Charlie Sorrel - page 96

MyShoebox is yet another cloud photo storage service which syncs your pictures between all of your devices. It’s been around for a little longer than newcomer Loom, and also goes up against Everpix.

Here’s a great idea for an iPad accessory – just kidding: it’s terrible! No, just kidding again. The idea is sound, but the implementation doesn’t really get past the lazy-computer-render stage.

It’s called the iBackPack (really) and it’s a way for cyclists to communicate with people behind them.

I’m a sucker for satchels. And with this beautiful canvas Mission Rucksack from Toffee, I can be a seersucker for satchels, because it also has a beautiful blue and white pinstripe lining.

I know what your asking yourself. You’re asking whether I really decided to write up this bag just so I could use that lame, alliterative gag about seersucking satchels. And the answer is yes. But the bag’s pretty cool anyway, right?

IOS7 beta 4 continues to impress, and it seems that Apple has now ironed out a lot of the bigger bugs, leaving time to polish the smaller things. In just a few hours of use I have noticed a couple of very helpful additions: one to Spotlight and one to the snooze function of the alarm clock.

The UK power plug (and its matching socket) is incredibly safe, just as you’d expect from a country that only allows half-voltage sockets in bathrooms (bathrooms also get string-activated light switches lest your wet hands come near dangerous electricity). The problem is that it’s also big and bulky thanks to the mandatory inclusion of a fuse and an earth (ground) prong in every plug, even those meant for low-power use.

The Thin Plug aims to fix that.

Good news for Brits: the new iOS 7 beta 4 has changed the colors of motorways and A-roads to match the long established scheme used in all other UK maps. Now the motorways (freeways) are drawn in blue and the A-roads (main roads, with one or two-lanes) are green.

Loom is yet another app that promises to organize your photos for you, just like the amazing Everpix. Unlike Everpix, though, which shows the Apple heritage of its engineers in its oversimplified and sometimes frustratingly opaque user interface, Loom looks to be a little more accessible. And controllable.

The Toffee Cases Fold Wallet takes a different approach to iPhone wallets that most others. Instead of trying to squeeze your cards and cash into a few tiny slots stuck onto the back of the iPhone, Toffee’s Fold Wallet is more like a regular billfold, only with an extra pocket inside for your iPhone.

Ever wonder what your iPhone might look like if Apple decided to add a zoom lens? Then take a look at Thanko’s Appollo 2, a crapware camera with a massive 30x schnozz on the front.

Despite their slim and delicate appearance, Apple’s iDevices are pretty tough. I have dropped my iPad mini from the top of the fridge onto a tiled floor with no real damage – just a dented corner. In fact, in the five years that I have owned iDevices, I have broken one screen, and that was an iPod touch in a front jeans pocket which got completely wrecked in a drunken bike crash (I think that’s what happened, anyway – I don’t really remember).

Which is to say, the majority of mollycoddling we bestow on our iPhones and iPads is unnecessary. The only thing which really needs protection is the screen.

Back at the end of May I wrote about a great Kickstarter project which updated the Camera Lucida. The Neo Lucida is a prism on a bendy stick that you can use to superimpose the scene in front of you onto a sheet of paper so you can “trace” around real objects.

In the post I wondered if there was an app that would use your iPhone’s camera to do the same thing, but then – as usual – I didn’t read any comments. Reader Golan pointed out that the app is called Camera Lucida, and as of this weekend it has updated to v7.0.

Wunderlist v2.2 adds two big new features to the rather beautiful cross-platform todo app; one great improvement and a slew of fixes. And it might even change how you use the app.

Just in time for beach season, Griffin’s ruggedized, waterproof iPhone case – the Survivor+Catalyst – arrived at CoM’s Spanish HQ (aka my apartment). And after a month or so of using it and abusing it, I can say its the best rugged case I have used. For the iPhone anyway.

Let’s see why.

Ever wish you could get a tourist photo that looks exactly the same as everyone else’s photo, only it has you standing in front of the monument/mountain/[insert cliché here]? No, of course not. But apparently there are plenty of people in Japan who do, and they can now use special camera stands, located at popular tourist spots, to do it.

You know those trackers you see in movies, the ones that beep and point to wherever you should be going? Heroes and villains alike use them to track bags of stolen money, and space marines use them to avoid aliens.

Now you can use one to get, well, to get wherever it is you want to go. The app is called Crowsflight, and it is just about as simple as navigation apps can get.

Everpix – already the best slightly-confusing service for keeping all your photos ever in one place – has updated to add support for Mosaic. And lest you – like me at 2AM this morning – go searching through the app’s settings to find some cool new grid view, let me tell you now that Mosaic is a separate service for printing photo books.

At some point in the recent past, Lomo went from being the resurrector of crappy Soviet-era plastic cameras to a niche manufacturer of some very interesting lo-fi photography kit. Today’s surprise is that Lomo will be making the Petzval lens, a lens invented in 1840 in – yes – Russia.

Ever wondered which episodes of our own CultCast feature conversations about WWDC? Or which episodes of the original The Talk Show have Dan Benjamin and John Gruber discussing a Bond movie?

Then try Poodle.FM, an experimental search engine for podcasts from the folks behind the podcatcher app Instacast.

Unlike pictures, sound is ambient – you can hear it even when you’re not listening “at” it the same way you have to look at something to see it. And this goes for recording, too. While you have to point a camera at a thing to tape it, you can record sound even if the mic is in your pocket.

And this in turn makes possible an app like Heard, which lets you record any sound you hear, even after you hear it.

It’s hard to see why the folks at Barcelona-based Honest&Smile built this crazy contraption into a Moleskine notebook, but that doesn’t make it any less neat — after all, Doc Brown built a time machine into a DeLorean. When closed, it looks like any other overpriced book of blank paper. When opened, it reveals a kind of analog Instagram playground.

If there’s one thing in your office that is likely immune to spills and dirt its the surface of your desk. Likely made from foil-covered MDF, or – if you’re fancy – from polished hardwood or glass or steel, the tough worktop will shrug of stains and liquids without even noticing them.

But if your “workstation” consists of a couple of upturned cardboard boxes, then Satechi’s waterproof faux-leather Desk Mat & Mate may be for you. And while you’re renovating it, it might pay you to read this random orbital sander review, for you could stand a chance of making your worktop more visually-appealing.

The Cocoon Grid-It, every geek’s favorite slightly-too-heavy travel organizer, has now been turned into a bag. It’s called the Slim, and it has enough straps and nooks to keep even a roomful of OCD freaks relaxed and happy.

Every time I’m about to rich Evernote, something like Lightly comes along to stop me. Lightly is an iPhone app from Ignition Soft, who you may know from such awesome iOS apps as Everclip and Everclip HD, and it lets you clip and highlight parts of a webpage, and save them to your Evernote account.

The Olloclip must be one of the most useful iPhoneography accessories around. It’s a tiny clip-on widget which adds three additional lenses to the iPhone: macro, wide-angle and fisheye.

And until now, the only thing it was really lacking was a telephoto – after all the more-or-less 35mm equivalent lens on the iPhone is already wide enough for most uses. Olloclip has fixed that with this new lens, and added another handy accessory in the box: A circular polarizer.

Landcam comes from the folks behind Currency, a currency-converter app which manages to be more beautiful, easier to use and – somewhat paradoxically – more information-rich than its rivals.

The legacy is clear. Landcam is also beautifully uncluttered, and yet easily as powerful as most other iPhoneography apps in the store. And all this for $1.