Giles Turnbull - page 24

Remember Kuato, the stomach-dwelling mutant from Total Recall? Of course you do.

Phoster is an interesting new app for designing posters and cards on your iPhone or iPad.

There’s no other way of saying this: Camera Camouflage is sneaky.

It’s a camera app that goes out of its way to avoid looking like a camera. It disguises itself as an incoming phone call. You can even instruct it to activate your phone’s ringtone, so you can pretend to take the call and hold the phone to your ear.

At which point, things get even sneakier.

If you use Posterous for posting stuff online, you might be interested in the new, free Posterous iOS app that’s popped up in the App Store today.

It’s got everything you’d expect to see in a mobile blogging tool. Namely: a big green POST button that’s everywhere in the app; no matter what else you’re looking at, you can always start a new post with one tap.

If you fancy yourself as a bit of an iPad artist, you might like to grab yourself one or two of these Stylus Socks, now on sale for five dollars a pop on etsy.

Slip one of these socks over any pen or stylus-shaped object, and you’ll be able to use it to paint directly on your iDevice screen as if it were a paint brush.

They’re made of MedTex130, a “conductive knit fabric for use in e-textiles”. You can do all sorts of fun things with it.

Seller Ivo Beckers told me: “When the material arrived last week, I gave it to my daughter Esmée (10) who likes to sew clothes and bears with her aunt Esther. I gave them a Koh-i-noor pen holder as well for the fitting and they did a great job. It fits perfectly around the pen holder’s top and works amazingly smooth as a stylus for the iPad.”

No matter how much you might dislike Microsoft and all its creations, you have to admire their pluck for calling in none other than Stephen Fry for today’s Windows Phone 7 launch event.

Fry is well known as an ardent supporter of all things Apple, but that reputation is to some degrees a creation of Fry’s own fans.

The thing is, he doesn’t just support Apple and OS X; he loves all technology, and like most of us prefers to use the best stuff he can get his hands on. “I’m all for biodiversity in the smartphone market,” he says.

People who have been desperate to turn friends into badgers – your prayers have finally, finally been answered.

Because for you, Badger Face is likely to be the best dollar you’ve ever spent on an iPhone/iPod touch application with turning-people-into-badgers functionality.

For the rest of us? Well, for the rest of us, Badger Face will make us momentarily double-take as we browse the App Store for amazing stuff. It will make us choke on our badger burgers as we read the app description. Badger Face is simultaneously the weirdest thing we have seen this week, and it is this week’s Best (Badger-Related) Thing Ever.

Who knows what will come next? The user comments suggest Dinosaur Face, but why stop there? What about Panda Face? Squirrel Face? Unicorn Face? And for A-Team fans, Face Face?

Transmit is a veteran FTP application for the Mac. So veteran, you can still download a version of it for Mac OS 9 if you want to.

In a market so crammed with competitors, what makes this particular FTP app stand out from all others? Let me count the ways…

Tweet Library by Manton Reece is something special, and I think one of a very tiny handful of Twitter clients – not just on the iPad, but on all manner of platforms – that add something genuinely new.

In nearly every single Mac application you use, you’ll find the Hide command. It’s a very useful thing to know about.

This, boys and girls, is the latest product from Arcam, designers of high-end hifi based just outside Cambridge in the UK.

The rCube is £500 worth of portable iPod music system audio loveliness, which Arcam calls “one of our most important products ever.”

Sparrow is a new email client for OS X, which takes a fresh approach to displaying and managing email.

On Windows, you got used to the Minimize command, which sent any particular document or application window down to the Taskbar at the bottom of the screen. OS X has a similar feature, which is also called Minimize.

Nokia has released the N8, a multitouch smartphone with a 12MP camera. It runs Symbian^3, a new version of an old operating system. Nokia clearly hopes it will help carve back some of the profits that the rest of the industry has been losing to Apple, but what are initial reports like?

Remember this video from a week or so ago? It was made by the people at London’s BERG studio for people at advertising agency Dentsu, as part of a wider project called “Making Future Magic”.

BERG hit on the idea of breaking words and pictures into slices which are displayed on an iPad screen one at a time. If you capture this display with a long exposure on your camera, you get 3D words and images extruded into thin air.

And now the rest of us can join in the fun, with a $1 app for iPhone and iPad, called Holo-Paint.

Here’s a bit of fun for any would-be street magicians among you. Card2Phone lets you do tricks with playing cards and common American, British, European and Australian coins.

Meet Paolo Tosolini. He’s a blogger and podcaster in Italy.

And this? Well, this is Paolo’s idea for a “video jacket”.

Stuck for inspiration for something different to do with his iPad, Paolo thought of a way of wearing it at special events, for what he calls “guerilla marketing promotion activities”.

Which sounds to me like the modern equivalent of the sandwich man, wearing someone else’s advertisement while prowling the streets.

I predict that the iPad sandwich man will soon be a common sight in our cities, walking the streets with animated ads playing at front and rear.

Anyway, that gives me another idea.

My idea depends on the next iPad having a user-facing camera. You could set up two iPads just like Paolo has done: one on your back, and one your front. Send the image captured by the front camera to the rear iPad; and send the image captured by the rear camera to the front iPad: behold! You’ll have an iPad-shaped hole right through your body!

Look-Up is an augmented reality shoot-em-up for iPhone (not iPad or iPod) in a Space Invaders style. And it’s fun.

Swarms of 1950s-style flying saucers fly down at you from the sky – you point your phone back at them and hit the fire button. Zappity zap zap. I tried it this morning in my office in flooding-with-rain Wiltshire, but I suspect it would be more exciting to play when you’re outdoors in the sun, like the guys in this demo video:

OK, you’ve used your iPhone to control robots. Now you can turn it into one, if you have the same techno wizard chops as Kazu Terasaki, the guy who’s done just that.

Here’s the video:

Perhaps “walking” isn’t quite the right word here. They’re sort of “sliding” their way across the table. But hey, all robots have to start somewhere, right?

(Via Gizmodo, and about half of Twitter this morning)

The tweet says it all: I’m back using Camino after switching to Safari when version 5 was released back in July.

Although I appreciate Safari’s speed while browsing, and the variety of extensions on offer was wonderful to see, there was one problem that drove me back to Camino: crashes and beachballs.

Spirited Away is useful for people who like to focus. It just does one simple job. You’ll either love it, or be completely baffled by it.

It runs in the background, and hides all applications other than the one you’re using. That’s it.

So, if you switch to Mail halfway through working on your spreadsheet, Spirited Away hides the spreadsheet – and your chat client, your browser, your Skype window, everything else that isn’t Mail. It all just disappears.

So why would you want this? Well, removing visual clutter on screen can be helpful for people. It means you can concentrate your mind on the task at hand, and not allow it to be distracted by other stuff. It’s probably not much use if you’re just messing about, but if you want to actually get some work done, it comes into its own.

And it’s flexible enough to bend its own rules, if that’s what you want from it. If you’d like all the other application windows hidden except your iChat window, or except iTunes – well, you can tell it to leave those apps alone.

You might hate the idea of Spirited Away. You might think it’s a long way from being essential. But it’s essential to some of us, and might be essential to some of you, too.

(You’re reading the 15th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more.)

This is ace. This is today’s Best Thing Ever. It’s called Revinyl, and it’s a one-dollar app that turns your music collection into a quiz that you can play on your own or with friends.

In “Rediscover” mode, the app will play you short snippets from songs, and show you a selection of album art. Pick the correct album – then name the song or the artist for bonus points. All against the clock, of course.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo 2010 on the subject of “Apple and the Open Web.”

Here’s the full talk:

He makes an interesting argument: based solely on what you see of its website, you’d never think that Apple was a web company. But its dependence on the web itself, and of the HTTP protocol, for things like the App Store and Mobile Me, makes it more of a web company than many would think. Apple’s innovations around the web, and its contributions (such as WebKit, the basis for Safari and many other competing browsers), make it “a great web company.”

“I think mobile is the best thing that’s ever happened to the web. I say the iPhone is the best thing that’s ever happened to mobile.”

What do you think?

If you’ve not had the pleasure of reading the interviews at The Setup before, I urge you to set aside some of your precious time and go and read them today.

When you’re viewing something like a web page, or an email message, or a PDF – anything that isn’t a text field for typing in – you can use the spacebar to scroll down in page-sized increments, just like a Page Down key that you were probably used to having on a Windows machine, and now won’t have if you’re using a Mac notebook.

It’s just as easy to go in the opposite direction. You can scroll up again by hitting Shift + spacebar.

(For the record, Page Up on a Mac notebook is officially done using Function+Up Arrow, and Page Down with Function+Down Arrow. But a lot of the time, using the spacebar is quicker and easier.)

I would never have thought to include this in the list of 100 tips, because I thought it was so universal. I’ve been using this trick for so long, it’s become second nature, and I just assumed that everyone used it.

But a post on Reddit today caused the penny to drop: it turns out that many of the readers there hadn’t discovered this little gem, so I thought it was worth passing on to you as well.

(You’re reading the 32nd post in our series, 100 Essential Mac Tips And Tricks For Windows Switchers. These posts explain to OS X beginners some of the most basic and fundamental concepts of using a Mac. Find out more.)