Kickstarter - page 11

A new Kickstarter project aims to solve the annoying problem of running out of smartphone charge. The solution? A pocket-size USB charger called the Popcord.

What if your iPhone charging cable could charge your phone even when it wasn’t plugged into a charger? It’d be pretty neat, right? Well, that’s what Native Union’s Jump does, and it does it all while being the best-looking Lightning cable yet.

A promising prototype stand called the Plinth fits in a pocket but quickly deploys to support a large tablet, a smartphone or even an old-fashioned book.

Developed by U.K. product designer John Bull, the super-portable Plinth would make it easier for him to use his beloved iPad by holding it rock-steady at three different angles.

The goDock is nothing if not ambitious. It’s a cleverly-fashioned block of aluminum which works as both a cable-wrapping spindle and portable dock for the iPhones 4 and 5/S. But it’ll cost you a ker-azy $85 ($58 for Kickstarter supporters), and needs a whopping $75,000 in pledges to get it started.

What?

Would Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs have created the Apple I as a Kickstarter project had they been born in, say, 1985 and 1990 rather than 1950 and 1955?

Certainly Apple co-founder Wozniak has clearly always seen a bit of himself in other would-be homebrew engineers — which is why he has supported the creators of kit computer Kano.

The Magazine is a Newsstand periodical that publishes five articles every other week. Created by Marco Arment, it is now owned and run by Glenn Fleishman, a veteran journalist who also writes for The Economist and elsewhere. As the first Newsstand-only publication of its kind, The Magazine is known for quality writing and illustrations on a range of topics.

Although articles are republished online through platforms like Medium, Fleishman wants there to be a physical version of The Magazine to celebrate its one-year anniversary. He has created a Kickstarter campaign for The Magazine: The Book, a hardcover collection of the best published articles from the past year.

In our original Hidden Radio review, we said that the little twist-to-open Bluetooth speaker looked great, but sounded a little tinny and lacked any way to control playback and iPhone volume from the unit itself.

These have bother been fixed on the new Hidden Radio 2, but the speaker (and radio) [UPDATE: The Hidden Radio 2 no longer contains a radio] still looks as great as ever.

You know all those tripods we feature here on Cult of Mac? Maybe you have a stack of them at home, or maybe you just have one of them, stuck at the back of the coat closet and generally never getting used. Or maybe you don;t even have a closet to keep it in, and you just keep tripping overt it on the way to make you coffee every morning.

Enlight’s new Phlite is here to help. It’ll let you leave your tripod permanently erected in the living room, without anyone complaining. How? Let’s see…

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The myLIFTER is a Kickstarter project for a small-yet-powerful, Bluetooth-enabled winch controlled by an iOS app — and it’s loaded with all kinds of other ingenious features, like programmable distances and the ability to link a chain of myLIFTERS together to lift heavier stuff.

The Mesh Card is a wallet so small and slim that it’ll fit inside a single card pocket in your own fat wallet. And it’s not just a place to keep cards and cash: it doubles as a neat iPhone stand, and even as a bottle opener.

There are really only two obvious solutions for backpackers to keep electronics charged out in the boonies.

There’s the more conventional route of using a solar-powered battery, like the Joos Orange, or Solio’s line of chargers. Or there’s the less common alternative of using one of an increasing number of stoves that can charge gadgets while heating dinner or water for coffee.

The upcoming newest member of the latter group, the PowerPot X (that “X” is a 10, btw), can even charge an iPad.

Yes, Joshua Young is a doctor. And yes, the strange device he built and now wields is indeed sonic. But no, it’s not a screwdriver.

Instead, Joshua’s intricate alloy AUUG controller is an imaginative musical device that turns the iPhone or iPod into a unique instrument that uses accelerometer magic to bend and blend sound.

It’s official: riding-a fixed-gear-bike-past-some-old-city-warehouses is the new perky-and-quirky-guitar-music in Kickstarter pitch videos, and the latest people to put an Urban Warrior in their video spot are Martin Fredewess and Philip Perera. What are they selling? A pretty cool-looking iPhone keychain carabiner called the TiStand. And spoiler alert, it’s made of titanium.

We’ve seen roughly one zillion iPhone wallet cases passing through the pages of Cult of Mac, and like neutrinos there are surely untold others which we never even detect. And yes, the Access Case is another wallet case, and yes, it’s even a Kickstarter project. But it has one thing none of the others do: it has a sweet-looking sister that fits the iPad, and which knows how to suck…

Would you pay $100 for a cutting board with a few holes drilled in it? No? Are you sure? Because somebody certainly does. In fact, as of this writing, 349 people have ponied up between $68 and $98 to pre-order the Slate Mobile AirDesk on Kickstarter, a wooden laptop tray that lets you put your laptop on your lap. Like a sap.

Meet the HuMn Mini, the mini version of the most successful minimal wallet on Kickstarter to date. This is the ultimate minimalist wallet – and it is built to last a lifetime.

The HuMn wallet has created a bit of a buzz with our employees and finding it’s way into a few of our pockets. Simply put, this wallet is a game changer. How many cards do you carry in your wallet that you use a few times a year? Cut the fat, get what you need from your wallet, and get on with your life.

Please note: This promotion is only available to our customers in the continental United States and includes free shipping.*

Due to a combination of laziness and… actually just laziness, I often use my iPhone to take product shots for the reviews you see here on Cult of Mac. And while my Snapseed usually lets me turn my snaps into usable photos, I could sometimes do with a little help trying to find a spot on my desk that isn’t covered in junk to use as a backdrop.

Yes, I could clean up, but as I mentioned above, I’m terminally lazy. So I might instead adopt Andrew Park’s Foldio, a tiny light tent for iPhone product shots and the like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Onb6Gqtf41Y

I’m a little on the fence about whether Toymail is a genius idea or an error that’ll have your kids talking to mailboxes.

Richard Haberkern’s new GPS Cookie looks like a great little data logger for photographers, and a nice tracker for bikers, hikers and vacationers. It’s a tiny little puck which does nothing but detect GPS satellites and record it’s location periodically, so you can just switch it on an forget it.

Coburns might sound like some kind of hippie Portland-based cooperative for growing sideburns aka. “mutton chops” aka. “bugger grips,” but it’s anything but: Coburns are a pair of hardwood kickstands for the iPad, and they mix in two of my favorite ingredients: frikkin’ magnets, and felted wool.

The MiStand looks like the mystery tool you might find at the back of a machine shop, especially in the industrial blue colorway of my test unit. It has a utilitarian angularity, a huge, over-engineered ball joint and it is as sturdy as anything you have in your home. It’s also just about the best iPad desk stand I’ve ever used.

I haven’t spent time on a construction site for some time, so I don’t know if it’s still true that every builder has a transistor radio. I do know that we had our kitchen remodeled a few months back and the guy our landlord sent to do it had the same kind of plaster and dirt-caked mains-powered radio you have been able to see for decades the world over.

He also seemed to spend a lot of time texting instead of working, so maybe he could have done with one of these iPhone chargers that uses a DeWalt battery pack for power.

Do you like to enjoy the bounties of your own body while you’re on an audio-only Skype call? Who doesn’t, right? And so you’ve probably also “accidentally” enabled the camera and inadvertently revealed your shame at some point, too. What you need, my pervy, flashing friend, is the iShutter, a $15 strip of steel with a hole in it.

We’ve all been there: Some mornings simply aren’t compatible with a task as sophisticated as groping for an iPhone and then pawing at the screen or volume button to activate the snooze.

And for those especially drooly mornings when even smacking a massive rubber button is too much of a challenge, there’s the wobL: a stand-app alarm combo for iPhone that works simply by  — you guessed it — wobbling it.

Lost your keys? Sure you have, you absent-minded fellow you. And you iPhone? No frickin; way, right? What you clearly need is a way to replace your keys with your iPhone. That’s already been done for the home, and now you can toss the keys for your bike lock.