Charlie Sorrel - page 65

If you ever tried to look at one of Reddit’s excellent AMAs (Ask Me Anything) on the iPad, or even the desktop, you will have experienced the a sense of futility, the feeling that there are many gems buried in the threads that you’ll never read because it’s too damn ugly and messy.

Interviewly takes these threads – where various celebs and interesting people answer questions from Reddit users – and cleans them up into something that looks more like a feature fro a Sunday magazine that a forum
thread.

After some confusing starts, a software update makes the neat Transporter into a true alternative to cloud services like Dropbox or Google Drive. Previously, the Transporter was a hard drive which could stay in sync with another Transporter kept anywhere, letting you have a safe and up-to-date offsite back up at all times.

Now, finally, the software has adde in features that turn this connected storage into a proper cloud service. A cloud service that’s hosted by you, and not by the NSA.

I just upgraded my desk to a 1.65-meter monster, a €40 workbench from the hardware store that I cut down to a 64cm height, and which can support up to 200 kilos. If you’re still not with the metric system (and why would you be? After all, it was only introduced like 215 years ago), that means it’s big enough for two people to work at it or stand on it.

But it still gets messy. What I need is a pal to tidy it for me. A DeskPal maybe?

Remember Horizon, the video app that won’t let you shoot portrait video, keeping the horizon horizontal however you orient your camera? Well, Orient is just like that, only for stills, and it looks pretty neat – as long as you don’t mind a drop in resolution.

Remember when Google launched Gmail with 1GB storage ten years ago? It was such a massive leap from the meager storage quotas of existing email services that everyone thought it was a joke. The April 1st launch date probably didn’t help either.

Now, with weeks still to go until April 1st, Google has done it again, this time offering 1TB of Google Drive storage for just $9.99 per month, or $1.99 for 100GB. The 15GB plan remains free.

Remember when the iPad first shipped and it didn’t have a clock app? Ah, happy days. Because who would want o use an iPad to set an alarm right? After all, it only comes to bed with you and sits on your nightstand until the morning when you wake up and grab it to read the news.

Back then, Due was the app of choice to add reliable alarms to the iPad, and since then it has turned into a full-on reminder app with timers for anything and everything. And now – finally – it has been updated to not look hideous on iOS 7.

Boxcar 2 has just been updated to add back a bunch of the features that went missing when the notifications app upgraded from v1.x. Now you can create an account to let you share notifications between devices, configure alerts sounds and more.

Nikon continues to beat the dead horse that is its tiny-sensor “1” range with the new 18.4 megapixel V3. The Nikon 1 series, for those who still care, is the company’s answer to the mirrorless camera question, if that question was “How can we make it look like we actually care about anything but SLRs?”

InRoute really does look like my new favorite journey planner. It’s a Universal map app with a whole slew of useful extras, including charts for elevation, curviness (!), wind speed, precipitation and more. It looks especially good for folks who understand that a journey and its route aren’t just about the miles.

The iOS 7 update has another nice tweak in the camera app. Just like the iPhone 5S warns you when it decides to automatically engage the HDR mode, it now tells you when it’s going to fire the flash. To be honest, you should probably have the flash turned off all the time, but if you don’t, you at least now get a warning before it powers up and washes out your poor subject’s skin tones.

The Ember bag is a Kickstarter that – at first glance – seems to be a bag out of some first-person-shooter. It’s a modular backpack design, which starts out as a “20-liter urban pack” and can be extended by adding all manner of sleeves and pockets.

If you’re a normal human with normal human needs and desires, I would imagine that you want this bag like now. It’s called the Berlin, and it is a special edition from ONA made to celebrate 100 Years of Leica.

If you’re using the latest Apple devices and all your software is up to date, then your iPhone will now use Bluetooth to search for nearby AppleTVs as well as just searching on the network using Bonjour. The end result is the same – streaming over the local Wi-Fi network – but if you have an odd or non-standard Wi-Fi setup, this might help[,your devices talk to one another.

Drug dealers, pimps and other criminals should be getting excited right now, of they live in Germany at least – their burner phones are about to get a whole lot more secure.

Why? Vodafone Germany has announced an encrypted SIM that will secure your precious data as it leaves the phone. The “digital private key and corresponding certificates” are stored on the SIM itself so it should all work with just a PIN on the device.

Just his week I took delivery of the amazing Filco Majestouch Tenkeyless keyboard, a clickety-clackety racket-maker which lets people know that I’m WORKING dammit. So I’m happy right now, keyboard-wise, but that doesn’t stop me appreciating the looks of skinny Rapoo’s E9070 Bluetooth number.

The Lady’s all-time favorite iPad case ever ever was the Porter from Skech, and the only reason she switched is because she wore the thing out. Unfortunately, she won’t be able to take advantage of the new Porter for iPad Air just yet, as she still has to suffer the indignity of using the old, fat, heavy and hot iPad 3.

I, however, with my svelte and perfect iPad Air, might call one in for review just to make her jealous.

Here we go: Just as the spring eases into the seasonal throne and forces winter to curl up and pretend to be a footstool for the next three months, along comes the Allo, a combination bike mount and speaker for your iPhone. It’s a Kickstarter project, but as the expected delivery date is May, you should get one in time for summer.

BlueAnt’s new PUMP HD headphones look perfect for sportspersons. I took a look at them at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a couple weeks back and they look and feel great. They’re a pair of “wireless” Bluetooth earbuds which clips over the ears and shrug off water and sweat.

Does anyone still use IM? In my home, we use iMessage, WhatsApp and Skype messaging, and almost nothing else. Apparently some folks still want to use AIM, Google Talk and Yahoo to do their chatting. And for them, Verbs IM has now been updated for iOS & and revamped to have a less annoying model for making money.

Wireless charging is a beautiful concept that fails to live up to its promise in reality. That’s not to say it’s unusable – far from it. I’d put wireless charging pads in the same place as Wi-Fi was some years back – useful when it works, but frustrating to get working properly.

The little iQi panel goes some way to fixing up the main problem of wireless charging on the iPhone. Because it’s not built in, you usually need a bulky case to pair with the charger itself. The iQi is so tiny it can be used with any case.

As mentioned in our iOS 7.1 screenshot roundup, the new iOS update adds auto-HDR mode for the iPhone 5s, letting the camera’s brain decide whether or not to activate the High-Dynamic Range feature.

In theory, this should mean that your iPhone will switch to HDR when there is too much contrast in the scene for the camera to capture in one exposure.

Let’s be honest with ourselves here: When we’re in the air, we don’t give a second thought to our luggage traveling in the belly of the plane just a meter or so below us. We don’t really start thinking about our checked bags until we’re standing at the carousel, as we’re wondering if it would look more suspicious to the customs officials if we visited the bathroom before or after picking up our suitcases.

So the Calypso Tag, which lets you know that your bag is about to exit the luggage conveyor, is probably a better option than a GPS tracking tag that you can’t follow when you’re in the air anyway.

If you replaced your first-gen Kindle Paperwhite with the new model just to get Goodreads integration, Cloud Collections and the cool new page-skimming feature, then you should look away now. An update pushed today to the first-gen Paperwhite has added all of these features to the older model.

Instagram has added a new “Lux” filter to its iPhone app, letting you “strengthen or soften your photos with a custom slider.” The slider affects the contrast of your image, but it does in in a way that actually looks good.

The Stubilizer is an accelerometer-and gyroscope-controlled mount for GoPro cameras, and it’s designed to smooth out shaky video shot with the action sports cam. Designed by extreme sports junkie Stuart Smith, the rig is small and light enough to mount ion a helmet, and it uses little motors so it doesn’t’ need giant cantilevers and counterweights.