It’s actually pretty easy to shoot sneaky pictures of people using the iPhone. You can pretend you’re doing something else as you point the camera at your unwitting/unwilling subject, or you can just hold the iPhone up to your ear, walk past them and snap a picture using the volume button.
Now there’s a third way: the Smartphone Spy Lens, an add-on that lets you shoot sneaky shots at 90-degrees to the camera’s own axis.
You know how it’s almost impossible to keep track of all the photos you take with your iPhone, iPad, and your regular camera? Imagine if you had another device that clipped to your clothes and captured video and stills all day long. It would be a nightmare of organization, right?
Then again, if you’re, say, a photographer who regualarly gets harrassed by police and “security” “guards,” then having an always-on camera capturing the 65-degree slice of life in front of you might actually turn out to be rather useful.
RayFlash’s new ringflash adapter is called the Universal, and it is. Well, almost. There are actually two different sizes, so you’ll have to choose the “Universal” model that fits your camera.
I kid. Kinda. The Universal part of the name actually refers to the flash-hole, which can now accommodate pretty much any flashgun, not just the handful of Canon and Nikon strobes that the old RayFlash supported.
A plain text adventure for the iPhone? That’s right. A plain text adventure with a bunch of the words covered up with black censorship bars? ██████ A!
It’s called ████████, and it comes from Neven Mrgan and James Moore.
In my tireless efforts to inform and entertain you, I find myself wrangling a lot of pictures for posts here on CoM. And now that many people are coming at us from Retina-screened devices, we try to use big pictures whenever we can. But how big is a picture?
Clicking the image and tapping the spacebar will give you a preview, but it won’t give you the image’s pixel dimensions. Not unless you install QuickLook plugin qlImageSize.
If you take a trip to the local laboratory supply store, and then follow it up by dropping into the vintage camera shop (or just a thrift store) then you could make your own beautiful lamp, just like those fashioned from dead photo gear by the Taiwanese Ystudio. It sure beats the usual crap you get from Ikea.
What the hell is wrong with wireless SD card makers? They manage to cram an entire Wi-Fi router into an SD card, along with the memory that’s already in there, and yet the software looks like they got their idiot cousin to write it in a weekend for like $100.
Toshiba’s FlashAir is a great example. The hardware is sound, and has some really great features. But the software is awful. Truly, breathtakingly terrible.
Got goals? Me too: Get up before 10 a.m. at least once a week; increase the number of cheeses I eat; and learn how to use semicolons. If you too have such pressing, life-altering plans in mind, you might like the keep track of them with Full, an iPhone app which not only tracks pretty much anything, but looks amazing while it does it.
DJing (or is that deejaying?) on the iPad is pretty rad, but what do you do about cueing up the next track? If you’ve got $20 to spend, you can buy the Traktor DJ cable, a splitter that lets you cue a track with your headphones and play another through the speakers.
Remember those adapters that let you permanently flush-mount a microSD card in your MacBook Air’s SD card slot, adding welcome (if slow) extra storage to your SSD portable? I certainly do: I mixed up the two main brands when I wrote a review and never heard the last of it.
Now you can skip that extra step, because PNY now makes a sawed-off SD card that does the same job – without an adapter.
I saw a kid at the airport the other day, carrying a Fujifilm Instax camera, and I wondered what the hell kind of cruel trick her parents were playing on her. That thing is hideous.
But if she’d been carrying the new retro-style Instax Mini 90, I’d have been all “WTF?”
MyFlavors for the iPad is a clever recipe app which auto-rips recipes from the web and separates out the various components, tidily parsing out and filing directions, ingredients, photos, the description and the cook time. The app is free, but requires a $5 in-app purchase to actually do more than try it out.
It’s almost instinctive these days for me to place my iPhone or iPad facing in in whatever bag or pocket I use, to protect its screen from bumps. But the new Portal series of bags from Osprey might just make it worth breaking the habit: The bags have a pocket at the front with a flap that opens to let you use your iPad without removing it from the bag.
Ever tried to snap a self portrait with your iPhone? And I mean a proper self-timer self portrait, not an arm-out-the-side-of-the-frame selfie. It’s almost impossible. First, you have to deal with the lack of a self timer on the iPhone. And second, you have to find somewhere to balance it.
What you need is Joby’s new MPod mini.
Every time I use my iPhone 5, I’m less and less convinced that it even needs a dock. It’s far easier to use the phone when it’s laying flat on my desk than when it’s propped up at a steep angle. The only place I’d like one is on my nightstand, and as I don’t have a nightstand that option is out. However, many people want docks, and of these many of them keep their iPhones in fat, ugly protective cases. The Sarvi Dock is for them.
In camera years[1], Canon’s G-Series is now drawing a pension and should really be scratching out a will. And when a product line is so successful and so mature, it gets hard to improve on it. The G15 had a big sensor, a fast ƒ1.8 lens and a handy front control dial, as well as all the rugged capability that made the G-Series last this long.
The new G16 adds very little, but it get one hugely handy update: Wi-Fi.
Great news for automatic fanatics: Twitter is back on If This Then That (IFTTT). The Twitter channel was pulled from the service some months back thanks to authorization issues, but now it’s back, and ready to trigger and be triggered.
Phlo is a handy little Universal iOS app which lets you search a bunch of different search engines simultaneously. Just tap in your search term and then hop between various sites using the popover sidebar list.
Protex’s new iPad case is a big improvement on the original – aesthetically, at least. The folks at Higher Ground (the company that makes the Protex) sent me the original and I couldn’t bring myself to review it as it looked like a rubber boot with a stripper’s underwear sewn to the back.
The new one keeps the rugged design, but swaps out the stretchy, satiny X on the back for a cross-shaped silicone grip.
Remember the Area Ware wooden iPhone dock concept that we saw back in May? No, neither do I, a problem not helped by the fact that Google insists on searching for “are aware” when I tap in “Area Ware”. Either way, that neat design has been, uh, redesigned and can now be almost bought: it’ll be shipping on November 1st.
I never thought I’d describe a camera and iPhone accessory as “creepy,” but here we are. The Keizus is a quadropod (four-legged tripod) which looks like somebody ripped the skeleton out of one of those cymbal-bashing monkeys beloved of 1970s and 1980s horror flicks. Shudder.
It was only a matter of time before somebody put a SIM card inside a camera. That camera is the Q, comes from Sweden and is – according to the pitch – “world’s first social camera.”
But is it too late?
I’m always surprised how much bigger and louder stereo speakers make music sound. It might be the fact that the 3-D space it creates fools our stupid brains into thinking that the music is surrounding us, but the difference is huge. Try it: take a device that’s hooked up to actual separate stereo speakers and flip between stereo and mono with your source.
And so I expect the Earshots Stereo Speakers to sound a lot bigger than their 34mm diameter would suggest.
Remember the AmpJacket for the iPhone? It’s an awesome little rubbery case which uses passive horn-speaker tech to amplify the iPhone’s already-capable speaker, making it louder and clearer.
The AmpJacket for iPad mini is the same thing, only bigger and designed for the iPad’s stereo speakers. It’s also great, but for different reasons.
Brett Terpstra’s SearchLink is a System Service for OS X which automatically generates links from your text, without you having to bother to look anything up on Google first. It’s like having an unpaid intern inside your Mac.
And Editorial is that fancy new iPad text editor that incorporates workflows that you can roll yourself.
Now the two have been combined into one amazing iPad ball of goodness.