I just switched back to the full-sized iPad – in the form of the iPad Air – after over a year of exclusive iPad Mini use. The reason? I can’t get on with the Retina Mini. The Mini is great in many ways, and so you’d think that an A7 Retina-ized version would be even better. But almost since I bought it, the new hi-res Mini has been driving me crazy.
Remember Photosmith? Yes, it’s the excellent iPad app that hooks up to your Mac’s Lightroom collection and lets you rate, reject, tag and manage your photo library from the comfort of your couch. That’s the promise, anyway. In practice, it crashes far too often, and it is confuddling (confusing and befuddling) as hell to use.
Ever since v3, though, Photosmith has been a lot easier to use. And now in v3.1, the LR sync part has also been improved, with a whole new sync dashboard. Oh, and the app also adds support for RAW photos.
Black-ash finish? Check. Big four-inch woofer? Check. Plenty of knobs and dials and even a built-in screen? Check, check, check! If you were to glance sideways at the Grace Encore (GDI-IRC7500) Stereo System whilst simultaneously taking some experimental military drug that altered your perception of time, you’d think that the Encore was from the 1980s.
MarginNotes is an interesting app that may just be a little too confusing to use, or may be the perfect document markup app ever. I still can’t figure out which.
The app will open EPUB and PDF files and let you mark them up, adding comments, margin notes, sketches and anything else, and also lets you add entire outlines, or turn the document into an outline – I’m not quote sure. Let’s take a quick look:
How about an iPad accessory so dorky, so unashamedly utilitarian that even the Android-using Killian Bell just dared me to wear one around this year’s Mobile World Congress? Interested? Good. It’s the Survivor Harness from Griffin, and it is so named becasue if you wear it, you’ll struggle to survive the taunts and humiliation it will surely bring.
Between your iPhone, your iPad and your Mac, it’s hard to imagine a time when you’d be online and need to edit a photo, but somehow not have access to an app like Snapseed (which has its own browser version BTW).
But should you find yourself trapped at a PC, while nestled deep in bowels of a government building that has confiscated your iPhone and iPad at the gate (to be root-kitted and infected with spyware no doubt), and with a desperate need to add some pop to that cute cat photo you found, then head for Pics.io.
The BluCub is a lot like the Tempo pebble I reviewed a few weeks back, only instead of measuring just temperature, it also measures humidity, adding another feather to your home-weather-station cap. If you wear a cap and put a feather in it when you buy a Bluetooth sensor, that is.
Lightroom Analytics is a plugin that breaks down the metadata in your Lightroom library into all kids of neat and interesting charts and graphs. Want to know what lenses you use the most? Or which setting you always tweak? Then you need LR Analytics.
Snippefy takes the almost-useless highlights from your Kindle and syncs them to Evernote, Dropbox or anywhere that’ll accept text. It’s an iPhone-only app, but as it’s only really there for processing your snippets to use somewhere else, it’s fine for the iPad too.
This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.
Want to watch the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, but don’t have a TV? Or do you have a TV but just prefer the coverage given by other countries?
Then you’re in the right place. Today we’re going to take a look at ways to watch the games on your Mac and iDevices, and which apps you might want to use to follow along with the fun.
Users of Picturelife on iOS can now edit their cloud-stored photos right there in the app, thanks to an update launched yesterday. Picturelife was already one of the most full-featured photo-wrangling services around (it’s my favorite, although I have a bit of a dupe problem at the moment), and now it can serve as a full-on organizing, editing and sharing suite.
IFTTT’s new Evernote action might not seem like much, adding one measly little function, but it’s a biggy. You can take anything, and append it to an Evernote note as to-do item, complete with a checkbox.
Example uses: Send your Foursquare to-dos to an Evernote checklist, or save iOS reminders to Evernote.
Reader 7 is a single-minded app with a single-serve purpose. You know when somebody sends you an MS Word DOC or DOCX file via email and all you want to do is look at it, and maybe track the changes that have been made to it, but then you open in in Pages and all bets are off? That’s what Reader 7 is here to fix.
It’s an app which can accurately display Word documents with complex formatting.
Rapoo’s new E2700 looks to be the perfect companion for my iMac, which is sat on a desk at a suspiciously convenient distance from the sofa in my office, letting me kick back and be amazed by episodes of True Detective and, uh, The Mentalist. Aside from being a regular keyboard with all the usual media keys, it also packs a trackpad on the rightmost end, so you can play/pause those annoying browser video players that don’t respond to the spacebar.
Hey, owners of the Best Camera Ever™ who want to use a 50mm equivalent once in a while – I have some good news for you. Fujifilm is set to release a 50mm adapter for the X100S, letting you use this classic “standard” lens focal length.
Keeping photos on Instagram, Facebook, iPhoto, Google Drive, Google+, Flickr, Lightroom, Aperture, Picasa, Dropbox or OneDrive? Then you might like StreamNation, an app and service that collects them all together in one place.
What’s more, it also gives you 20GB of free storage to get started, and the upgrade rates aren’t so bad either.
Tivoli has long made great-looking, full-toned radios and speakers with a distinctly classic style, and the new Model Three doesn’t change any of that. But there’s one addition which is distinctly modern. The nine-year old design now comes with Bluetooth.
The Togo Dock is a new pocket-sized iPhone dock from the makers of the Une Bobine, the super-successful “handy bendy iPhone-holding snake.” The new gadget is as simple as can be: it’s a little plastic reel with a magnet on the back, which turns a lightning cable into an iPhone dock that can be stuck to anything – as long as it’s made of ferrous metal.
Musx is like Instagram for music. Post tracks you like, add a few words and your followers can check out the same tunes. Why the hell didn’t anyone think of this before?
Pixite’s fantastic Tangent app gets a big update with v1.5, adding in a new “Urban Decay” pack that lets you point your iPhone camera at a building and have it crumble into rubble and dust, and then snap pictures as zombies and wild animals reclaim what us evil humans were only ever borrowing.
Wait, no. Urban Decay is a new set of fancy filters for grungifying your pictures. Just make sure you get the right Tangent app, as the developer has been plagued by a copycat who keeps putting fake versions of the app up on the store.
Here’s a neat take on the small pocket strobe or flash. Instead of forcing you to buy and manage the charging of a ton of AA batteries to use it, the Neewer TT850 is a hot-shoe strobe that uses a 12-volt li-ion battery. This not only makes charging easier, but also means you get a lot more pops per second thanks to the fact that the battery can dump 12V instead the flash instead of the paltry 6V that 4xAAs can manage.
Command-tab, a keyboard shortcut so ingrained in the Mac user’s finger-memory that it’s easy to find yourself hitting it when using a keyboard with your iPad, or when you’re on a PC (NB: don’t use a PC unless you have been professionally trained and are wearing a tie).
The switcher already lets you flip between apps, quit apps, view recent documents in a cool Exposé view (use the up/down arrows), and to drag and drop documents onto apps to open them. But now there’s SuperTab, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-style app which adds even more.
When Heidi from Waterfield Bags wrote to tell me about the Rough Rider, I had no choice but to write about it. It’s called the Rough Rider after all, which pretty much means I can make as many “going commando” and “bareback” jokes as I like.
It’s almost too easy.
Ever wanted to save just one sentence of a web page? Or have you ever bookmarked a page, or sent it to your favorite read-later service, only to come back and wonder what the hell it was you’d wanted to remember?
Then Gloss is for you. It’s a bookmarklet and service that lets you highlight a single line of text on any web page, and it rocks.
If you Google Cult of Mac for “minimal iPhone case” you get a lot of results (too many, in fact, including a Mac-only music app – nice job Google). But you should ignore every last one of them, becasue the Bumprz really is a “case” so tiny you almost can’t see it.