Giles Turnbull - page 9

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Futulele. It’s a crazy electric ukelele made of iPads and stuff.

So the 25 billionth download from the iOS App Store was none other than Where’s My Water? Free. It brought its owner a shiny $10,000 iTunes gift card and worldwide fame for 15 minutes. But will it bring you anything? The short answer is probably: no.

Fuzel is another one-dollar photo collage maker for iOS. There are dozens of others, so what marks this one out?

Well actually it’s rather impressive. To start with, it has a lovely natural interface that begins with the faux-textured front cover of a photo album, with your most recent creation poking through a hole. Swipe this aside, and keep swiping through your creations, just as you would with a real album.

This simple image has become a cliché in the UK in recent years, and is now much parodied and remixed everywhere you look. Now you can remix it yourself, thanks to a variety of (very similar-looking) apps for iOS.

Yesterday we showed you how to make your own gorgeous pixel art with The Grix. Today we’re looking at pixels again, this time with a clever new photo toy for iOS called pxl, by Rainer Kohlberger.

First things first: Pentax calls this “the smallest, lightest interchangeable lens camera in the world,” and they’re dead right. This camera is small. You thought your micro four-thirds camera was small, but it’s huge compared to the Pentax Q. It’s hard to appreciate just how small it is, until you put it next to something else that’s really small. Like an iPhone.

As you can see, the Q sits neatly atop the iPhone’s screen, not even touching the edges of its case. It’s tiny.

Camera Awesome is a new all-singing, all-dancing photo app on the iOS Store this week. But just how awesome is it?

Brought to you by photo sharing site SmugMug, the first noticeable thing about this app is the price: it’s free. There are no adverts inside it, you’ll be pleased to hear. But there are quite a lot of extras that can only be unlocked with in-app purchases.

The Grix is a cool new $5 pixel editor for iOS, with wide appeal for serious pixel artists and anyone looking for a creative way of killing a dull moment.

Here’s Tomahawk, a music player with a difference: it plays music from anywhere and almost everywhere. Not necessarily music from your collection, either.

TinkerTool is the Swiss Army knife you need for your Mac.

With its blades you can activate – or deactivate – all sorts of features that are normally hidden from view.

Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer-on-a-board developed by a team from Cambridge, UK, went on sale at 6am GMT this morning.

I first heard about Launch Center from my old TUAW colleague Dave Caolo when he began writing a series of posts about it on his excellent 52 Tiger blog.

Read what Dave writes, and take careful note of his wise words: Launch Center is an ingenious little marvel that’s well worth having on your iPhone. Allow me to explain why.

ThumbTack is a Menu Bar utility for OS X that puts your most recent Pinboard bookmarks in easy reach, no matter what application you’re using.

SpamSieve is a top-quality spam-killer for your email account, protecting you from phishing, from lures tempting you to download God-knows-what from dodgy file sharing servers, and from non-existent Nigerian princes offering untold wealth in exchange for, well, a few cash payments up front. To cover expenses, you understand.

Denso is a little bit like Flipboard, but just for video content. Open it up, and you’ll see a selection of curated and branded channels that you can subscribe to on your iPhone or iPad.

Photo of Zias used with permission

This smiling youngster is Zias Kool, and he’s happy for good reason: as a birthday present, the makers of cult iOS puzzler Edge are going to add his Lego-designed custom level to a future version of the game.

Once you’ve downloaded Better Touch Tool and started to explore what it has to offer, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Photo of Andrew Lansley looking at apps from Department of Health Flickr feed; used with permission

Doctors in the UK might soon be able to prescribe apps as well as drugs, following a government study that asked the public to nominate their own favorite health-related apps.

PopClip brings cute iOS-style select-and-click text tools to your Mac. It’s great.

Fluent is a web-based wrapper for your Gmail account that clearly takes cues from the much-loved (and sorely missed, by some) Tweetie Twitter client and the much-loved (and still very much alive) Sparrow mail app.

Acorn describes itself as “an image editor for humans”, and that sums it up in a nutshell.

What you get inside Acorn are pretty much all the image editing features you’re ever going to need, for a fraction of the price of some of the competing apps.

Here’s another lovely short video from Matthew Pearce, the man behind the Matt’s Macintosh YouTube channel.

MacPaint doesn’t just explain what MacPaint was, but is more about why it was an important part of the software lineup back in those days. Things we take for granted today (like copying a graphic and pasting it into another document) were new and exciting back then.

As Matt points out, MacPaint in 1984 laid foundations for features you still see today in modern graphics applications.

(And one other thing: Matthew’s original Macintosh 128K looks pristine, and the screen as clean and bright as the day it was made. He even has an as-new copy of the original printed manual. Where does he find this stuff?)

Enjoy!

This weird-looking gadget is a Strap Stylus for iPad, designed for people who require assistive devices to help them use computers.

The Strap Stylus, along with the Mouthstick and Steady Stylus pictured below, all come with soft-touch capacitive tips. They’re the brainchild of Dutch designer Ivo Beckers, who now sells them worldwide on Etsy under the name ShapeDad. (We previously mentioned his conductive paintbrush socks a couple of years ago.)

His company makes a lot of 3D printed stands and supports for iPads, but assistive devices are now an important business line.

James Thomson, developer of esteemed iOS calculator PCalc, posted an interesting image on Twitter earlier today.

He mentioned that he was working on iPad Retina artwork – “just in case” – and the results were, well, big.

The image above has been resized to 640 pixels to fit inside Cult of Mac’s layout, so make sure you click here to see the original at full size.

Chances are James isn’t the only iOS developer trying out a little Retina-scale artwork at the moment. There’s still nothing official from Apple, but speculation about the likely resolution of the iPad 3 screen is hotting up since last week’s MacRumors story that claimed to confirm the device’s resolution at 2048×1536.

This is Pinwheel, a new iOS app for leaving and finding virtual notes anywhere in the real world.

It’s in private beta right now, but you can join in if you ask nicely and leave your email address in the box of the Pinwheel home page.