I’m a big fan of waterproof speakers. Not just for in-shower podcast listening, so I can get all excited about CultCast host Erfon Elijah’s sweet vocal tones as I froth myself into a soapy lather. No, I also like to listen to Erfon in the kitchen as I cook, perhaps kneading a soft and supple bread dough by hand, or washing the dirty dishes with my rough hands plunged into the hot suds…
Anyway. Splash-proof speakers. Muji makes one .
Perfect B&W is a pretty great black and white photo app for the iPhone and the iPad (it’s universal). It’s built by OnOne Software, the folks behind high-end (and high-priced) desktop photo apps and plugins, and the results show it: Perfect B&W will let you make a great black and white conversion with one tap, or dig in and tweak almost every aspect of the picture.
Sony is saying that their new Cybershot HX50V camera is the lightest, smallest 30x optical zoom-equipped camera in the world.
Seems like optical zoom is the new megapixels, at least as far as high-end point-n-shoots are concerned; it’s amazing to see the increasing zoom range camera makers are scrambling to pack into their pocketable shooters these days. For now, looks like Sony might just be the race leader.
Let’s take a closer look at the HX50V.
That statement up there in the headline, that Flowboard will be “the most important free app you download this month” — that’s kind of a bold thing to say.
But it’s not hyperbole; Flowboard’s publishing tools are super-easy to use, letting you easily create electronic portfolios and presentations — heck, even magazines and eBooks — and the finished products, published on Flowboard’s site, are just as easy to share and view.
And if you rarely download anything, well, this may be the most important free app you download all year.
Panasonic’s new LF1 is a Wi-Fi-sharing, fast-lens shooting RAW-capture camera which looks like a kind of remixed LX-series camera. It’s clearly aimed at smartphone users who want a little extra.
Fans of both Ikea and swashbuckler movies will be very pleased with the new Metallo case from V-Moda. It comes with its own Allen wrench to screw on the backplate, and when you make this change, the sound
“emulates the sound of unsheathing a sword.”
FocusTwist attempts to turn your iPhone into a Lytro Light Field camera, complete with photos that can be focussed after you take them. How does it perform this technological magic? It cheats.
Timebar is an ultra-simple timer app for your Mac. Click! its icon up in the menubar, drag! to select a period of time and then Go About Your Life! as it ticks the seconds away by running a blue progress bar across your menubar.
But there’s more.
Last week saw popular photo-editing iPhone app FX Photo Studio go free for a day. MacPhun, the app’s developer, then extended that free day indefinitely — a result, they say, of the app’s overwhelming popularity as it’s blown through a million new downloads since going free.
Now the developer’s doing the same thing with the even-more-fantastic iPad version of the app, FX Photo Studio HD. Only this time, they say the app will be free until it hits 10 million new downloads. Since this is such a stellar app, ten million is not nearly as steep as it seems.
Hooooo! That, apparently, is the sound of an iPhone whistling. At least, that’s the sound of an iPhone whistling when its inside the WhistleCase, a combo tweeter and phone protector that actually looks cool enough to buy and use.
Cult of Mac reader Derek Stein put me on to this hot hot leather case for the iPhone 5. It’s similar in intent to the TwelveSouth SurfacePad I re-reviewed on Friday in that it’s a simple wraparound leather cover. The differences are that it looks less functional and much longer lasting.
Yeah, you could buy reams and reams of bound notebooks all pre-printed with iPhone-shaped templates for your UI-designing needs. But what will that get you? Boxes of crappy notebooks all filled with quad-printed paper and covered with little iPhone outlines.
Worse, you’ll have to carry these with you along with your proper Moleskine notebook if you want to do any real sketching or note taking.
But what if you could add an iPhone page to any book, any time you like? With this stamp, you totally can.
It’s funny: Back in high school I had a project called "Mount Julie" (which Julie never knew about), and now here in 2013 we see a new project called "Mount July." Coincidence? Probably…
Anyhow. Mount July will be a set of camera filters for film, stills and video which will add Instagram-like effects, using old-fashioned analog glass filters.
I almost never (except when shooting video) wish that I had a wider angle lens – it would just mean that I have to poke my camera even closer into the face of my subject. But I do often reach for the telephoto lens that isn’t there. After all, apart from a long lens’s ability to squish elements together in a picture, sometimes you just can’t walk any closer to your subject.
At those times, you can now reach for the iPad Telephoto lens for Photojojo.
Evernote has just updated Skitch for both the Mac and iOS. And what an update! The headline feature is PDF annotation (premium account required, 30-day trial for new users), a feature which could make the app useful to more than just bloggers marking up screenshots.
Slugline is a new app for screenwriters from Stu Maschwitz (movie maker, visual effects superstar and guy named Stu). It’s a Fountain-based app for writing movies and outputting them in industry-standard Final Draft format, but in use it’s more like a simple plain-text Markdown editor.
Got one of Fujifilm’s shiny new X100S rangefinder-style cameras? Or another of the company’s digicams with the fancy X-Trans sensor inside? Then go hit up your Software Update and install the new Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O70X7JY4re0&feature=youtu.be
It won’t let your kid paint with light in the traditional, photographic sense — using a light source to burn magical images into a photograph.
Instead, Griffin’s new Crayola Light Marker turns an iPad into a canvas that’s transformed with light — a form of light painting, and just as magical.
The release of Iron Man 3 for Android and iOS is almost upon us, and Gameloft sent us a sneak peak of the 18 different Iron Man armor suits available to the player in the game.
These gorgeous images augment the trailer Gameloft released of their endless runner (the category of game Iron Man 3 falls into) last month. The game’s out on April 25; no word about price yet. More suits to get you drooling below.
There’re few photo apps better than MacPhun’s FX Photo Studio for the casual photographer. It’s got a pretty interface, it’s super-simple to use and it’s stuffed with way more filters than any other iPhone app at the App Store (pretty sure this is true; if you think you know of one with more filters, let me know). Normally the app is $2, but today it’s free.
My favorite read-later app, Pocket, has revamped its sharing options to make it way easier to send articles and snippets to other people. It’s powered by email, although once you’ve set it up you wouldn’t know it. And yes, for those who have been following along, it totally lets you save your favorite passages as highlights, although you’ll need to hack things to get that working.
Moxtra is a great, free app that allows groups of users to collaborate using files — video clips, images, PDFs — that they’ve stored in virtual notebooks; some collaboration can even be conducted in realtime.
Back in January, when Moxtra launched, I described the app as a sort of Evernote-Pinterest blend. Now there’s even more blending with the former, because Evernote has added Moxtra integration.
The French were everywhere at this year’s CES, measuring everything. Everything. The most imaginative expression of this peculiar (but useful) French obsession was the Hapifork, a Bluetooth-connected utensil that measures the user’s eating habits.
If that sounds interesting, good news: Hapifork has finally made it to Kickstarter, just two months behind schedule.
The DeskRail is a desk-tidy for the digital age. Whereas I spent hours in my school shop class cutting, glueing and painting acrylic tubes to hold pens, paperclips and other desktop detritus, the DeskRail is made to organize the junk we use today.
And by junk, I mean Moleskines, USB cables, iPhones and… hipster plastic-framed glasses?
I have used Mailplane on and off for years. I love that it turns the great Gmail interface into a proper desktop app, complete with drag-and-drop attachments, notifications and an icon in the dock and tab switcher. But I never liked its super power of spinning the CPU of my Mac at all times, even when supposedly idle.
Now v3.0 is out, and it seems to have solved the latter problem, while adding a few new features.
