The iOS 6-compatible updates continue to deluge our App Store apps, and the latest is Drafts, the excellent inbox for almost everything on your iPhone or iPad. Drafts takes plain text (or Markdown text) and pipes it to any and every place you could possibly need it.
The update adds support for the new tall iPhone, as well as a whole bunch of neat iOS 6-only features. Let's take a quick look:
Great news for notification junkies: you can throw out all the third-party hacks which let you pipe your Growl alerts into Mountain Lion's Notification Center. Now Growl itself has been updated to V2.0 and had native integration with OS X's notifications. Better yet, it adds support for forwarding alerts to iOS services Prowl and Boxcar.
Like any good father, I love my Lensbabys. Screwed onto the front of my camera they distort the world just enough to make looking at it more interesting, and therefore make me take better photos. But for some, these lenses — which let the photographer move a "sweet-spot" of sharp focus around an otherwise blurred frame — are expensive novelties.
Well, they might still be novelties, but the new Lensbaby Spark are anything but expensive.
CloudMagic 2.0 is a huge update to a (previously) marginally useful search app. Now, with many extra services added along with a native iPad app, CloudMagic is pretty essential if you use any cloud services whatsoever. It lets you search in your Evernote, Dropbox, Gmail and other accounts, instantly
Click-clack-CLUNK! That’s the sound a Transformer makes when it, uh, transforms. And that’s the sound I imagine the Jorno makes when it transforms from stout, ugly black box into miniature-but-not-too-tiny Bluetooth keyboard.
After a few days of trickling releases, the flood of iOS-compatible updates has begun. Among them is Instapaper, our favorite read-later app here at Cult ofCult of Mac. Amongst the usual bug fixes and iOS6 compatibility comes a new font, optimized for dyslexic readers.
There's one camera accessory which you probably never, ever use — unless you're a professional who carries several cameras: the body cap. This protective plastic disk is most likely in the back of a closet somewhere, waiting inside the camera's box for the day you sell it and the cap is needed once again.
But Olympus thinks that it can tempt you with a fancy body cap. What's more, it thinks that you'll pay £70 for it (around $114). Behold: The 15mm ƒ8 "body cap."
Question: How many iPhone owners does it take to change a lightbulb(‘s color)?
Answer: One. As long as he has installed the LIFX app, and bought the LIFX remote-controlled lightbulb.
No other news agency consistently fails as much as Fox. Take for instance this Fox 5 reporter in NY who decided to head down to the 5th Avenue Apple Store to interview a few of the crazies already lining up for the “most amazing, best Apple product ever.” I was shaking my head until the reporter started listing off some of the new features of the iPhone 5 and let me tell you… I’m packing my sleeping bag as soon as I finish this post!
Leica's new M-E looks to be the boutique camera maker's "budget" model, an answer to the Fujifilm X-Pro and the Sony RX1 cameras. Only being a Leica, the company has cut back on an already sparse feature-set whilst keeping a ridiculous price. The M-E will cost you $5,450 for the body only when it goes on sale this month.
It reads like some kind of fanboy fantasy: Jony Ive To Design Leica Camera. Only this fantasy is totally non-fantastic. Ive is set to design an ultra-limited edition of one single Leica, and it will be auctioned off by Bono (who else?) for charity.
iNote is an app with one single purpose. And that purpose is such a good one that as soon as I tell you what it is, and how well it works, you’ll be off to the store to drop your $2 on it: iNote syncs your iOS notes with Evernote.
That’s right. Just tell Siri anything you want to remember and — moments later — it’ll be in your Evernote, filed under a new iNotes stack.
It looks like those little green hamlets have been filling their noggins with all sorts of engineering tidbits. Armed with nothing more than a few spare parts and ingenuity, these Bad Piggies are set to take off and conquer Android, iOS, PC and Mac come September 27. Rovio has teased us once or twice already, but this is the first time we get to see the actual gameplay of this upcoming Angry Birds spin-off.
Fabric Horse, the Philadelphia-based utility-wear company, has gotten around to making this sweet waxed-canvas iPad case.
Canon's other new camera today is the G15, successor to the G12 and flagship compact in the Canon range. The big changes are the lens, which retains its zoom range but gets a faster maximum aperture of ƒ1.8, and the rear LCD panel, which no longer flips out but now sports a higher 920,000 resolution.
Olympus joins the Photokina news bukake-fest with two new PEN cameras and a smart compact.
Olympus is entering Photokina week with three new cameras: the E-PM2 and E-PL5 for its PEN Micro Four Thirds lineup, and the X-Z2 as a flagship compact camera.
Both PEN cameras feature a 16.1MP CMOS sensor, a max ISO of 25,600, in-body image stabilization, a 3-inch touchscreen, touch shooting, 8fps continuous shooting, photo filters, RAW files with in-camera editing, and 1080i HD video recording.
Complaining about Apple gypping you by changing its terrible, bulky, hard-to-use 30-pin dock connector for the sleek, double-sided Lightning connector? Then take a look at the alternative from Samsung. One of the few things it didn't copy from Apple was the giant connector, but that's not to say it got anything right.
Oh, it is soooo on. Right after the announcement of Nikon's (relatively) cheap and small full-frame 24MP D600, comes Canon's reply: the 6D, a (you guessed it) small and budget-minded full-frame SLR. And it adds Wi-Fi and GPS.
Canon seems intent on fighting camera phones with Wi-Fi and large sensors. Also: ISO 12,000.
Instagram: Probably the best thing to happen to photography in recent years. InstaStory: a slick and simple little app which turns your Instagram photos into slideshows, and adds music. If you have an Instagram account, and you have an iDevice, then you should be downloading this free app right now.
Poster is a brand-new iPad blogging app for posting to WordPress sites. It works with hosted WordPress.com sites, as well as with self-hosted WordPress sites like Cult of Mac.
It seems like just a few months ago the choices for blogging from the iPad were limited in both quantity and quality, with the best apps (like Blogsy) often heavily flawed, and the worst apps (the then-available WordPress App, for example) being unusable.
Now, we have an embarrassment of options. And ironically — for WordPress users at least — you can now post images into articles direct from mobile Safari (in iOS 6), meaning you mightn't even need an app after all.
Sony has launched a whole new range of cameras at the Photokina camera trade show, including the new full-frame A99 SLR with 24MP sensor and a translucent mirror, the NEX 6, with 16MP sensor and Wi-Fi, a 35mm camcorder with interchangeable lenses (the VG900) and several others.
But we're not going to talk about them, interesting as they are (nice launch strategy Sony — burying your own products). We're going to look at the RX-1, the high-end, full-frame mirrorless camera. Why? Because I want one, that's why.
Ladies and gentlemen, I wish I was making this up, but unfortunately I’m not. Apple’s patent crusade has taken a new low. They’ve actually filed a lawsuit against an online Polish grocery site, claiming they are trying to confuse customers with their trademarked A.pl. The companies full name is A.PL CompanyInternet SA and the .pl is actually Poland’s country-wide domain. However, Apple believes this site-to-door grocery delivery site is simply trying to profit off of their almighty reputation.
Apple’s hardware product lines might be clean and sparse to the point of obsession, but behind the scenes it’s another story. Take iOS 6, for example. While yesterday’s Apple keynote showed off plenty of new features, many of them are location dependent. And I’m not talking about maps here – many features are switched off outside of the U.S, and just which one’s you can use depends on the country you’re in.
Back when Apple showed off the first iOS 6 beta, there were a paltry 11 cities featured in the spectacular 3-D Flyoverfeature.
I figured a week or two back that the new maps app wouldn’t launch with such a crappy line up, and I was right. With the Gold Master (GM) version of iOS 6 released to developers yesterday, maps just got a whole lot more 3-D cities.