Among a long list of cool new features added to Boinx’s iStopMotion for Mac, two stand out. The first is that you can hook up a Canon DSLR and see it’s live-view output right in the app. But the second is the one you’ll really be interested in: iStopMotion now outputs animated GIFs.
If you’re buying a Mac Pro today, you might also be looking around for a 4K monitor or two to hook up to it. Well, LG has you more than covered, with its crazy wide new 19:10 ratio 4K screen, catchily dubbed the 31MU95. The 31-inch screen has a resolution of 4,096 x 2,160, and is so wide you might only need one of them.
You know how Apple keeps last year’s iPhone around, maybe adds a color, and sells it for less than the current model? That’s what Olloclip is doing with the 3-IN–1 lens. Kinda. The lens now fits the iPhone 5C, comes in a rainbow of matching colors, and costs just $60.
These PopSockets are pretty neat. They’re flat circular buttons that pop out, accordion-style, to make little rubbery cones on the back of your iPhone, iPad or other handheld device. They aid grip, work as basic kickstands and offer a place for fiddlers and fidgiters to work off their annoying energies.
Like the Lomo Konstuktor (which I have actually konstrukted and found to be pretty cool), the Last Camera comes as a kit so you can build your own camera.
Unlike the Lomo, though, the Last Camera comes with two interchangeable lenses, and you can buy extra kits to customize it in the future, and it even ships with a special “light leak” back that lets stray photons in through the back door.
It used to be OK to ask a stranger in a bar “do you have a Nokia charger?” and borrow said charger for a while to juice your phone. These days, though, you’ll mark yourself out as a Low-Charge Loser, the kind of person who goes to bed without plugging in his iPhone. Worse, you’re probably carrying more than just a phone. Are you really going to ask a stranger for adapters to charge your iPad and Kindle too?
You are not. What you need is a beefy backup battery. And at this time of year, it should be waterproof, too.
Imagine that one of your photos was printed onto a sheet of card, and that this piece of card was carefully sliced and cut to chop it into a series of concentric rings, or concentric squares, or just a geometric pattern of tiles.
The imagine moving these sections with your finger to make a fragmented version of your picture, only because you’re using the Fragment app instead of real scissors and paper, there are never any gaps between the pieces. Sound like fun right?
Photos+ is a new iPhone app from Justin Williams aka Second Gear software aka the developer of iOS text editor Elements. Photos+ is in the “one thing well” school of apps: it lets you look at the photos you have on your iPhone, and it does a better job that the built in app. In most ways at least.
MIDI Guitar for GarageBand is a Mac app (remember those?) that turns your guitar into a MIDI controller for, well, for any instrument you like. Thus you can thrash away on your axe like the heavy metal rock god you are, and have the sound emerging from the speakers be a plinking, ringing triangle.
Lollipod by Lollipod
Category: Tripods
Works With:iPhone, cameras
Price: $50
The Lollipod is a lightweight lighting stand masquerading as a camera and iPhone tripod. And this is – in almost every way – a good thing. A light stand isn’t nearly as sturdy as a camera tripod, but it is a lot lighter, a lot more likely to be in your bag when you need it, and is roughly 1,000% better than no tripod at all, aka a sharp rock propping up your delicate iPhone.
Looking for a $330 camera bag that looks like and old thrift-store leather satchel? Then look no further: The Brooklyn ONA Camera Bag is just such an enigma, a beautiful bag that can carry your gear in a safely padded interior. Or you could opt for my excellent alternative…
There’s much to love about the CEO Folio and its accompanying web page. It’s the modern-day equivalent of a Filofax, and I guess even the “CEO” part of the name is a kind of upgrade to the mountain of “executive” faux-pleather crap that fills the pages of the Sky Mall catalog.
Anyhow, let’s ridicule it:
We talk about people who take their jobs home with them, some folks take this way too seriously. Our own Killian Bell, for instance, gave his poor disappointed daughter a Kindle Fire instead of an iPad last Christmas.
This year, Santa tells me that she has begged him for a phone with Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich, and he’s going to give her this: an iPhone 5 with an ice-cream sandwich case. What a dad!
QuickerTech’s pitch for its 802.11AC USB Transceiver is a good one in this wasteful age of needless upgrades: instead of tossing out your perfectly good old Mac just to buy one that is only marginally better just because it has faster 802.11ac wireless, just add this little USB dongle instead. This is especially true for a desktop Mac, which has plenty of USB ports to house a the little widget.
I just spent a week traveling with my Retina iPad mini, and there are a few things I learned. One is that you don’t have to worry about charging it like you did with the first full-sized retina iPad, the iPad 3 – the new retina mini can be juiced in a few hours tops. Another thing is that I like to have a good protective case for when I stuff the iPad into an already-full backpack.
But I don’t want a bulky cover that sticks around when I’m actually using the iPad. And this is where the new VersaPouch Mini Stand Case comes in.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, and maybe into the 1990s (I spent much of that decade drunk, so it’s all a little hazy), there was a phrase that could turn even the toughest and most sociable of us into terrified, dread-filled jellies. You would be invited to a friends house for drinks and maybe dinner, to celebrate their successful return from a trip to the furthest corners of the world.
You’d be all set, happy to see them and spend some time chatting over drinks, and then the words would come. “There will be a slideshow.”
In the times of film, this meant a darkened room, a humming projector and lots of very dull commentary. And after dinner, it was almost impossible to stay awake.
Which brings me to the new The Projecteo Gift Set, which is either an awesome modern-day take on the slideshow, or a way to get revenge on your show-off friends from decades past. It could even be both…
The TabHandler is another handle that sticks to the back of your iPad, only it beats the competition in a few ways: First, the permanent circular mount is small enough not to annoy when attached. Second, the handle is almost absurdly useful in its range of positions. And third, the voiceover guy on the video sounds amazing, like he should be selling saddles and lassos to cowboys, not iPad accessories to soft-skinned cubicle-dwelling troglodytes (cublodytes) like us.
In our original Hidden Radio review, we said that the little twist-to-open Bluetooth speaker looked great, but sounded a little tinny and lacked any way to control playback and iPhone volume from the unit itself.
These have bother been fixed on the new Hidden Radio 2, but the speaker (and radio) [UPDATE: The Hidden Radio 2 no longer contains a radio] still looks as great as ever.
You know how most image editing apps have a “paint” filter that supposedly makes you photo look like it was actually made with oils or watercolors? And you know how they all – ALL – suck? Then Waterlogue is going to utterly amaze you, as it’s the first app I’ve seen that gives results that really look like a watercolor painting.
Then again, as the app comes from the folks behind Popsicolor and Percolator, it’s not that surprising that it’s so damned good.
You know all those tripods we feature here on Cult of Mac? Maybe you have a stack of them at home, or maybe you just have one of them, stuck at the back of the coat closet and generally never getting used. Or maybe you don;t even have a closet to keep it in, and you just keep tripping overt it on the way to make you coffee every morning.
Enlight’s new Phlite is here to help. It’ll let you leave your tripod permanently erected in the living room, without anyone complaining. How? Let’s see…
The best iPad case I ever had was the red leather Smart Cover for the iPad 2 (and iPads 3 and 4). It looked and felt great, and only ever got better with age. It’s sturdy (the Lady is still using it on her iPad 3), and while the metal hinge has worn a shiny pattern into the iPad’s edge, it grips way better than the plastic-hinged covers for the Air and Mini.
In short, I loved the leather. To get an Apple-made leather cover for the iPad mini, though, you need to buy the Smart Case, which is a case, and regular readers will know I’m not so hot on cases thanks to their usual bulk and weight.
So how does the crazily overpriced Smart Case shape up? Pretty damn well.
As ever with many of Quirky’s excellent crowd-sourced designs, the Prop Power Pro inspires me to make my own. I’m pretty sure a regular extension cable plus a bendy wire coat-hanger plus a length of flexible tubing would do the trick. The thing is, by the time I’d bought all the parts (plus a roll of gaffer tape), I’d be in the hole for way more than the $25 Quirky want for its version.
In the market for a new Lightning cable for on-the-go charging purposes? Then consider the awkwardly-named “8-pin Lightning Data Sync (iTune) Blocker” from USB Fever. Not only is is like about a third of the price of Apple’s own cable, but it comes with a switch on the wire that’ll let you plug your iDevice into any charging hole without worrying that it’s going to suck out your data of pump it full of filthy malware.
The Mesh Card is a wallet so small and slim that it’ll fit inside a single card pocket in your own fat wallet. And it’s not just a place to keep cards and cash: it doubles as a neat iPhone stand, and even as a bottle opener.
Mr. Reader, the best RSS news reader app for the iPad, is now fully iOS 7-ready, letting me (finally!) get the last non iOS 7 app out of my dock. As you’d expect, it now looks great, and adds a few neat new features.
