In the old days, a piece of string tied around a finger served as a reminder. You just couldn’t forget what the string was for in the first place.
Today, there’s a better way to use your fingers to remember your keys, passport and other personal items with the iOS app Don’t Leave It! Type items into the app you can’t be without and an alert will go off should a certain distance separate you from that particular item.
It was a pretty bold move for the pioneering but fading photography icon Kodak to launch a smartphone dedicated to serious photographers one month after Apple’s release of the highly anticipated iPhone 7 Plus.
The Android handset was released in Europe and Australia and some lackluster reviews soon followed. But Kodak and its partner in smartphones, Bullitt, still have high hopes in putting the Kodak Ektra in the hands of more photographers.
Adam Rosen’s collection of vintage Macs doesn’t make him a hoarder, but he acknowledges it doesn’t make him an obvious choice for a husband, either.
In several rooms of Rosen’s Boston home you’ll find a love story nonetheless. The rooms are shrines to a high school sweetheart that matured and grew more sophisticated with time, a friendly face still aglow with “hello.”
Maybe you begin to bristle when the price of a quality iPhone case goes above $40. If so, your eyebrows could reach new heights when you notice the price on the newest luxury covers for the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus from Element Case.
Starting at $349, the Katana is not the most expensive luxury case on the market, but it is sure to elicit a gasp from budget-minded consumers.
One of my favorite observations by a now-forgotten sage explained the difference between writing and photography like this: A bad sentence can be massaged, but nothing helps a bad photo.
So true. However, I’ve experienced for myself how a good photo-editing app can salvage sloppy composition or bad exposure — and even teach you something along the way. So if you resolve to become a better photographer in 2017, you might want to add some tools to put a finer finish on your iPhone photos.
Great photographers often employee great assistants. Ansel Adams hired master darkroom technicians who printed to his exact specifications, and the lush lighting in an Annie Leibovitz portrait is typically achieved by trusted assistants who understand her vision.
Adobe is working to bring photographers of all levels a valued assistant — and the voice of that assistant may sound familiar.
A video produced by Adobe Research shows a man giving voice commands to an iPad to crop a photo and prepare it to post on Facebook. The voice coming from the iPad sounds like Siri as it repeats the photographer’s commands.
A couple of ex-Apple engineers released an app that turned the iPad into a drawing tablet and the reviews, especially from artists, were positive. One even said “life-changing” while others saw only a couple of limitations that could easily be worked around.
The creators of Astropad were concerned that there was even one limitation. On Wednesday, it launched what it hopes is a tool with no limits, Astropad Studio, a subscription-based version of the app for professional creatives who use the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil as their go-to tools.
You love your MacBook Pro and think it can do just about anything, even make change.
That is literally true for some MacBook users, who have been reporting on tech forums of the odd placement of a random quarter or penny in their machine’s SuperDrive, discovered when the bottom plate was removed.
Natalie Rebot tried reading bedtimes stories to her 3-year-old daughter, but they didn’t hold her interest. So one night mom pulled out her iPhone and used the flashlight mode to create shadow play on the bedroom walls.
The nightly ritual stirred young Chloe’s imagination. The gears in mom’s head started turning, too, and before long, Rebot had designed a smartphone attachment that uses the camera flash to project a story on walls and ceilings.
If you have an Apple Watch on your wrist and an old Mac in your heart, the design company elago has a stand that will take you back in time.
The Apple Watch rests on the W3 stand behind a silicon housing that is a cute scale model of a 1984 Macintosh computer monitor, incorporating the watch face so it appears you have a little working Mac.
The iPhone and Instagram get credit for being the first shoot-and-share social network, but even Steve Jobs would say that’s wrong. The Polaroid camera introduced a social component to taking pictures in the late 1940s, the first instant photography with three steps — shoot, shake and share.
Polaroid brought disruptive innovation to the market and also became a casualty of it when it failed to change course in time to be part of the digital photography revolution.
But a new version of Polaroid is thriving and even stirring up some buzz this week at CES in Las Vegas with new products covering iPhone photography, consumer 3D printing, camera drones and fun cameras that produce an on-the-spot print.
Sports photographer Brad Mangin used to rush to an airport after a big game to get several rolls of film on the next flight to New York for processing and editing. He never saw what he shot until it was on the cover or a two-page spread in the latest Sports Illustrated.
Now his colleagues with their heavy DSLR cameras, lenses, and a laptop to transmit photos laugh when they see Mangin with his gear – an iPhone and maybe an external battery.
When lens maker ZEISS partnered with ExoLens to bring pro optics to the iPhone, mobile photographers had to make a choice between having great lenses or a protective case for the phone.
Now ExoLens has solved that, at least for the iPhone 7, with a protective case that will accommodate the ZEISS line of lenses. The new ExoLens Case will be on display at CES in Las Vegas this week and will be available for purchase within the next couple of months.
Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t create innovative home designs by drawing from his couch. He sat at a drafting table, its surface supporting his paper at the angle of his choosing.
So what would he do with an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil? He might try the new DraftTable by Portland, Oregon-based Elevation Lab.
It didn’t take Super Mario Run and its nearly 3 million downloads on day one in the iTunes Store to recognize how serious iOS users are about gaming.
App developers submit hundred of games each day to Apple for iTunes and with a dizzying number of iOS games available, there is an equally impressive number of accessories companies making gamepads for mobile games.
One, GameSir, will debut its first iOS-centric hand controls at next week’s CES in Las Vegas after five years of developing gamepads that have been well received among Android users.
Musicians who can’t read sheet music play by ear. What about a photographer who doesn’t fully understand the science behind imaging software?
That’s me and I’d call myself a fiddler. When it comes to toning an image in Adobe Photoshop, I don’t analyze the spikes on a histogram or adjust pixel color values. I fiddle with a picture until it looks right.
Macphun seems to design photo imaging programs with my brain in mind. Its newest app, an all-in-one program called Luminar lets photographers of all levels quickly improve the look of a photograph without even knowing how certain tools work.
We roll our eyes when Tim Cook introduces a new iPhone and says, “This is the best iPhone ever” each year. But the iPhone 7 Plus will be different.
Sure, ambitious upgrades remain in the pipeline, but the remarkable camera in the iPhone 7 Plus will make this year’s model memorable. Fifty years from now, photography historians will talk about the iPhone 7 Plus they way they do the first Leica or the first Polaroid.
We value our Mac computers. Whether on a desk or in a lap, they help us complete many life tasks. But you and your machine wouldn’t make it without reliable accessories — especially now that we live in the USB-C era.
Storage drives, hubs with extra ports, a good pair of headphones, maybe a bag to carry your tech — all these Mac accessories play important roles. They often remain unsung, but sometimes come through to help us avoid a devastating loss of hardware or important work.
So if you are looking to bolster your Mac support team, look no further than this list of some of Cult of Mac’s favorites accessories from 2016 for iMacs, MacBooks and MacBook Pros.
Instagram’s move to adopt features similar to SnapChat seems to have paid off for the globally popular photo-sharing network.
On its blog Thursday, Instagram sent a thank you note to its community, a number that surpassed 600 million users since it was founded in October of 2010.
People griped when Apple launched the iPhone 7 without an earphone jack and asked the world to get excited about AirPods, the company’s cordless earphones designed for the brave new “wireless future.”
Apparently, cutting the cord hasn’t been so easy for Apple, either.
The AirPods, skewered on social media within seconds of being introduced at Apple’s product launch in September, remain in a holding pattern because of audio glitches — and could miss the crucial 2016 holiday shopping season entirely.
The geeky excitement shared by mobile photographers over the dual-camera of the iPhone 7 Plus has not waned.
And as they’ve played with the small optical zoom and blurring backgrounds in portrait mode, two small accessories companies have been quietly but furiously developing a two-lens attachment dedicated to enhancing the reach of the 7 Plus camera.
If you like watching a kid opening a gift at Christmastime, you might delight in watching a video posted by iPhone photographer Cielo de la Paz that shows her opening an unexpected gift from Apple.
For the second straight year, the self-taught photographer had one of her pictures selected for Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” marketing campaign. In addition to compensation for use of the photos for the campaign, Apple surprises the photographers with a coffee table book displaying photos selected for the Apple World Gallery.
If there was doubt Apple is moving forward with development of a self-driving car program, events over the last week show Cupertino is indeed mapping out a course.
An Apple patent application for an autonomous vehicle collision-avoidance system published Thursday is the second public acknowledgment that Cupertino is very much in the game.
The National Hockey League may soon introduce a new set of pads for the hands.
iPads.
Apple and the NHL are reportedly close to a deal that could put iPads into the hands of coaches on team benches and for fan engagement around arenas.
Apple and Hollywood are reportedly in talks to provide home-video rentals of movies as little as two weeks after theatrical release.
Studio heads from Warner Bros., Universal Pictures and 21st Century Fox have indicated recently they are looking for deals. Two unidentified sources close to the talks told Bloomberg News the studios are considering partnering with Apple and iTunes.