You know what? I’ve never looked at my desk and thought “I really wish that I could open two drawers at the same time, and yet still have easy access to the bottom one.” That’s not to say the Cartesia Desk is a bad idea. Rather, it shows my lack of imagination. The only thing I think of when I look at my desk is “where the hell am I going to put all my junk while I use the ironing board to actually iron some clothes.”
Zenbox’s slogan really says it all: “Hide the mess behind the desk.” As a dedicated throw-everything-in-the-closet-and-slam-the-door-before-it-falls-out practitioner, I can get behind this 100%. The Zenbox is a dock for your MacBook Pro: you plug one end into the left side of your Mac, and plug your various peripherals into the other.
The USP of this dock over others is that those peripherals sit at the end of a cable, letting you throw all of your junk behind the desk and only have to deal with one tidy box.
Pano Glitches are a the new fake light leaks. Only they’re better. Pano Glitching involves setting your iPhone to shoot a panorama and then dicking with it on purpose. Instead of following the instructions to smoothly sweep the iPhone across the scene in front of you, you can quickly switch views, or just jerk the phone in your hand.
The Keyper isn’t strictly a Mac-related gadget, or even an iOS-related one. But I’m writing it up for a few reasons anyway. One, it’s gorgeous. Two, leather confections are a favorite of our esteemed deputy editor John Brownlee. And three, it actually is pretty iPhone and iPad friendly because it’ll stop your keys from scratching up their screens if you toss the lot n a bag or pocket together.
Owners of the Big Jambox are in for a treat. Just head over to the MyTalk page and administer a new firmware update. You ill be treated to two whole hours of extra battery life (in addition to the 15 you already enjoy) plus a host of genuinely hand new features.
Good news for those of you who were unfortunate enough to have dropped $130 on the Wahoo RFLKT (ROFL!) Bluetooth 4 iPhone HUD for your bike. One of the best iPhone cycling apps – Cyclemeter – has just been updated to support your fragile dongle. There’s bad news, too: You’ll have to drop another $3 on an in-app purchase to enable the new feature. Insult, meet injury.
Just Mobile, the folks behind many handy aluminum Mac and iOS accessories (like the pencil-impersonating AluPen stylus, and the AluRack laptop mount) has just busted out three new gadgets. There’s the AluCup – a plastic and aluminum desk-tidy in the shape of a cup; the HeadStand, which is a headphone holder/hanger for your desk, and the AluFrame, a fancy aluminum bumper for the iPhone 5.
Having just discovered that my beloved PadPivot iPad stand also works great with a closed MacBook Air (the 13-inch), you’d have a hard time convincing me to buy another iPad stand, especially one which only has a single angle of view, and which only holds the iPad in horizontal mode.
However, the Sne Stand, fashioned as it is from beautiful bent Baltic Birch plywood, is certainly tempting. Right up until you get to its $90 price tag.
My huge 27-inch iMac is currently hanging on the wall thanks to a VESA mount and adapter, which means I’m intimately familiar with the heavy aluminum leg that used to hold it up. I have been looking for something to do with it other than using it to gather up dust under my bed, and now I think I have it: An oversized iPad stand.
Or I could just give Bluelounge $40 for the Mika, a “Universal” stand for anything vaguely tablet-sized.
What if you tok Twelve South’s neat Plugbug Mac charger extension and shrunk it down to work with the iPad charger? You’d get Scosche’s CoverCharge, that’s what. Just like the Plugbug, the adapter slides onto its host and adds an extra USB port.
The iPad is great for photographers, but the built-in Photos app sucks. You can’t change the viewing order. Making albums and moving photos is a multi-tap pain in the ass, and navigating is confusing even for the experienced user.
That’s where Focus Point comes in. It’s a photo-viewing app that’s been around for a while, but the latest update adds enough new goodies to make it worth a look.
Tempted as I am by the likes of the amazing Fujifilm X100s, I know that I’ll keep coming back to my iPhone 5 camera thanks to its combo of convenience, quality, connect-ability and apps. But the Sun & Cloud camera has just the right balance of price to quirky novelty to get me interested.
I used to use a sleeve-style case with my original iPad, and I loved it. Sleeves protect the iPad while you carry it, and let you experience the full slimline awesomeness of a naked tablet when you take it out to use. Then Apple made the iPad 2 and the Smart Cover and that was it. The only time I change cases now is if I need something rugged, or if I’m testing one for review.
But I’m tempted by the Calypso Tab, a lovely leather sleeve for the regular iPad and the mini. It’s a softish hard shell, and it looks fantastic.
I don’t really care about measuring the wind – I prepare for a bike trip using WeatherPro, which tells me how bad the wind will be, not how bad it is right now. But the Vaavud wind meter is notable for another reason: it communicates its wind-speed readings to your iPhone wirelessly, yet uses no electronics whatsoever. How? Read on…
Moshi’s Luna backlit Mac keyboard is a weird device. It’s a desktop device through-and-through, connecting via USB, but doesn’t have any USB ports itself – one of the major advantage of using a wired keyboard.
It also uses scissor-switched chiclet-stlye keys instead of something more substantial like you’d find in the Matias or DAS keyboards.
It does, however, sport Mac-friendly media keys, and packs a numerical keypad, perfect for moving your mouse further to the right and causing extra RSI.
The Bikespike is a GPS-enabled cellular device which lets you track your bike. And while you can use it as an iPhone-connected bike computer, complete with speed, calorie and location stats, its main purpose is as a security device.
Counter-intuitive though it may seem, taking a light source and putting it right up close to your subject’s face – as close as you can without getting it in frame – makes for softer light. Why? Because it makes the light bigger in relation to the subject. If that subject is a face, a bigger light can “wrap around” its contours and fill in its own shadows.
And the Photojojo Pocket Spotlight is a big light source for your iPhone.
Oh man, this is what happens when companies don’t really know what to do with themselves. We’re familiar with Apple’s ultra-simple product lineup, a hallmark of a focused corporate mind. Canon, on the other hand, decided that — after stripping down the DSLR to make the mirrorless EOS M — it would take that stripped-down camera and, uh, strip it back up again.
So here we have the EOS 100D (or Rebel SL1, to further confuse things), billed as the smallest DSLR in the world, and essentially an EOS M with a mirror and therefore a viewfinder. And corporate confusion aside, it might actually be a cool little camera.
Withings, the mobile-connected health-monitoring people, have just announced a brand new bathroom scale. Only this isn’t just another scale that’ll Tweet your weight to a disinterested world. It has hookups to monitor not just your body, but also the home you live in.
Wacom has announced a new baby Cintiq graphics tablet. The new 13-inch model joins the plus-sized 22 and 24-inchers in the lineup, and will let travelling designers and artists work on the go.
Say hello to CubeSensors, sensitive little cubes that detect pretty much everything and tattle to your iPhone about it. The cubes are internet-connected, so you can get their information anywhere, any time.
As a reader of Cult of Mac, I’d say it’s a safe bet that you have a whole bunch of 30-pin docks around your home. And that those docks have been rendered useless by Apple’s evil insistence on equipping all of its new devices with smaller, tougher, easier to use Lightning plugs.
Now, we bring good news. With just €13, you can resurrect your pointless plastic paperweight.
You know what you need when you go away on a weekend trip? Along with your two suitcases worth of clothing, a laptop, a pair of iPads, a speaker maybe, plus case of shoes (rain or shine… Who knows?), chargers, your own personal pillow and, well, you get the point. Now you can add to that list the Traveler Laptop Stand from Magma. That’s right: a folding, portable stand for your folding, portable computer.
Fingers is a concept design, but it’s so simple and clever, and so easy to make for yourself with just a piece of stiff card and a pair of scissors, that it seems worth taking a look. It’s yet another desk-tidying cable manager, but you’re going to love it, I promise.
My 27-inch iMac hangs on my wall, freeing up desk-space and terrifying me that it will fall off as I sleep and crush me in my bed. To get it up there I had to hit up Amazon and order the VESA wall mount, plus an adapter to replace the iMac’s huge foot with a VESA-compatible set of holes.
The result is very sturdy, and very neat. But there’s one problem: where the hell do I put that giant (and heavy) aluminum foot? If I were buying new iMac, I could just order a version without the stand, and instead equipped with a built-in VESA mount.