The just-launched Instagram for Android is great news. Now all your Android-using friends who insisted on putting photos up on Facebook can finally leave the dark side. But will they get the same great Instagram experience as we do on the iPhone? Matthew Panzarino of the Next Web decided to find out, and loaded up his account on both his iPhone and a giant Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
The surprise is that — in some respects — the Android version is better than the iPhone one.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZC8fX1HHx3A
The Fling controller from TenOne Design (soon to be reviewed) is a great way to add a physical to your iPhone or iPad, just by suction-cupping it onto the screen. This means that it works with any game on your iOS device that uses an on-screen “joystick.”
The downside is that it moves at the worst moments: I have wiped out in more than one GTA car chase this way. But designers at the Keio University in Japan have come up with another idea. A joystick which uses the iPhone’s camera as a controller.
A year after the launch of the Lensbaby Pro for DSLR cameras, the light-bending lens comes to mirrorless cameras. The upmarket version of the regular Composer can now be had in models that fit Sony NEX, Samsung NX and Micro Four Thirds cameras, and I can’t wait to get my hands on one.
Ever wonder how those funky aperture numbers ended up on your lens barrel? Or who chose those odd f-numbers that run in the seemingly arbitrary 1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32 sequence? And why does the biggest number refer to the smallest lens-hole?
Now, video sketching supremo Dylan Bennett is back to explain f-stops to you. Grab a beverage, sit back and enjoy 15 minutes of easy-to-follow explanation. With drawings!
There are more iOS text editors in the App Store than there are stupid giant-screen iPhone rumors “sourced” by Digitimes. And this makes it impossible to choose. Does Elements support iCloud? Does Readdle Docs play nice with TextExpander? And have you ever even heard of FastEver XL? The answer to all these questions, plus many you didn’t even think to ask, are in Brett Terpstra’s exhaustive, crowd-sourced iOS Text Editor roundup.
Apple and Google, sitting in a tree, f-i-g-h-t-i-n-g. We know that the Apple/Google relationship has gone from best friends to hate/hate, and that Apple has done its best to distance itself from its former lover. Apple has already bought mapping company C3, and is using OpenStreetMaps in iPhoto for iOS. But the Apple-designed map tiles are a little hokey. What the Maps app needs is these beautiful CC licensed tiles from Stamen Maps.
I’m not sure if Kickstarter is the best place for software projects, especially complex ones involving video editing. That said, I like the look of Vival quite a bit. It look like the perfect way to sweep up all those little clips I snap on my iPad and iPod Touch, and automagically turn them into montages.
After years of tweaking and improvement, ioShutter is finally here. ioShutter is a simple cable that connects your iPhone to your camera and allows you to control it using an app. Remote shooting, time-lapse sequences and even photos triggered by sound can all be programmed in easily using the free companion app. And best of all, no fancy dock connectors are required: ioShutter connects through the headphone jack.
Thanks to a great article by our own John Brownlee, we now know how easy it is for apps and people to stalk you using location-sharing services like FourSquare and Facebook. And now the more paranoid among you might be wondering, just how do I turn these things off?
Theoretically, you would have already checked the privacy settings when you signed up. But that’s like reading the manual before you switch on a new gadget: Almost nobody ever does it. So here’s a quick guide to locking down FourSquare, and a rather more involved guide to shutting down Facebook.
If you’re going to launch a real product on April 1st, then you may as well make it seems as ridiculous as possible, and that’s just what Brian Holmes did yesterday when he announced The Littlest Black Book for the iPod Nano, the new tiny, nano-sized Moleskine-style case from Brian’s company, Pad&Quill.
I actually mailed Brian yesterday to see if this was for real, and it is. There’s even a Kickstarter page to prove it, which is already almost a quarter of the way to the $4,500 goal.
Well, here we go again. Despite the crowing of many “journalists” looking for a click, or so-called consumer agencies which have dumped objective reviews to chase page views, the public loves it some new iPads. According to a survey by ChangeWave, fully 82% of respondents said they were “very satisfied” with the new iPad. And adding in the numbers for “somewhat satisfied,” (16%) we get a 98% satisfaction rating. Not bad, right?
Thankfully for tech bloggers the Anglo Saxon world over, this year April Fools Day aka All Fools Day fell on a Sunday. That didn’t stop PR folk waking from a fitful, hungover sleep, dragging their laptops into bed and sending out a “funny” press release, which is why you should probably still watch out today.
But above the dross stands — as it does every year — ThinkGeek. In the past, we have seen such April Fool wonders as the Taun Taun sleeping bag for kids, the iCade iPad arcade cabinet and the 8-bit tie. This year, ThinkGeek went to town with a whole range of fake gear. Here we take a look at the best.
We love us a good iConcept design here at Cult of Mac, and we especially love those which appear to be better than the Apple product they are based on. So I’m happy to bring you Enrico Penello’s iPod Nano Touch, a great-looking update to the terrible iPod Nano.
You know what? You could probably do a blog about only iPhone cases and you’d still have something worth reading. Provided that the world keeps coming up with cases like this super-specialized iPhone Scuba Case, an underwater shell which gives you access to the camera app as you dive, that is.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Nz7ZsXLDOQI
The Woodero is a slightly different take on the wooden iPad case. Instead of a solid sleeve (like several Bamboo cases we have seen) or a Moleskine-like book (like the baltic birch-frame Pad & Quill), it works like a cross between a pencil case and a desk drawer. It also looks rather impractical.
You know, I used to think custom iPad stands were kind of a dumb idea, especially as the Smart Cover is already a stand. But I watch movies and TV shows in bed with The Lady, using an iPad and JamBox balanced on one of those breakfast tray/table things. And after one too many iPad tumbles, I’m ready for a sturdier stand.
And the iKlip looks as good as any.
Bleeding hearts the world over are very happy with the news that Apple and Foxconn are working together to make employee working conditions better in their Chinese factories. But there is a group of people who aren’t so pleased about the reductions in working hours: the workers themselves.
TiltShift Generator is one of the old school of iPad photo-editing apps, and has just been updated to play nice with the iPad 3’s Retina Display. But that’s not all. You can now shoot images directly into the app, which has the effect of making this one of the first iPad-native, Retina-ready photo shooting apps around. And while the preview of the image is a little weird, it takes some pretty great shots.
This iPhone 4 money clip is either the best or the stupidest solution to the wallet/iPhone carrying problem that I have ever seen. The trouble is, I can’t quite work out which it is.
Do you have an old film SLR lying around that you promise yourself you will one day load up with film and take out shooting? Well, forget about that — it’s just taking up space and picking up dust. You should instead do what Etsy-er Roberto Altieri does, and turn it into a dock for the camera you actually use every day: Your iPhone.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=tN6jFuuQFVY
You might look pretty dorky these days if you make a frame from your fingers and start sizing up the world around you. But it’s actually a surprisingly good way to separate out parts of the landscape, especially for artists using pencils or paint who may not be carrying a camera.
But what about combining the two? That’s just what the nerds have done down at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences in Japan. The Ubi-Camera is a tiny digicam which uses your fingers as the viewfinder, and even allows you to zoom.
This is the Galileo, a tilting, spinning 360˚ camera mount for your iPhone. It can pan, enable cool moving time-lapses, or even just work as a powered iPhone dock (it comes with a USB cable and a lithium-polymer battery).
But when you see the video below, with its wonderful a-ha moment, you’ll want one right away.
Instapaper has just been bumped from v4.1 to 4.1.1, But despite this tiny numerical increment, there are a few big changes worth writing about.
Marco Arment, the coffee-slurping, BMW-driving playboy developer of the iPad’s best read-later app, has fixed a few bugs introduced in the Retina-ready v4.1 released last week. These include some odd rendering problems for the new default font, Elena, and some speeding up to the page animations which were slowed down by some weird iPad 3 oddities.
But there are also a few new features, and one reversion that should please the luddites who hate the cool cell-table layout of the article list.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=T_P5H3XZ1-Y
I shoot a bunch of video these days. It’s so easy, as everything from my iPod to my iPad to even my camera shoots HD video. And editing it is a blast using iMovie on iOS. But what I don’t like, and what keeps me from editing much of the video I shoot, is dragging through the footage to find the good parts.
Enter Highlight Hunter, a Mac (and PC) app which runs tirelessly through any amount of video and separates out the highlights into discrete 30-second clips, ready for further editing.
IPhoto for iPad is pretty amazing and, like most of Apple’s iApps, much of the functionality is hidden away like the sweet, sweet meat of a walnut hidden inside its shell. Much of the app is gesture based and, while many actions have menu-driven alternatives, some tricks are gesture-only. Here’s a long list of ways that you can navigate and control iPhoto, using just swipes, taps, twists and pinches.