You might not know this, but back in the 1700s there was no iPhone, and therefore — shockingly– no Instagram. It may also surprise you to know that the English were once forward looking, inventive and curious as a nation, and so they came up with their own way to grungify the views they saw on vacation, and (probably) their breakfasts.
If Kickstarter were a forest, you wouldn’t be able to see it for all the iPhone camera adapter cases littering its leafy, money-begging hummocks. And here we bring you another photo-friendly sapling of an invention, only this one is a little different. It’s called the Magnifi, and it works with pretty much any piece of imaging equipment that ends with “-scope” (or “-lars, as we shall see in a second).
You have a camera, and maybe you have an old flashgun lying around the place. Problem: while you know what to do with the camera, even in all-manual mode, you are terrified of that flash. Used on top the camera it washes everything out and makes it look like a drunken birthday party photo taken in a bar. Used off the camera… well, in that direction there be dragons.
You really should learn to use off-camera flash. But seeing as you never will, Photojojo’s neat set of flash-filters will at least give that old strobe something to do.
The Blackmagic Cinema Camera is calling itself a “digital film” camera, and with a 2.5K sensor and a 13-stop dynamic range, that description mightn’t be far off the mark. Amazingly, it’s also cheap — in the relative terms of movie cameras, that it. The Blackmagic comes in at “just” $3,000.
VoodooPad, Gus Mueller’s amazing little desktop Wiki, has been updated to v5 on the Mac and v2 on iOS. The big news is that it has dumped Mobile Me syncing and instead now syncs via DropBox. There are lots of other tweaks and new features, but Dropbox — and by extension any cloud-syncing service — is the big one.
I know, I know — it’s yet another power plug. But you’ll like this one, I promise you, because it solves a headache I guarantee you’ll have experienced.
It’s called the Plug Power, and it frees up that pesky leftover socket on the power-strip that has been hemmed in by all the other odd-sized adapters.
645 Pro bills itself as an app which will turn your iPhone into a DSLR. At first glance, it seems like this has been achieved by mimicking the buttons and LCD panel of a modern SLR, and to an extent that’s true. But the real meat here is under the hood: 645 Pro shoots uncompressed JPEGs and TIFFs, and gives the closest that we’re likely to see to RAW images from the iPhone’s camera.
Way back in the dark days of the 1990s, when smartphones had styluses and mobile apps were made from Java, I yearned for a way to stream music from my Sony Ericsson P900 to my stereo via Bluetooth. At the time, it was impossible.
Fast forward to the present day (by drilling down through several hard-to-navigate menus and hitting the tiny “skip” button with the tip of the stylus) and there is an embarrassment of choice. These days I’d rather pick up my JamBox and carry it into the living room rather than fire up the proper stereo that’s already in there.
Joining this wealth of wirelessness is the Audio Cube from Satechi, an inexpensive, pocket-sized Bluetooth speaker with all of the features you’d expect.
Remember the Padcaster? It was a photography rig made to turn the new iPad into a shallow-focusing movie camera, and it was [teased](https://www.cultofmac.com/156157/padcaster-turns-new-ipad-into-shallow-focusing-movie-camera/) by the makers Manhattan Edit Workshop last month. Now, the Padcaster has been revealed at NAB 2012, and it is just what we thought it would be — a way to mount big lenses on the iPad 3 and turn it onto a movie camera.
PicPlayPost is supposedly a way to make video diptychs of your precious moments, and then share them via the usual social networks. But if you grew up in (or otherwise managed to live through) the 1980s, you’ll know exactly what this app is for: remaking the cheesy title sequences of 1980s TV shows like Dallas.
Abvio has updated its trio of iPhone fitness apps — Cyclemeter, Runmeter and Walkmeter — with iCloud support and a bunch of new features. The biggest improvement, though, is that they are no longer annoying to use.
The Retrospective 7 is another one in Think Tank’s great lineup of stealthy-ish camera bags. This one distinguishes itself by slapping a pocket on the side which is designed to hold an iPad or an 11-inch MacBook Air.
645 Pro is a new app that claims to shoot RAW images with your iPhone. It also offers control over almost every aspect of photo-taking, and comes on like an app that turns your iPhone into a DSLR. But let’s get back to that RAW business, which we all know is impossible.
I’ll come out and say it at the top of this review: Mattebox is hands-down the best camera app I have used on iOS. That it was launched in December of last year and I only found out about it today is something of an embarrassment.
If you love the richness of features and tweakability of something like Camera+, then Mattebox may not be for you. But if you ever picked up a Leica and loved how the camera seemed to disappear, allowing you to just get on and shoot, you’re gonna be out by $5 in the next few minutes.
When traveling, I achieve tangle-free gadget nirvana with Griffin’s stubby little USB cables, a set of short, stiff connectors which are impossible to tie a knot in, let alone get twisted up with each other. But Aviiq’s new Ready Clips (slogan: “They bend over backwards for you”) go one better. Not only are they stiff yet pliable, they also have a built-in clip for securing them into a pocket.
Speaking of Wi-Fi connected cameras, Samsung’s entire new range of NX mirrorless cameras has Wi-Fi inside. This is an improvement on Nikon’s new D3200 – also announced today – which requires an awkward dongle to do the same trick.
There are three new models, the NX20 and NX210, which replace last-year’s NX10 and NX200. There is also the brand-new entry level NX1000. All share the same 20MP sensor as the old NX200.
We’ve been banging on about connecting proper cameras to the internet for quite a while now, and it seems that at last these cameras are starting to catch up to the world of smartphone cameras. Nikon’s new D3200 SLR updates the D3100 with some slightly better specs, but the big news is that it can be used with an optional Wi-Fi unit for sending photos to your iPhone, iPad, or whatever piece of junk you use instead.
If you’re thinking “Whatever, Charlie. This is Nikon. How much does this thing cost?” then I have your answer. A surprisingly cheap $60. That’s way less than an Eye-Fi card, and hopefully it’s way more reliable.
Path Finder has long been a super full-featured Finder replacement for OS X, and now it has been updated to version 6. I have been trying Path Finder on and off for years now, but finally gave up as it’s pretty much impossible to kill the native Finder completely.
Add to this the fact that the Finder doesn’t suck nearly so much as it used to, and that I find most of what I want with Launchbar and Spotlight these days and I’d all but given up on Cocoatech’s offering. But as v6 adds support for file tagging and batch renaming which – in addition to it’s already impressive line-up of features – might make it worth another look.
For anyone who spends a lot of time in trains and planes, noise-canceling headphones are pretty much essential. But if you’re walking the streets, then noise canceling can be a pain or even a hazard, isolating you a little too much from your environment.
Luckily, the Able Planet Linx Audio Clear Harmony headphones sound pretty good with noise cancelation both on and off. And they’re also comfy enough to keep on throughout a long journey.
If you have a DSLR, I hope you opted for the 64GB model when you bought your new iPad – MIC Gadget has just announced a new camera connection kit which will let you slurp in your huge RAW (and not-so-huge JPEG) files from your Compact Flash cards, SD cards, microSD cards and even via USB direct from the camera.
Unless you are some kind of OCD music nerd, your iTunes library is likely a mess. Sure, you always meant to properly assign genres to your old Napstered tracks, or delete all the one-off songs in your library (that old Rick Astley track you used to think was so funny, for instance). But of course you’ll never get around to it without some help.
Doug Adams has been making amazingly useful Apple Scripts to do this for many years now, but if you’ve used them, then you’re the alpha geek I already mentioned above. Now, though, Doug has packed these functions into a $2 app for the Mac, and it is the perfect way to finally spring clean your filthy, crusted music library. It’s called TrackSift.
There are plenty of add-on lenses for the iPhone’s great camera, but if you’re shooting movies, the sound is still going to suck. The iPhone’s mic does a fine job of picking up sound, but maybe it picks up a little too much, or maybe it gets freaked out by a little wind and starts to sound awful?
What you need is a boom mic, and luckily Photojojo will sell you one specifically made for the iPhone.
Those of you waiting for the big Spotify press event today (12 noon EST) in hope that an iPad app will (finally!) be announced, I have something for you in the meantime. It turns out that a Swedish developer already released a free Spotify iPad app — two weeks ago. It’s called Spotable, and while it’s simple, it’s pretty slick.
When the iPhone launched, “pundits” said that it would fail thanks to the lack of a physical keyboard. Then the iPad debuted to the same knee-jerk whine. Years passed, and tens of millions of units were sold, yet there are still people who think they want a keyboard to take up half the face of their device, all the time. For you, my dear Luddite friends, there is the TK-MBD041, a tiny Bluetooth keyboard that will mimic your precious (and tiny) BlackBerry buttons, and packs a special secret function (spoiler – it works as a phone handset).
Gemini is a Mac app that does one thing: Find duplicate files on your Mac. You just point it at a directory (your home folder is a good place to start) and sic it on your files. After a few moments it gives a list of anything that is doubled-up on your machine, and then the fun begins.