Ever wanted a quick-and-easy way to slap a watermark on a digital photo, so that no pesky bloggers can claim it as their own without permission? Ever wanted to slap a watermark on dozens of photos at a time? Image Agent might help.
With the launch of iOS 6, Apple debuted a new panorama mode built into the camera app that allows users to take stunning widescreen panorama photos with almost no effort. Unfortunately, these photos have made for little more than a cool demo until now, because there’s been no good way to share them.
Enter PanoPerfect, an app that’s designed specifically around sharing your panoramic photos. While it’s probably the first of its kind, its sure not short on features.
Liquid is a productivity helper for OS X. It comes in two flavors – free and paid. The idea is to speed up your information seeking workflow. You find something you need to research, and a few key presses later you’ve got some data. Or a unit conversion. Or, in the paid version, a language translation. It’s got a lot of features.
Meet Nick. Nick D’Aloisio. He’s 17, lives in London, and his new news app Summly is attracting quite a lot of interest over in the UK. It seems to me that most of the media coverage is because of Nick’s age than the app he’s created. So let’s take a closer look at that app and see what all the fuss is about.
Here are the two things you need to know about the iPad mini. The form factor’s perfect, it’s beautifully designed, you will love holding it… but the screen’s awful and the performance is lacking, especially in graphics. Even at the price, it’s a deeply disappointing product that most people should think twice about buying right now.
How often do you want to know what sounds look like? I’m guessing not very often, unless you’re a musician. But if you do want to know what sounds look like, and you want to know it in the most stylish and good-looking way possible on iOS, you can’t go far wrong with an app called Soundbeam. It’s just beautiful.
Weather On is a weather forecasting app for iOS that is remarkable for one thing: its very obvious nods to Microsoft’s mobile operating system.
Open it up, and you’ll see a selection of square and rectangular tiles that look and behave just like the tiles you’ve seen on the latest smartphones running Windows Phone.
Born on Kickstarter, the MobileMount is a nifty little tool that allows you to mount almost any smartphone or tablet to a flat surface. Its design is simple; it consists of two suction cups that are held together by a ball and socket joint, so you can angle the stand in almost any direction while it’s mounted.
Both suction cups utilize a ‘turn-to-lock’ mechanism in an effort to ensure it’s super secure, and that your device never becomes unstuck. And because they’re just simple suction cups, you don’t need to remove cases or chargers from your device before you use them with the MobileMount — provided the case you’re using has a flat surface, of course.
This also means you can use one mount for your iPhone, your iPad, your iPod, and more — you don’t need to carry separate, dedicated accessories for each device. The MobileMount comes in black or white, and costs $39.99. But is it really worth it?
A mere 6 months ago, I moved my glut of photography gear into a new, portable home: the Think Tank AirPort International Rolling Camera Bag ($350). Since then, I’ve been able to tote my equipment around easily, in style, but most importantly, packed snugly in a vault of total security.
I immediately loved it.
But as with most reviews, time tells how a piece of gear will really work. And now, with six months of carting the Airport International to and fro, I’m ready to report how it has performed over the long haul.
When it comes to Bluetooth speakers, there’s one company’s product against which all others are measured: Jawbone’s iconic Jambox.
There’s a reason for that. Jawbone entered a pretty much empty market segment with a new product that they polished to hell. The Jambox doesn’t sound like sonic nirvana, but it sounds pretty good, and the rest of the details — from the way it feels in the hand, to the way it’s boxed, to the Nintendo-like bleeps and bloops it makes when you pair it or skip a track — are just polished to hell.
Just like with Apple products, though, that polish comes at a premium: the MSRP of the Jambox is $199.99, which is a lot of money for most people. Enter the CUBEDGE EDGE.sound, a new Bluetooth speaker that attempts to do everything that the Jambox does for an MSRP of $50 less.
You shouldn’t judge people purely on first impressions (although many of us do). You probably shouldn’t do the same with apps either. But first impressions count for a lot, and my first impressions of zombie killfest Earn to Die are, well, not that great.
It’s rare that you can point to an accessory and say “Jony Ive” designed that, but with the Harman Kardon Soundsticks, that’s literally true.
Back in July 2000, Apple partnered with Harman Kardon to release an officially blessed subwoofer and speaker combo to perfectly accentuate the translucent iMac G3. One of the benefits of that partnership to Harman Kardon was that Jonathan Ive undertook the design of the product. The result — the iSub 2000 Subwoofer and SoundSticks — are a classic example of vintage Ive design, all bubble shaped and translucent.
If you aren’t Apple, it’s rare to be handed an Ive design every day, and so Harman Kardon has wisely kept the shape and look of the SoundSticks line pretty much the same for the last twelve years, only improving the technology inside as they can.
The new SoundSticks Wireless system is a further refinement of the classic year 2000 design. There’s one big difference, though: the SoundSticks now do Bluetooth.
The SmartFlex View is a new iPhone 5 case from Speck that has one handy feature: it’s got a built-in retractable stand, so you can turn your iPhone into a free-standing display — in portrait or landscape mode — at any time in any place, without the need for additional accessories.
Eufloria is an ingenious, engaging, addictive strategy game for iOS, with its own unique look and style. There’s much more to it than first meets the eye.
This is Rubbernet, a network activity monitoring tool for OS X. If you really need to know what’s hogging your bandwidth, Rubbernet can tell you.
I confess, I was prepared to dismiss Pocket for Mac when I first heard about it.
After all, I thought: I already have Pocket on my Mac. It sits in my browser, where its life began and where I think it belongs. It is software born of the web. It should live on the web.
But I changed my mind pretty fast after trying out the native app, downloaded from the Mac App Store. Because it’s gorgeous.
Chances are you’ve heard of the popular app iTranslate Voice that made a splash when it landed on the App Store earlier this year. iTranslate voice made it easy to quickly translate phrases and sentences, right on your iPhone.
Well, the folks at Tapity and Sonico Mobile haven’t been standing still, releasing a brand new app today called Languages that builds on the foundation of iTranslate Voice. I’ve been testing it out for the past few weeks, and it really is an incredible application.
Back in June, when I first reviewed the C-Loop camera strap mount from Custom SLR ($40), my favorite camera strap and mount was actually the RS-5 system from a company called Black Rapid. But since those long summer days, though I still really love the RS-5, I’ve noticed that the C-Loop has really grown on me and has become my de-facto strap mount.
After three months of use, I think I now know why, and in that time, I’ve also been able to identify some C-Loop issues my first review period was unable to reveal.
We all love OS X, but sometimes there are little things about it that annoy, or get in the way, or just don’t work the way we’d like them to. For power users, the solution to these little niggles often lies in Terminal, the command line application that lets experts dive into the heart of OS X’s innards. But for the rest of us, there’s always Mountain Tweaks.
The short form: If you have $60 to spend on a pair of iPhone-ready headphones, buy the RHA SA950is. They are hands-down the best $60 I have ever heard, and better than a lot of cans at several times the price. Move over Porta Pros — there’s a new boss in town.
Quick, answer this one: what’s the quickest, easiest, no-sign-ups required way to get a bunch of photos from your iPhone to the internet, right now?
Instagram? Nope. You’re kind of right, but Instagram has its limitations. And you need to sign up to use it. Apple’s Photo Stream? Closer, but you still need to be using iCloud.
The quickest, easiest and no-sign-uppiest service I’ve yet seen has to be Photoset, a new thing from the people who make Tumblr.
When one company swallows another, it’s common for a slow shift in rebranding and design to occur as the two entities thrash out their roles and relationship. The latest shift in the Logitech-Ultimate Ears story — Logitech purchased UE in 2008 — occured a month or so ago, when Ultimate Ears was rebranded as Logitech UE and launched a suite of high-end, blue-tinged soundware, with a product selection that reached far beyond the in-ear monitors the company has thus far been known for. In fact, out of seven new gadgets, just one new IEM was introduced: the Logitech UE 900 ($400), a quad-armature earphone that now sits at the pinnacle of UE’s non-custom earphone line.
The UE 900 has lineage, of course; we loved the snug fit, solid build and amazing sound of its antecedent, the TripleFi 10. But the TripleFi 10 is gone, and the UE 900 has stepped into its place with new ergonomics, a new sound — and a lot of blue.
MapMyWalk is one of a range of apps from the people at MapMyFitness. It’s not a pretty app, but mapping walks doesn’t have to be pretty to be functional. And it is functional. Mostly.
For all intents and purposes the latest, 7th generation iPod nano is nothing new. We’ve seen it all before: the widescreen form factor, the touchscreen display. What is new is that we’ve never seen these features in this configuration.
That’s what paradoxically makes the 2012 iPod nano the best one yet: it’s an agglomeration of the best features of the nanos that came before.
It is as though the best features of all previous generations of this protean device are refined and combined into this latest “Lucky Seventh” iteration. Now the iPod nano is the right height, the right shape, the right screen size, the right colors, and perfectly simple. It is what the iPod nano was always meant to be — a good-looking, on-the-go music player.
The first thing you notice about the 2012 fifth-generation iPod touch is how beautifully it’s made. Crazy thin, ridiculously light, yet sturdy as a slab of slate.
The fit and finish are extraordinary. There are no seams, screws, gaps, cracks or openings. It’s literally seamless. The buttons look like they’re part of the iPod’s case, not nubbins that poke through. Who makes stuff this good? Oh yeah, Apple.
Other reviews have complained about the price (it starts at $300) and some reviewers seem unimpressed by the touch. Who is it for, they wonder? Especially if you already have an iPhone.
Well, it’s for the kids. It’s a kids’ computer. Their first computer, if you like. It’s a relatively cheap, highly portable, extremely capable little handheld computer for children. It plays games, music and movies; surfs the net; communicates via text and Facebook; and hosts a bazillion apps for entertainment or homework. It also displays e-books, though let’s be honest: reading is the last thing it’ll be used for.
But $300 is a lot of money to spend on a kid. Is it worth it?