News - page 38

Do you still own a collection of music stored on cassette tapes? Then I have some advice: STOP LIVING IN THE PAST! Those things’ll kill you eventually. If the wow and flutter doesn’t get you, or the ridiculous rewind times don’t drive you crazy, then the magnetic tape will probably spool out at nights and strangle you in your sleep. Probably.

But before you ditch those mix-tapes, you might want to transfer them to your iDevice. And wouldn’t you know it, but Hammacher Schlemmer will sell you a device almost as useless as your own (probbly perfectly-preserved) Walkman to do it.

Denominations is an iPhone currency converter app that is actually useful. No, it doesn’t offer a slew of options, nor does it even look particularly swish or fancy. But it is dead easy to use, and this will make it just about the best conversion app around when you actually need it.

I bet you never thought you’d feel early-adopter’s remorse for a bathroom scale, right? Well, if you bought the Withings Wi-Fi-connected scale to wirelessly share your weight and BMI with the world (or just with your own suite of fitness apps) then prepare to get stressed out, and maybe to comfort yourself with a big slice of rich, delicious chocolate cake: The Withings WS30 is here.

Olloclip users rejoice. Or rather, Olloclip users who really hate any kind of lens-induced distortion, rejoice! For now you can grab a free app which will automatically remove and correct any and all of the bends, aberrations and artifacts of your handy add-on lens.

Rhino has become the first native iOS client for Alpha.app.net available in the App Store. App.net, you may remember, is a Twitter-like platform whose social networking service – Alpha – costs users $50 to join. Up until now, users have had to struggle along with a web view, or get invited to one of the many beta (and alpha!) programs for new apps.

It’s no secret that many of us aren’t fans of the new shared data plans being offered by Verizon and AT&T. Worse are the tactics these carriers are using to all but force us into the new plans. Consumers aren’t the only one’s disappointed, as Sprint and T-Mobile both discourage the practice and prefer to stick with the assumption that users enjoy having unlimited data with no fear of overages. Why should anyone have to pay a premium to see their data capped and divvied up between their data hungry family?

Clearly the “military” part in Griffin’s Military Grade Survivor case for the iPhone doesn’t refer to the color. While olive drab is an option, the majority of the rugged cases come in candy colors more suited to a pre-schooler’s toy box than the killing fields of, well, whichever countries the U.S is currently at war with.

What I want in a rugged sports camera: High definition (to see every detail), a waterproof case (so I don’t have to worry about taking a dip), a slim and stylish body (to match my own!) and probably some other things I never thought of yet.

And here comes the Sony HDR-AS10 HD Action Camcorder, which takes care of all of these bullet points, including the last one.

Wowsers! Western Digital’s Thunderbolt My Book VelociRaptor Duo is all about the big numbers. 10,000 RPM platters, 2TB storage, 10Gb/s transfer (in both directions) and – if you daisy-chain it with other Thunderbolt drives – you can RAID things up to make them even faster.

Heck, even the price is impressive: $860. Ouch!

I can’t think of many things worse to do on a bike than ride it indoors on a stationary trainer. After all, without the world going by and the wind in your hair, you’re effectively just sitting on a stool and waggling your legs.

However, if forced to use these blow-up dolls of the bike world, then I’d insist on one that connected to my iPhone 4S or iPad 3 via Bluetooth 4 and let me control it and hook it up with third-party app. And amazingly, that’s just what Wahoo’s Kickr PowerTrainer does.

Over at the IFA tradeshow in Berlin. Zagg has launched a couple of new iPad keyboards. And one of them, the Pro Plus, has something I have missed ever since I took to typing on my iPad in the corners of dark and seedy bars: a keyboard backlight.

Etchings is an iPhone photography app which takes your pictures and turns them into very realistic etchings. Or fake etchings, I guess. Whatever you call them, if you pick the right source pic then you’ll end up with something that looks as if you lacquered your own metal plate, etched it, dropped it into an acid bath, washed and dried it, inked it up and ran it through a printing press.

Only instead of taking a whole morning, it takes just seconds.

Concept is one of the nicest implementations of the virtual corkboard/scrapbook we’ve seen. You can add photos, post-its and index-cards to various “boards,” and rearrange them at will.

It’s a 1.0 release, and as such lacks a few basic niceties (like portrait orientation) but the polish and ease of use make up for it.

A boring charger might not have the glamorous appeal of a fancy iPad case or bag, but it could make a huge difference to your life. If your life is sad, small and you’re excited about saving a few seconds every day. Kidding. LaunchPort’s inductive iPad charger actually looks pretty awesome.

Aleratec’s Charge-Glo dock cable has a very simple yet very neat gimmick: like the MagSafe charger you have for your MacBook, it sports an LED in the plug, and this LED changes color to show charging status. No more tapping at your iPhone’s home button to see if it has done charging.

Just when you thought it was safe to enter a camera store without being assaulted by megapixel madness and other “feeds and speeds,” Samsung goes and adds a new tech race to the game. Processor speed. Its impressive new camera, the Galaxy Camera, comes with a 1.4GHz quad-core processor, and looks like the future of compact camera design, packing an Android 4.1 Jellybean computer.

Sony has gotten on the connected, app-enabled camera bandwagon at last with the NEX-5R, an updated 5N which adds Wi-Fi, “apps,” an very sweet new AF system and a couple of extra buttons. Sony’s NEX series is already smoking hot, and these new features might just bring the fire brigade a-runnin'.

Sony says they’re getting ready to ship two drool-inducing new toys. The first is a new addition to its compact NEX series, the NEX-5R, equipped with wifi, an ultra-quick (according to Sony), hybrid phase-detection/contrast detection autofocus system and — here’s where it gets really interesting — the ability to download specialized apps.

The second is Sony’s entry into the exploding action-cam market; the aptly named Action Cam is a really tiny, 3-ounce (with battery) video camera that comes with a variety of outdoor-enthusiast mounting options and the ability to use a smartphone’s screen as a viewfinder.

Looxcie today launched their own Facebook channel, along with an update to their free live-streaming app — called LooxcieLive that turns any Android or iOS device into a video broadcast camera that streams video straight to your Facebook feed.

Of course, Looxcie’s isn’t the first app to do this; Utsream did the same thing just a week or so ago with their own app, Broadcast for Friends (with the gag-me-cute acronym of BFF). The difference here is that Looxcie’s Facebook channel can also serve up live broadcasts from Looxcie’s own hardware — which may make first-person-perspective shooting easier than, say, duct-taping your smartphone to your forehead (snicker all you want, we’re sure it’s been done). And, of course, Looxcie is first out the gate — and the only  Ustream to the punch with an Android app.

Imagine if your took the ultimate hippy artifact (apart from the roach clip, I guess), and combined it with the ultimate must-have hi-tech accessory. That’s right: the beanbag chair meets the microfiber cloth.

Now, further imagine that you shrunk the result, and added some fabric designs that would be more at home on a corporate robot’s necktie than on a filthy 60s dropout’s cheap furniture.

Now, behold the result of your crazed imagination: the Toddy Wedge, (not to be confused with the “Todd Wedgie, which was an unfortunate schoolyard event that led directly to the laugh-a-minute movies Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness)

FioWriter is yet another new iPad text editor, but with one huge difference: it has Command, Option and Control keys right there on the keyboard.

What’s more, they work as they should: hold down the modifier and hit a key to execute a command. For instance, press Cmd-F (for “find”) and a search box pops up over the keyboard. And that’s not it. Not even close.

Final Draft is the Microsoft Word of the screenplay world: users hate it, but it’s the industry standard, and if you don’t submit your draft/edits in .FDX format, you’re about as popular as Ben Stiller after an award acceptance speech.

Still, in the same way that we all want Word on the iPad, we all want Final Draft Writer on the iPad too. And while it has been a coupleof years in the making, FD is now on iOS.

Static publishing is the new, uh, CMS. Or something. What’s for certain is that there has been a recent surge in interest in blogging platforms which publish single, pre-rendered, static HTML pages instead of generating those pages on the fly from some kind of database. The latest of these uses the venerable VoodooPad to generate your pages instantly, ready for uploading to your web-server of choice.

There are a bunch of services which will take your old films, movies and even videocassettes and scan/digitize them, but YesVideo is not only pretty convenient, but also claims to be the first to modernize your analog memories and store them in the cloud.

Sure, the company will still send you a comedy “archival” DVD so you can put your hot coffee on your desk without leaving a ring, but now you can also store an unlimited amount of photos and videos online and ready to share.

AutoStitch, the fantastic panorama-shooting app, has been updated to v5.0. And what an update. The new headline feature is called StitchGuide, and it uses augmented-reality overlays to help guide your photo taking.