, either when actually mounted on the wall or in transit. It’s called the Wallee M, and it is about as sleek as a mounting set could get.
Imagine that you could buy a tiny USB-powered box that detected your motion like Microsoft’s Kinect, only instead of watching you jump around a room, it watched your hands and fingers. Imagine that the box was sensitive enough to track the tip of a pencil tracing out letters in a 1cm square of space, and to turn that into accurate handwriting on the screen.
Amazingly, that box is available for preorder right now. It’s called the Leap, and it works with your Mac.
You know those awful bendable lamps that coil from your computer’s long-suffering USB port and let you point the cold, bluish-green LED light in any direction except the one you want? Well, somebody took one of these silvery snakes, improved it, turned it into an iPhone charger and gave it a ridiculous name: The Une Bobine. It’s probably French or something.
FreezePaint is a very neat iPhone app that lets you “remix” the world around you. Or rather, it allows you to make a scrapbook of anything you see, just by pointing your iPhone camera at it and painting in the parts you want to keep. And don’t be put off by the photos on the site — they’re a little cheesy, but when you actually start playing with the app, you’ll be surprised by its potential.
I write a ton on my iPad these days, which lets me work wherever I like (usually in bed) and concentrate way better than I can working on my giant-screened iMac. Thanks to our complex blogging back end here at Cult of Mac, it’s still easier to add pictures and other bits and pieces with the Mac, but the writing part is so much better on the iPad that I try to do it as often as I can.
I figured I’d show you a few of the apps I used. Below you’ll find my favorite writing apps for the iPad.