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If you enjoyed Dylan Bennett’s great video on how and why noise affects your digital photos — which we brought you a couple weeks ago — then you’re going to love this one about depth-of-field. Depth-of-field often proves confusing, but simply put, it is the amount of your scene that is in focus.
With an update to v4.0, the Mac AirPlay server AirServer has gotten the ability to mirror the display of your iPad on your big-screen Mac. This is pretty big, as you can now not only send video and music to your Mac as you could before, but you can make presentations and even play games, wirelessly.
CineXplayer, the go-to iOS app for playing pretty much any kind of video you can throw at it, has been updated to include virtual surround sound. This gives you surround sound in stereo speakers or headphones instead of mixing Dolby Digital 5.1 surround down to a plain stereo signal.
Y’all know Instapaper, right? It’s the amazing read-later service from Marco Arment which lets you save anything your find on the web to read at your leisure on your iPhone, iPad or Kindle. Now a new, free, Mac App Store app called Read Later will let you read your articles on your Mac.
Square, the iOS credit-card company, wants to replace lame old cash registers with sleek iPads sporting its little square white credit card-reading dongle. The new Square Register app for iPad aims to do just that.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — This year I decided to cover the Mobile World Congress without a computer. Or at least, without my MacBook. I live in Barcelona, so I knocked out a couple of posts on my iMac when I was at home, but on the show floor and in the press lounge I relied solely on my iPad. And amazingly, it was up to the task. There are some annoyances, but with a combination of perseverance (or just stubbornness) and the right apps, I got a pretty easy system going.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — When we shuffle from meeting to product demo to boozy party it’s easy to forget what a weird place the yearly Mobile World Congress is. Tens of thousands of attendees flood Barcelona’s hotels and commandeer its taxis, while companies from tiny to huge spend a fortune to sell and promote their wares.
As Ferris Bueller might say, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it. Here’s a quick look at the best, worst and weirdest of this year’s show.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Snapily is an app that lets you snap 3-D photographs with your iPad or iPhone, and then view them with 3-D specs. You can even order 3-D lenticular postcards from the app and have them sent to your home. It would be amazing: if it worked.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — If you thought that Adobe’s new Photoshop Touch was just a cut down, iPad-sized version of the desktop app, think again. I just watched a hands-on demo here at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and this deceptively simple little app is pretty amazing.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — One of the big stories at this year’s Mobile World Congress is Android tablets. If last year saw the things popping out like maggots from a rotting wound, this year they are skittering across the floor like a carpet of startled cockroaches. And like cockroaches, they all look pretty much the same. So let’s take a look at a couple of them: ZTE’s PF100 and T98.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — What if you could swipe your credit card and then — moments later — have the transaction details appear on your phone. Better still, what if all of your payments could be organized in a beautiful app, an app which could actually make managing your money fun. This service now exists for your iPhone, and it’s called Boku.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Speck, the prolific and (very friendly) gadget case maker, had something very special on show at the Mobile World Congress Mobile Focus even last night: An iPad 3 case, which you see above, now liberated and comfortable in the Cult of Mac Barcelona HQ. But all is not as it seems. It turns out the case isn’t quite as mysterious as you might think.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — As ever, NTT DoCoMo has some weird new tech to show off at the Mobile World Congress. This year, it’s a cellphone battery that charges fully in just ten minutes. and if you’re really in a hurry, you can get enough juice to last a couple of hours in just a minute.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Last night I was treated to a security demonstration. Cryptography Research director Pankaj Rohatgi pointed a cheap, standard TV antenna at an iPod Touch several feet away, running standard RSA encryption operations.
On the screen of his oscilloscope was a sound-wave generated by his custom software showing distinct troughs at semi-regular intervals. These troughs, and their accompanying flattish peaks, represented the ones and zeroes of the private keys used in every secure communication we make today, sucked right from the iPod. With no further cracking required, all of your private operations can be read as if in plain text.
How is this done? From the electronic noise generated by every microchip as it goes about its processing duties.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Yesterday, Nokia announced its crazy new 41 megapixel camera phone, the PureView 808, and the world chuckled. Just how big is the damn phone, I wondered, when Cult of Mac Deputy Editor John Brownlee woke me up and told me the news. But last night I spoke to a Nokia engineer, and it turns out this camera is pretty smart after all.
First, while the sensor does indeed contain 41 megapixels, it doesn’t snap 41MP photos. Instead, the sea of noisy data collected from those pixels is combined in software to get 5MP photos. Why? It started with the desire to design a better zoom.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — There’s a curious flipside to Microsoft’s iron-grip on the minimum specs for Windows 7 phones: They’re pretty much all alike. This is clearly to Microsoft’s advantage — who cares what brand is on the box as longs as it runs Windows? But it makes it hard to write much about new handsets unless they have great style (Nokia) or, say, a fancy camera. And so there is almost nothing to say about the ZTE Orbit.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Samsung seems to be obsessed with adding easy-to-break, easy-to-lose accessories to its “phones” and tablets. The two Notes come with tiny, disappearing styluses, and this monstrosity — the five-inch Wi-Fi-only Galaxy S — has an antenna. Yes, heft this slab in your palm and you’ll be whisked back to the early 1990s, when phones were the size of bricks, and you pulled the antenna out to make and receive calls.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Samsung’s showing at this year’s Mobile World Congress is light compared to the scattering of new products companies like ZTE have vomited onto the market today, but it is curiously strong, despite being hampered by the still-sluggish Android OS. First up is the Note 10.1, a proper iPad-sized version of the ridiculous five-inch Note. It’s not much different from the Tab 10.1, but for the skinny Wacom-based stylus.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — When I first spotted the Aurasma booth, I thought it was yet another annoying app to serve ads on top of the real world, using augmented reality. And it actually is. Only before I could walk away, I got caught by the enthusiastic marketing folks and found out that the app is actually very cool indeed.
Aurasma is a kind of cross between augmented reality and Instagram. It works like this: You point the app at anything: a painting, a product package, a building, and Aurasma will remember it. You then pick a video or photo or a 3-D rendering to show up over that real-world scene whenever you point your iPhone’s camera at it again.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — SuperTooth, the company behind the excellent, beat-pumping SuperTooth Disco, are ready to boost their product lineup like their speaker boosts your music’s bass. First will be the imaginitively-named SuperTooth 2, followed by the dinky SuperTooth Mini, and some SuperTooth Bluetooth headphones.
BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — On Voicefeed is a neat new iPhone app which takes over your voicemail account and turns it into a kind of personalized everything box for your communications. The headline feature is being able to record personalized voicemail greetings for everyone you know, individually or by group. But there’s a lot more to it than that.
Hey, iPhone users with death wish: We have just the thing to tantalize your suicidal tendencies. It’s called the Xappr, and it’s an augmented reality gun for your beloved iPhone 4. Simply pre order the Xappr for $30, hop on the plane to any decent-sized U.S city and wait for the cops to see you and mow you down in a glorious rain of lead.
Are you a fan of Instagram? Of course you are. And are you also a fan of those frustrating memory games where you have to flip over cards and match the pictures? I thought not. But if you are — you freak, you — then InstaMatch might be right up your alley.
CineSquid Suction Mount from Cinetics on Vimeo.
Remember the Cineskates? They were a Kickstarter sensation, a bendy Gorillapod married to three roller skate wheels and useful for anything from smooth dolly shots to crazy bullet-time-like movies. Now Cinetics, the folks behind the Kickstarter project behind the Cineskates have come up with the Cinesquid, a tripod with suction cups for feet.
The year’s biggest phone expo is about to kick off in Barcelona, Spain. The Mobile World Congress always seems to have an unofficial theme. Last year it was non-Apple tablets and bad 3-D. In 2010 it was Windows Phone 7.
This year? This year looks set to be all about the Phablets. And Cult of Mac is going to be there first-hand to laugh at report on them.