I hate the beach: It’s full of dirty sand, sweaty half-naked men and polluted with the sound of bad radio stations. It’s exactly like your average building site in fact, and we don’t go and lie in the sun on those.
But in July in Barcelona, the beach is one of the few places you can go to cool down and feel a breeze. It’s also just about the most dangerous place to take your electronic gadgets.
And that’s where these Cloudcover weatherproof cases come in.
This is a review of a camera case. And not just any old multi-user camera case: this one only fits two specific cameras – the Fujifilm X100 and the X100S. However, I’m reviewing it anyway because when I was buying one I couldn’t find any useful information about it. Also, there are builders in my apartment and everything is sealed down behind plastic sheeting, so I couldn’t review anything else even if I wanted to (I promise the Lumopro LP180 review will be ready on Friday).
The case is Fujifilm’s own LC-X100S.
I’m on the verge of giving up on using my iPad as my main photo machine, but one brand new app is keeping me from switching back to the Mac. It’s called Photospector, it lets you organize and edit your pictures, and it’s pretty much the iPad photos app Apple should have made all along.
One of my most-used Mac apps is Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil, a utility which hijacks the audio from any app you like and pipes it to your AirPlay speakers. It synced audio and video over AirPlay before Apple added the feature (back when it was called AirTunes), and is a great way to send the same music to every one of the stack of wireless speakers I’m testing at any one time (it’s like a bad disco in here).
Now, there is Airfoil Remote, which lets you control Airfoil for Mac from your iPhone.
Muku Shuttr is a tiny, keychain-sized (and keychain-mountable) remote shutter release for your iPhone. OR your iPad. Or your giant Android “phablet.” For just $29, you’l never have to see another “selfie arm” disappearing from the side of your self portraits ever again.
Google Maps has been updated to 2.0 for iOS, which means that it finally has a native iPad interface. No longer will iPad users have to deal with stupidly-oversized navigation elements on the 2x pixel-doubled screen.
I love the look of OWC’s Envoy Pro EX. It’s a tiny external USB 3 drive which makes even a pocket HDD look bulky, and it packs a 240GB or a 480GB SSD, making it as fast as you’ll ever need.
But there’s one small problem: even the little one is $315, and the 480-gigger is almost $600. Ouch.
Spendee looks like the kind of finance-tracking app I might actually use: It’s dead simple, great looking and works great with cash. It even has a nice flat design that’ll be at home in iOS 7 – although that icon will have to go — it’s 100% Forstallian.
You gotta love the destruction of the point-and-shoot camera industry at the hands of the cellphone. After years of trying to woo us with more and more hard-drive-filling megapixels, camera makers are finally being forced to give us what we actually want. And it doesn’t hurt that these features are exactly those things that are difficult to put into phones: Big sensors and – now – viewfinders.
The latest convert looks like it’ll be Panasonic, with the newly-leaked GX7.
Ever thrown your camera up in the air in self-timer mode in order to catch a shot from a new angle? No, me neither – I’m no dummy when it comes to using-and-not-abusing my gadgets. But with the Squito, you don’t have to worry about breaking anything – it’s rugged ball with a panoramic camera inside, and it’s designed to be thrown.
Ole Zorn, the super-villain[1] behind the amazing Pythonista for iOS, has just started teasing his newest app – a Markdown text editor for the iPad. Only unlike all the other Markdown editors, this one is looks like it’s as programmable as Pythonista. I’m getting pretty excited.
OmniFocus for iPhone got an update today which lets it refresh itself in the background, in what is probably a foreshadowing of things to come in iOS7. It uses the now-familiar workaround of location-based updates, which lets an app download data in the background when you arrive or leave a predefined location.
Lenstag is hoping to give evil camera thieves second thoughts before they steal your gear. It’s a brand-new database by Google engineer Trevor Sehrer which aims to make it harder for thieves to sell their ill-gotten wares.
Bleed that rust hones peripheral of mark of apple
I Kakaru peeling layer of red rust is cracking. split.
It becomes the two works realistic that utilizes the transparent cover.
This incredible piece of poetry is not in fact a finely-honed chunk of verse, but just a clumsy machine translation from Google. Or is it? Perhaps Google’s vast and distributed computer brain has attained consciousness and turned itself into a soft, wooly-brained artist? If so, the nerds at Google are gonna be pissed.
The text above is also the description of a set of rusty cases for the iPad Mini, straight from the Bird Online Shop.
They say that the kids these days don’t listen to vinyl records, nor CDs. And apparently they don’t even use Rdio or Spotify. They use – get this – YouTube.
Which is presumably why Eltima software has made Airy, an app for downloading YouTube videos and extracting the audio to an MP3 file.
The Saidoka is both ingenious and utterly superfluous, both at the same time. It’s an iPhone dock designed to let your iPhone lay almost face-up, letting you charge it and use it when you’re sitting at your desk. It comes in 30-pin and Lightning flavors, and hooks up to a charger or computer via micro-USB.
You know what else keeps your iPhone say on your desk and facing upwards as it charges? Nothing? That is, you can put nothing under your iPhone and it’ll do the exact same thing. And neither will it cost you €50/$50.
The new A4000i electric scooter from Japan’s Terra Motors can hit 65km/h (40mph) and do 65km on a full charge (or “gallon”) of electricity. Used to travel 20km per day. The scooter will cost just $29 per year to run. That’s even less than my bike, which I fuel with a combination of delicious pizza and chocolate.
But the real reason I’m writing about the A4000i Is that it’s a giant, mobile iPhone dock.
Remember how simple Skitch used to be before Evernote bought it and ran it through its UI-mangling machine? So does Instapaper’s Marco Arment, which is why he made Bugshot, an app whose “sole purpose is dealing with screenshots better.”
Any.Cal is the new iPhone calendar app from Any.Do, and it brings an ultra-clean UI to your iOS calendar, complete with some rather useful extras. Plus it uses the same account you already have for Any.do, which ties everything together.
Manfrotto’s new Pixi tripod is built to supports hefty compact cameras, but will be equally at home when shoved under your iPhone (via a case with a tripod screw mount, of course). In fact, it’s almost perfect for iPhoeography as it doubles as a handgrip letting you shoot much steadier video than you could with the iPhone only.
Tangent is a new iPhone app for dickering with your photos. It comes from Ben Guerrette, the brains behind Deco Sketch for the iPhone and iPad, and it is similar in intent. Tangent overlays geometrical patterns onto your photo, and then lets you adjust them.
If we’re guessing about improvments coming to the next iPhone, then a better camera is a pretty safe bet. Each iteration of the iPhone has bumped the megapixels and improved image quality, low-light performance and added featres like HDR and panoramas. Many other makers (cough Samsung cough) have attempted to match the iPhone’s camera, but only one has really come close – Nokia. And the new Lumia 1020 looks even more amazing yet.
Fray Fix is my favorite kind of gadget: cheap, simple, and completely single-minded. And it doesn’t even have any stupid CamelCasing or vowel movements in its name. What is it? A protector for the power cable on your MagSafe brick.
Olympus was always the company with the best gimmicks, the smallest cameras and the coolest TV ads (in the 1980s UK, at least). And that (apart from the ads) continues to this day. Almost a year ago, the company showed off the Body Cap Lens, and now it’s available to buy. As in, “buy from Amazon today.”
The Blazar is yet another wireless speaker designed to play nice with your iDevices, and any other music-machines you might have laying around. This one distinguishes itself with a few neat features, including stereo pairing and NFC.