Sonte’s new film can switch up its opacity in just a second, and it can be controlled from your iPhone. Cover a window and flip it from transparent to opaque at the tap of a screen, blocking out nosy passersby or ugly distractions whilst still letting in most of the light. It’s like turning any room into a bathroom. Only without the extra plumbing required.
The KickLight is a $180 LED lamp for your iPhone. I hear you. “WHAT?!” you shout, in justifiable ALL CAPS. You even combine a question mark and an exclamation mark to further express your angered confusion. To which I can only say CALM DOWN. It’s actually worth the money.
Remember the Hitcase? It’s the “virtually indestructible” iPhone case that our own video jockey Michael Steeber checked out at this years CES. Now you can buy not only the case itself, but a range of neat-o accessories which let you put the thing on bike handlebars and car… Tubes?
YACReader, or Yet Another Comic Reader, is exactly what it says it is: a comic book reading app. Only it should be called TOCRYEL, or The Only Comic Reader You’ll Ever Need.
It would be hard to convey how little I care about Google+, but I’ll try:
Google what? Plus? What’s that? Never heard of it. And if I had heard of it, I would probably forget about it in less than a minute.
Pretty good, huh? Yet despite this I actually quite like the photos part of Google+, although until now I haven’t been interested enough to post many photos to it. But the newly-updated Google+ app for iOS has just launched and it has all th cool new photo features announced by Google at its dorky Google Glasses 1
GeoTagBee is a brand-new iPhone app for recording your wanderings in order to geotag photos later. Yes, it’s my new obsession. GeoTagBee’s stand out feature is its simplicity, although it manages to pack in some neat features anyway. Let’s take a look:
Probably the best part of Effing Weather is hidden in the “Features” list in the media kit. Check it out:
The user also has the option to display the more vulgar expression, such as “It’s Fucking Cold.”
Rdio, the Pepsi to Spotify’s Coke, just got an update to it’s Mac app today. For those of you following along on iOS, the changes will be familiar, complete with big and “beautiful” album art and a neat new “upcoming” view.
Back In The Day™, when men were men, cars were cars and boys were forced to work to support their families before their stupid brains were even half developed, we fixed automobiles by kicking their tires and sucking our teeth.
Fast forward to the Space Year 2013 and cars now repair themselves. All you have to do is take it to a repair shop, where they plug it into a computer which sucks the money from your bank account while you take a spin in a “courtesy” car.
But what if you want to tinker? If you own a Ford and an iPad, and don’t mind getting your hands (literally) dirty, then you’ll be happy to hear that there’s a (concept) app for that.
This is the Bridging Book, and it “bridges” the gap between reality and virtual reality by combining an iPad app with an actual paper book. The concept is simple and yet looks to be very effective, if the smiles on the kid in the video are anything to go by: The iPad detects page turns made in the book using magnets. Yes, frikkin’ magnets.
Quick question: How do you feel about 60˚? That’s the angle, not the temperature. Do you like it? Still not sure? Then let me put it another way: Are you a fan of tilting things back by 30 degrees?
If so, and if you don’t like to adjust things, then the ChillTab2 might just be the perfect stand for you.
It’s hard to believe, but some people don’t like the image-crunching, JPG-mangling special effects of app like Instagram. Instead, they want the output from the iPhone’s highly-tuned camera to be clean and as good as it can be. Which is why Olloclip’s new iPhone app goes in the opposite direction to most grungification apps and corrects errors introduced by the company’s clip-on lens of the same name.
Later.fm is like Instapaper for music. And like Instapaper, it is beginning its life as a web-only app, although it works so well in Mobile Safari that you won’t care about the lack of an actual iOS app right now.
The Mutator is a hardware mute switch for your iPhone. What’s that you say? You already have a hardware mute switch on your iPhone? Well, yes you do. But – as the poor fellow who caused Mahlergate found out – mute doesn’t always mean “mute”.
Farensius is a simple menubar app for your Mac which will let you know what the weather is doing outside, should you be too busy to turn your head and steal an unproductive glance through the nearest window. You get a little icon showing you the type of weather you’ll find beyond the confines of your office, and a temperature in – yes – ˚F or ˚C.
I know what you bike nuts are thinking. You’re jealous of all the hue-controlled lighting available to the stay-at-home folks, and you want a little bit of that color-changing action for your ride. Well, the folks at Helios have heard you, and are just about to launch a couple of crazy handlebars with built-in LEDs. And that’s not all they do. Oh no…
Remember those cool glass filters that act like a real-life Instagram for your real-life camera? They’re finally ready for pre-order, kinda.
Remember when the iPhone launched, and people complained that the non-removable battery was a “deal-breaker”? And then the very same thing happened to the MacBook in the form of the Air, and the very same people whined the same whine?
Happy days indeed. Now we know better: we can indeed carry spare batteries for our iPhones, only they’re external and don’t require that we power down the phone just to swap them.
And the batteries in our MacBook last way longer thanks to the fact that they are squished into every internal nook and cranny of the computer’s case instead of having to be an easy-to-remove rectangle. Not that anyone ever needed to swap a battery into a computer anyway. Well, except those dullards who would stare at a single Excel spreadsheet for the entire duration of a six-hour plane ride, and they all own PCs anyway.
Which is to say, in a very roundabout way, that Eagle has made available yet another external battery pack. And this one is orange.
Probably the biggest problem you have in your modern life is finding a place to store your earbuds when you’re not using them. Unless, of course, your life isn’t a shallow, empty parody of existence used by a gadget blogger to make a lame point.
That said, tangled cables are a pain. Probably not enough of a pain for me to stick a special case to the back of my iPhone and actually use it, but I’m just plain lazy. For those of you who care, there’s the Sound Pocket, a rear shell with a small compartment on the back for your Apple EarPods.
UltimateEars Boom is yet another wireless Bluetooth speaker, a category that has gone from a mere sprinkling of spores on the petri dish of consumer gadgets to a veritable mushroom field of musical materiel. However, as is now necessary in this crowded corner of consumerism, there’s a twist: This speaker will annoy everyone equally, wherever they may be.
The obvious thing to say about the XiStera is to call it the "“Swiss Army Knife” of iPhone 5 accessories. Leaving aside for a second the fact that, if all the Swiss Army is bringing to the fight is that little knife, it’s no wonder it refuses to play in any wars, let’s make a better analogy for the Xistera. It’s like a Glif crossed with a Pulltaps corkscrew.
Waiting for Apple’s iWatch? Good luck with that if you’re expecting anything fancier than a fitness-tracking iPod nano with a wrist strap. You should save your money, your hopes and your time and buy Beloved Crapware Vendor™ Brando’s Fashionable Bluetooth Vibrating Bracelet + Watch instead.
MakeDoc is a single-serve iOS app which costs just $3. That’s a lot less than the app it might replace for many of you: Microsoft Word. MarkDoc does (mostly) one thing: it takes a clipboard filled with Markdown text and turns it into a DOCX file. That’s it.
To be honest, I’m writing this post based solely on the awesome name of this iOS-compatible headphone amp: the Mobile Music Pump. What is it? An amp to boost the puny output from your iPhone’s headphone jack to make big headphones sound better.
You know how all your photos have a ton of extras tucked inside? Like – to pick a completely random example – the GPS data. And yet, whenever you send your vacation photos to your mom, she mails back to ask “where is that cool restaurant with the camel and the statue of Elvis outside?” or somesuch thing. Of course, you want to scream “Just look in the EXIF data, you idiot!” but, bring a good son/daughter, you just tell her. Again.
Well, a new app for the iPad and iPhone will help you make the implicit explicit. It’s called Map Camera.
