Product managers at Nikon and Canon must be getting pretty worried about their bonuses right now – First of all they’re still being squeezed by cellphone cameras at the low end, and now even their high-end compacts look absurd in the face of Fujifilm’s latest offering, the X-A1. It’s a camera which costs around the same as Nikon’s P and Canon’s G cameras ($600), only it comes with an APS-C sensor and an interchangeable lens.
It’s hard to argue with the awesomeness of Grove’s Wood Print case, a maple shell for your iPhone 5 with one of your own Instagrams printed on the back. Who wouldn’t want that?
iOS 7 is launching on Wednesday September 18th, and with it will come a whole slew of neat (and sometimes eye-searing) features. But what will there be for us poor bloggers and developers who have (maybe) been running the beta for so long now it doesn’t even seem new anymore? The answer is app updates. Lovely updates to some of our favorite apps to make them play nice with the new, clean OS. And the one of these will be Instapaper.
The M7 Motion Coprocessor (MoCoPro?) in the iPhone 5s is something of a mystery beast. It’s function is clear – it is an always-on low-power chip that processes data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass in your iPhone – but its eventual purpose is still a little unclear. So why don’t we do some speculation?
Photogene has long been one of the top photo-editing apps on iOS, beating out Photoshop Touch in so many ways it’s not funny (not funny for Adobe anyway – it’s still pretty funny for me, and I laugh about it every time I use something by Adobe and am forced to wonder if they hired chimps to write their installers).
Anyhow, now Photogene 4 is out, and it’s a big update. To begin with, it’s now universal (previously there were separate apps for iPhone and iPad), and it works with full-res RAW images.
I absolutely love my Magic Trackpad. It gives me all the functionality of my MacBook’s trackpad, only on a huge panel which can be placed to the left or the right of my keyboard. For a while I was even using two of them, but that deviation is now over (side note: if you want a Trackpad and live near Barcelona then hit me up on Twitter or e-mail). But my happiness with Apple’s glass-n-aluminum slab doesn’t stop me coveting the Touch Slab from Orée, possibly the best-named Mac peripheral ever.
What is it? The Touch Slab is a trackpad carved from solid wood.
Is there any end to the awesomeness of Drafts? The write-once-send-anywhere app for iOS has added a great new sharing feature for those using iOS 7, without developer Greg Pierce having to do anything. If you use AirDrop, you can send a chunk of text to anyone else with an AirDrop-capable device, even if they don’t have Drafts.
It’s hard to exaggerate the effect that stereo has on sound. Sure, it gives you different sounds from the left and right speakers, positioning the musical instruments or the on-screen action in 3-D space, but it also opens up the sound and makes it seem a lot bigger… Even when used with tiny speakers.
And while candy-bar all-in-one speakers like the Jambox pack in stereo speakers and stretch the soundstage using electronic trickery, it turns out that old-fashioned physical separation still works great. Which is why the otherwise average Earshots speakers are worth a listen.
Readdle’s new iOS calendaring app, Calendars 5, launched yesterday, and after a day of use I can confidently state that I can find nothing wrong with it. In fact, I like it a whole lot. Why? Because it combines your calendars and reminders in one iOS7-style app, and folds in Fantastical-style natural-language entry.
It’s pretty great.
Got yourself a pair of Beats headphones? I’m sorry to hear that, but I do have some good news: no, there’s not a magic fix to tame the over-boomy bass and bring balance back to the sound of your expensive cans, but there is an iPhone 5 case that’ll help you wrangle the red cord.
Actually, the Cordii Case will work with any sufficiently thick headphone cable, not just Dre’s overpriced junk.
If iPhone 5 chargers keep getting smaller at the same rate, soon the whole thing will fit inside the Lightning hole like some kind of USB-powered suppository. For now, though, you’ll have to settle for the still impressively small ChargeKey, a teeny tiny USB-to-Lightning adapter that – yes – hooks onto a keyring.
If you never downloaded the free Snapseed app for OS X before Google axed it, then you have a second chance – as long as you;re using Google’s Chrome browser anyway. Google+ added a browser-based version of Snapseed to its flailing social network.
Remora is a super-simple “case” for the iPhone 5/s which does two things:
Actually, there might just be a third thing – the Remora looks a lot like the tire levers I carry in my bike-repair kit, so maybe it could be used to get the tires off your bike?
Basil, still hands-down my favorite recipe app for the iPad, is going 2.0 just in time for iOS 7. And man, if you thought the original was clean, slick and easy to use, then you’re going to be blown away by v2.0, which developer Kyle Baxter tells me is “basically an entire new app.”
Blur is a universal iOS app which does one thing: blurs your pictures for use as wallpapers. But it’s single-function design doesn’t mean that it can only be used for one thing.
Looking forward to OmniFocus 2 on your iPhone? Then you can also look forward to ditching OmniFocus 1 and paying full price for the update. And if you do want OF1, then you’d better buy it now, as it’ll be disappearing as soon as the new app is launched.
OmniGroup, the developer behind OmniFocus, OmniOutliner and OmniEverythingElse, has laid out its plans for dealing with the lack of upgrade pricing in both of Apple’s App Stores. And they sound completely reasonable.
What happens when Brian Holmes of Pad&Quill decides to make actual bags for Macs and iPads? You get Intrepid Bags, leather satchels for “him and her” which are made with an almost absurd attention to quality. There are two models right now: the Journeyman (For Him) and the Lillium (For Her).
The iPhone 5S is looking fantastic for photographers. It has a new, bigger sensor, a color-mixing flash and some crazy image-processing software to make your pictures even better, right before you feed them into Instagram and undo all the good work.
Oh,and the camera just Sherlocked GoPro, with a 120fps slo-mo mode.
UPDATE [We said the case is available for the iPhone 5, which it isn’t.]
BikeConsole addresses the single biggest problem with using your iPhone as your in-bike computer: battery life. The iPhone clearly makes for an awesome brain for your bike, with maps, GPS and all manner of bike and fitness apps available, but leaving it running up there with the GPS and screen burning is a great way to kill your battery, fast.
So the BikeConsole does the obvious thing: it adds a battery.
NoteCube is another one of the “new generation” of note-taking apps, started by Q Branch’s Vesper, which are ultra-clean (in the iOS7 style) and work with pictures (the other one being Whitespace).
The USP of NoteCube is that it syncs with Evernote, which means that a) it actually syncs, unlike the other two apps, and b) it gets access to Evernote’s neat text recognition in photographs.
If you happen to have a bunch of Four Thirds lenses lying around, and your in the market for a new camera, then Olympus has you covered: The new OM-D E-M1 is an SLR-style body which will accept old Four Thirds lenses, as well as new Micro Four Thirds lenses. And more importantly, they actually work, and focus at a decent speed.
I can think of little more boring than grinding away on a gym treadmill the thump, thump thump of your heavy feet slamming out a soporific beat over the even more mind-numbing whirr of the machine. Running outside is dull enough; running inside must be insufferable.
Which is why Steve invented the iPad. For reading while you’re at the gym: how else can you explain its bright, easy-to-read screen or it wipe-clean glass front? The problem? Jiggle. That is, your head is moving, your iPad’s screen isn’t and the mis-match makes reading hard, which is the problem the Run-n-Read purports to solve.
You know the drill: you get some crazy attachment in the mail, and you need to convert it to a format you can use. And – of course – you’re on your iPhone or iPad.
Maybe it’a a FLAC file you want in AAC, or a Microsoft DOC file that you’d prefer to see as a PDF. On the Mac you can convert these with little problem, but on iOS? Well, it’s now actually even easier than it was on the desktop. If you use CloudConvert anyway.
Remember the Radius? It was an iPhone case so minimal that it was almost invisible when viewed from anywhere but the back, and weighed in at just 4.4 grams, a weight too light to even register on the scale of ounces [1]
The Corners 4 somehow manages to be even more minimal than the Radius, ditching that heavy x-shaped brace on the back and just putting a little round puck on each corner of the iPhone.
PRONGGGG! That’s the name of the company that makes the clevertastic PocketPlug, an iPhone case that comes with a built-in charger so you can just flip out its prongs and stick them into the nearest available wall socket.