Are you a fan of plain-text files? Are you nerdy enough to stuff your todo lists into a todo.txt file? What if I told you that you could bring a lick of modernity to the your old-fashioned, candlelit ways? It’s called TaskBadges, and it adds a numbered badge to any plain-text list telling you how many uncompleted tasks are left inside.
Forget nano-coatings that render the individual components oin your iPhone waterproof. And forget bulky underwater cases that make your svelte phone look like something Nokia put out ten years ago. What you need for total iPhone protection is this amazing Japanese condom.
Lomo, the surprisingly successful maker of crappy plastic film cameras and accessories, has just launched a 110 film for its Orca camera. The emulsion is called Orca 110, and it is a high-contrast B&W film rated at ISO 100.
CloudPic is a great new Kickstarter project which connects your DSLR to your iPhone using Bluetooth 4. By plugging a dongle into the side of the camera, a fast connection is formed and you can beam photos to the iPhone, and from there have them upload automatically to the cloud service of your choice.
There’s probably only one thing you should be doing while you are using your iPhone, and that’s sitting down, or standing politely off to one side of the sidewalk. Anything else is likely a danger to both you and to passersby. The folks behind the Tuidle iPhone case though, think otherwise.
The Tuidle (pronounced “twiddle”) is billed as a case that will let you “multitask with one hand.” The schoolboy in me thinks that that sounds pretty dirty, but in fact it looks very handy indeed.
If you own an iPad and like to get out of bed on time, then you probably own a copy of Due, the super-simple alarm and timer app for iOS. It’s probably the easiest and best designed alarm app around, and now it is available on the Mac.
If you’re confused by iPhoto for iOS, then you’re not alone. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the cluttered and complex interface. There is light at the end of this long and painful tunnel, though, in the form of a very powerful photo cataloging and editing app. And a new book, called Hello iPhoto for iPad & iPhone, will help you get there.
Sony has announced a pair of new cameras today. One is the A37, an “SLT” (like an SLR, but without the flipping mirror) and the other is the NEX F3, a new mirrorless model.
We have our full review ready and coming to your screens in a few hours (11:30 PST), but for a quick look at the details, read on.
You might like to think that Cult of Mac deputy editor John Brownlee is a beacon of intelligence in the world of Apple news, but sometimes he can be as dumb as the rest of us. Example: When staying with the Lady and I recently, John came to meet me in a local bar.
I pulled out my brand-new, just-bought Wacom Bamboo stylus to show him, and mentioned that it had a super clean, easy-glide tip. I handed it over and watched as John absent-mindedly stabbed the virgin rubber repeatedly onto the filthy, sticky bar table. Thanks a lot, John.
If I had had the Hand Stylus, though, I needn’t have suffered. The biggest feature of the Hand is its retractable tip, but there’s more to it than that.
Believe it or not, some people still carry around laptops. Sure, those laptops are ultra-thin MacBook Airs, but they’re laptops nonetheless, used in ignorance of the real future of portable work — the iPad paired up with a Bluetooth keyboard.
Still, we don’t judge you luddites out there. And to prove it, we bring you this sleek little sleeve made just for your MacBook Air. It’s called the City Slicker, and it comes from SF Bags in San Francisco.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoB2BvA0nZ0
The Parrot DIA (pronounced like the Spanish for “day”) is a weird little gadget that also manages to be very cool indeed. Its main purpose is as a digital photo frame, but even there it fails to be dull — the screen is actually transparent, so it displays your photos like old-school film slides.
GarageBand’s velocity-sensitive drums and keyboards — which use the iPad’s accelerometers to know how hard you hit the screen — are nothing short of amazing. But just as you wouldn’t want to write a novel on a virtual keyboard, neither would a musician want to perform by trying to hit the little on-screen keys.
Enter The Carbon 49, a USB MIDI keyboard controller for the iPad. The controller, from Samson, connects to the tablet using your camera connection kit and has a slot up top to keep the iPad snug and safe as you play.
When snapping digital photos with our cameras and phones, it’s easy to forget what’s actually happening inside to get the light from your subject into the camera, and then up on its way to Instagram. So, if you ever wondered how a CCD sensor actually works, and how light is turned into electricity and shifted off the sensor, watch this great video by Engineer Guy Bill Hammack.
Our iPhones, iPad and Macs all come equipped to pump out music and movies, and yet the built-in speakers are merely adequate. Depending on whether you travel or stay at home, whether you use a Mac or an iPod to listen to your music, or whether you live in the countryside or cooped up with easy-to-rile neighbors, there is a speaker just for you. And here’s our list of the best.
Only in the world of technology could a company get away with calling these earbuds “wireless.” The product is called the BackBeat Go, and the company is Plantronics, and to anybody with more than zero eyes, it’s clear that they are connected by a wire.
Not so, according to the product blurb: “No wires, no hassle, no compromise,” it says. To which we might add “no brains.” Even better, just a few lines later you can read this sentence: “Inline controls let you pause music to take a call, change volume, or skip tracks.”
Inkflow is a new handwriting and drawing app for the iPad and iPhone, and it has one standout feature: you can select, move and resize anything on the page.
Do you hate those morons who wander through the streets whilst tapping text messages into their phones? Do you want to knock the stupid handset out of their hands every time you’re forced to swerve or step aside to avoid them? Then you might consider moving to Fort Lee, New Jersey, where police have started fining pedestrians who they catch texting while they walk.
Perian, the six-year old play-anything video package for the Mac, is about to be retired. It won’t be taken out round the back of the farm, forced to stand by an old bathtub and then shot in the back of the head and sprinkled with lime, but it’s close — the project will be donated to the open-source community.
I love playing games on my iPad, but I hate playing games with on-screen joysticks. Your finger drifts away from where it’s supposed to be, and you end up flailing around at a crucial moment. If only there was a way to put an actual, physical thumb pad on your iPad’s screen?
Of course, there is. It’s called the Fling, and was debuted some time ago by Ten One Design. I recently picked up the European version, which is the same thing only it’s sold by Targus, and comes in ugly packaging. I have been putting it through its paces in Grand Theft Auto III, Streetfighter 2 and others. How does it do?
I have a love/hate relationship with destruction videos. Love because, well, who doesn’t love seeing how tough our gadgets really are? And hate because smashing up perfectly good items shows everything that is shameful and bad about our wasteful modern society.
So it is with mixed feelings that I bring you Kai W of DigitalRev TV and his series of ever-more-cruel ordeals for the Canon 7D SLR.
The world’s best podcast network just launched an app. Now you can live stream podcasts direct to your iPhone from Dan Benjamin’s amazing 5by5 network using the new 5by5 Radio app.
Does the name of the day contain the letter “y”? Then it must be time for a new Kickstarter project. This time we bring you the Day Maker, a rather ingenious toaster-like alarm clock which pops up your iPhone when it’s time to get your lazy ass out of bed in the morning.
Leica seems to be on a roll, at least when it comes to making up crazier and crazier prices for its cameras. And nothing screams “overpriced” more than a special edition. Well, nothing except a special edition with “Hermes” in its name.
OK. There is one thing more expensive, a special edition Leica, with “Hermes” in its name, and with the whole thing written in French. Behold: the “Leica M9-P ‘Edition Hermès Jean-Louis Dumas’,” a camera that costs just $50,000.
As a rule, I don’t like thick folio-style iPad cases, and especially not ones that zip closed. So when I spied the Spigen Zipack in a consignment of cases that arrived some weeks ago, I put it on the bottom of the “to review” pile and ignored it.
However, it turns out that the Zipack’s combination of weird features, featherlight weight and decent amount of protection is a winning one. As there will likely be many folio-haters like me out there who would pass over this case on principal, I thought I’d give it a chance to be seen.
The official Etch A Sketch iPad case might be the coolest thing, like, ever, but does it actually turn your iPad into a working Etch-A-Sketch? No, it doesn’t. But the Etcher does, which somehow makes it even cooler.