The rush to announce products at CES means we often see CGI renders and vague price promises, just to get in on the news action. But we’re giving SuperTooth a break here for two reasons. One, the company makes great speakers, and two, pretty much every one of those speakers has started life as a dummy model on a trade-show stand.
Withings isn’t content with looking after your body throughout every waking hour of your life. Now it wants to make like some kind of Inception-style doctor and keep an eye on your dreams with the help of the Aura.
I’m a huge fan of Rickshaw’s bags. Pretty much everyone in the Rickshaw office cycles to work, and it shows in the design of the bags. They’re well made, practical and light, but still full of clever design details. The Commuter 2.1 is no exception, somehow managing to offer a huge collection of pickets and cubbyholes, and yet remaining light enough to be more comfy on the shoulder than many more simple messenger bags.
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Would you pay $7,800 for a suitcase full of carbon fiber and aluminum tubes? No, me neither, but clearly somebody will, or Shadowcam wouldn’t be hawking its crazily-priced S–5 camera stabilizer, a three-axis gimbal rig that would keep your shots steady even if you stood on a vibrating table with a bowl of jello on your head.
The Mummy Case is one of our all-time favorite iPhone cases, and now it has a sequel. No, it’s not the execrable The Mummy Returns. It’s the Straightjacket, and it looks pretty rad.
MaxStone is yet another way to trigger your camera from your iPhone, with all the usual timer and detection options to fire the camera’s shutter from afar. But this one takes a different approach to the hardware. Instead of running a cable from the iPhone to the camera, the MaxStone uses a combination of Bluetooth and IR.
What could possibly go wrong?
This Week, the app which we said “beats iOS Reminders app at its own game,” is now a universal app with newly-added iPad support. And it’s still way better than Reminders for adding dated tasks.
Fact: I’m currently waiting for my lazy optician to supply my first pair of “old-man glasses” aka specs with progressive lenses. In young-folk terms that means I get glasses which let me read without holding the iPad at arms-length.
In the meantime, I have boosted the size of my iPad’s text, but on the Mac I might give Zoom It a spin. It’s a loupe app that magnifies whatever is under it’s little virtual glass eye, and it’s now compatible with Mavericks.
I’m a sucker for great charger designs, and Ventev’s Utilitycharger 2100 is clearly a smart design. So clever is it that I’m even willing to overlook my hatred of cards for a few minutes as I write this post.
If you’re looking to soften up your photo lighting (and let;’s be honest, who isn;t these days?) then you could do worse than the AirBox range of light modifiers. The AirBoxes are soft-boxes that you inflate. With Air. Hence the name AirBox.
My current desk cost me around €30 in the local flea market, comes from the GDR and is awesome. But it’s not a great desk for piling up with tech, thanks to a complete lack of charger cubbyholes and cable wranglers.
If you put my desk at one end of the tech-configurability spectrum, and a neat, modern desk on the middle, then the Bee9 Tablet Desk 2.0 would be way off at the other end of the scale.
Write, the slick iPhone and iPad text-editing app, is now available in beta form on the Mac. It doesn’t yet have many of the fancy trimmings of its iOS siblings, but it is already a rather nice place to write your Markdown, rich text or plain text notes.
“Thunderbolt, ho!” That’s the cry of low-frame-rate animated big cats when they found out just how much the new Akitio Thunder Dock can do when hooked up to a Mac. And “Snarrrfff” is what their rat-like friend said when he saw the $269 price tag.
If you own a laptop, it’s pretty easy to up and move to a more comfortable workplace when your joints start to stiffen. But if you have a giant 27-inch iMac or Cinema Display, you’re kinda stuck at your desk. You could opt for a standing desk, but what if you want to sit? Or you could go for one of those adjustable numbers, but what about the perfectly good desk you have already? That’s where the WorkFit-A comes in. It’s a big robot arm that lets you swing around even a 27-inch (2013 model) iMac as if it were an iPad. A really, really big iPad.
When I was in high school, I got the jump on all the other photography students because my dad bought weekly and monthly photography magazines that he passed on to me when he was done. I learned a ton about photography (and also the female anatomy, thanks to the “glamour” sections that seemed to be featured in every issue.
These days we have the internet for both learning and porn, but I still have a soft spot (ahem) for photo magazines, which is why I’m checking out FLTR, “world’s first smartphone photography magazine.”
I gave up on buying FitBits after my second $100 device dropped from my pocket and ended up who knows where. So I was interested in yesterday’s update to the iOS app which lets you track your steps using just the app and the iPhone 5S’s M7 MoCoPro.
But apparently this tracking doesn’t offer the full FitBit kit and caboodle, eliminating the useful functionality of recording individual activities. Thankfully, another app just added these features. It’s called StepTracker, and it’s free.
I recently scored an awesome second-hand sofa for my office, which means that I can sit back behind my 27-inch iMac and watch TV and movies on the big screen. But I’m used to watching everything on my iPad, I’ve been using AirServer to turn my iMac into an AirPlay screen. It works flawlessly, and this alone would be worth the $15 price.
But now a new update adds screen recording, plus support for using your keyboard’s media keys to control playback from the iDevice
1Keyboard looks like a great way to avoid having to spend $100 on Logitech’s K811 Easy Switch keyboard. It’s an app that takes the input from your Mac’s keyboard and sends it to the iDevice of you choice, and it costs exactly $0.
Christmas is a filthy time of year. First, it’s in the middle of the winter, when coughs, sneezes and dirty old diseases are most common. And second, extra germs, bacteria and viruses hitch a ride on us meatbag humans as we jet around the globe to see our families, swirling the air into a slurry of septicity.
It’s no wonder Santa spends the rest of the year in bed.
What you need to counteract this insurgence of influenza is the PhoneSoap charger, a kind of Howard Hughes-style tissue box for your iPhone, only with a UV lamp inside.
Mountain is a very useful little widget that sits in your Mac’s menubar and tells you all about the disks you have mounted. It also lets you eject them right from its drop-down menu, and do a whole lot more besides.
The goDock is nothing if not ambitious. It’s a cleverly-fashioned block of aluminum which works as both a cable-wrapping spindle and portable dock for the iPhones 4 and 5/S. But it’ll cost you a ker-azy $85 ($58 for Kickstarter supporters), and needs a whopping $75,000 in pledges to get it started.
What?
If you write anything longer than a paragraph, then Gabe Weatherhead’s new Bookmarker Macros for Editorial are going to get you pretty excited. They let you highlight any section of a text document and save it as a bookmark.
StorySkeleton is an amazing app that’s been around for a little while, but a recent update to add iPad support has made it even better. At heart, it’s a kind of index-card-based note and outlining app for writers (screen, fiction and non-fiction) to help structure and plan stories. But the design is fantastic, making it easier to use than most other alternatives.
Oh, and it exports directly to native Scrivener files.
No, don’t worry: it’s not another terrible mouse design from Apple. This is the Tempo from UK-based Blue Maestro, and it’s a smart Bluetooth thermometer disguised as a pebble.
2013 is arguably the year where phone cameras, and specifically the uiPhone camera, got as good as regular cameras. A DSLR or awesome mirrorless camera will still give you better photos technically, but the iPhone is way more convenient, and will give most folks better results in most instances.
Even in the days of film, convenience could win over quality. Only an enthusiast of a pro would go anywhere near an SLR. In those days, most people used a compact camera with fixed focus (AF crept in in the 1980s), and the real cheapskates opted for crappy 110 or Disc cameras, which used tiny films — the equivalent of small sensors these days.
I own probably the best camera I’ve ever used, the Fujifilm X100S, and I’ve all but given up taking it out with me, saving it for portrait work where it really shines. For everything else, I use the iPhone. So what’s changed to make it so compelling?