Instagram was just updated with its first big tweak since it was bought by the Evil Empire, and much of the buzz is about the new Explore section, which replaces the useless Popular tab (which mostly featured I Shot Myself-style self-portraits of pretty girls, and cats).
But Facebook designer Keegan Jones Tweeted out an awesome little tip: long-pressing on the camera icon launches you right into your camera roll.
There are several iPad cases which have straps to let you fasten them to the headrests of your car seats so people in the back can watch movies. The trouble is, they’re almost all bulky and ugly, as they try to cram too much into one case.
X-Doria’s Drive-In is also bulky and ugly, but as it’s designed as a permanent addition to your car, who cares?
If you want to buy a new zoom lens for your FujiFilm XPro-1 camera, then tough: Fujifilm says that you’ll have to wait until next year. The company has released a roadmap for its XF-series lenses and the variable focal-length lenses are almost all due in 2013.
It’s not all bad, though. Lovers of fast, fixed glass have some treats in store.
How’s this for an almost spectacularly misguided idea. It’s the HighLine, and it’s a kind of springy phone cord which locks into the dock connector of your iPhone or iPad. Sure, it’ll keep the phone safe if you drop it, but it will also cause you to swear the moment the cable gets caught up and rips itself out of the delicate 30-pin dock connector port.
Want to quickly check the weather on your iPhone? Want to have your eyes soothed by wonderful, minimal design at the same time as you’re informed of the temperature outside? Then you need WTHR, an iPhone app which could have been designed by Dieter Rams himself.
You probably love Instagram filters, and all the other image-tweaking filters in the myriad apps available for your iPhone. But no matter how many you try, they are all just presets.
What if you could make your own presets instead? That’s the promise of Booster!, an iPhone 4/s (or iPad 3 if you don’t mind pixel-doubling) photo app with infinitely changeable live filter effects.
Got a super-fast Canon 5D MkIII? Love that you can just pop out the SD card and slide it straight into your Retina iPad via the camera connection kit? Not so fast – literally. Photographer Jeff Cable has done the math and found that the camera’s SD slot is slow, slow slow compared the the CF slot, and then it actually gets worse.
RadTech’s brand spanking news RadSleevz are the closest you’ll get to a Smart Cover for your new Retina MacBook Pro. Although some of you might feel that your $2,000+ notebook deserves a little more protection, others will appreciate the RadSleevz’ minimalism.
SkimClip is a very clever, and very handy little Mac app. What it does it this: With one keystroke, you can make a screen grab of any part of your Mac’s desktop and SkimClip saves it and performs OCR.
Thus, any image containing text is instantly cataloged for searching. Sure, you could also roll your own PDF workflow to do the same thing, but as SkimClip also organizes the results into an iTunes-like interface with search, subcategories and quick-look, and only costs $5 on the Mac App Store, then why bother?
Plus, this is yet another way to convert DRM-encumbered e-books into plain old go-anywhere text.
SkimClip v1.0 is available now in the Mac App Store.
Source: Dom Loves Kim Software
There’s making things out of Lego, and then there’s making things out of Lego. And H.Y. Leung’s amazing white Leica M8 is firmly in the latter camp. His replica rangefinder might just be the best Lego fake we’ve ever seen (outside of anything to do with Star Wars, of course).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXPWgEcIUI8
Years ago, I worked out a way to remote control my home’s lamps from my iPhone: just record the sound of somebody clapping, and play it back when you want to switch a light on or off.
Now, though, there’s a much higher-tech way to do the same thing. It’s an iPhone-controlled lightbulb from Insteon.
I used to think that Wash & Go – shampoo and conditioner in one bottle – was the greatest combination of all time. That’s until I found out about the Camera Cooler, a camera bag and beer cooler in one. Clearly, the predictions that the Singularity would occur in 2012 were correct.
If you had any doubts that the world of iPhone accessories could grow any stranger or more diverse, then throw them out now. The Shaka Wind Meter proves that there are still plenty of depths yet to plumb.
The Shaka is a simple little gadget: a fan that plugs into the headphone socket of your iPhone and tells you the wind speed. It’s made for surfers, but has many more uses than that.
Who doesn’t love the Drobo? People who like to lose their data, that’s who. For the rest of us, today brings good news: New Thunderbolt-equipped Drobos, one for the desktop and one for taking on the road.
Alphyn Industries’ DELTA415 Wearcom jeans may as well have been called the Dork-O-Tron 3000, for they are nerdy in the extreme. They are also flat-out awesome, and if I was the kind of person who spent $160 on a pair of jeans, then I’d be al over them. Or all in them, I guess.
The Wearcoms are simple: the front right pocket has been replaced by a see-through phone pouch, complete with a protective flap to cover it.
Satechi’s Portable Energy Station is the backup battery you need if you have a new iPad aka iPad 3. Why? Because its 10,000 mAH battery is almost as capacious as the 12,000 mAH (45 watt-hour) battery in the iPad 3 itself.
Magnets. Even if we’ll probably never know how they work, you gotta love them. They let us pin notes to fridges, they lock and unlock your iPad’s screen and now they can even stick your your iPhone to any metal surface. If only they didn’t do that pesky trick of wiping your bak cards, magnets would be pretty much perfect.
Apple is generally known not just for the minimal design of its products, but also for the minimal design of its packaging. But when it comes to the new MagSafe to MagSafe 2 adapter, the box is not only huge in comparison to its payload, it also consists of a frankly ridiculous number of individual parts. And Paul Kafasis, boss of Rogue Amoeba software, has the photos to prove it.
In case you haven’t been counting down the days to Verizageddon, it’s almost upon us. Tomorrow, Verizon will be lighting up and expanding its 4G LTE network in a ridiculous number of markets. Verizon undeniably has the largest 4G LTE coverage in the U.S. and it’ll be years before its competitors catch up.
On-demand news radio service, Stitcher Radio, dropped a nice update in the laps of Android and iOS users today. Starting today, Stitcher Radio will follow in the footsteps of services such as Pandora or iTunes Genius, by providing personalized recommendations based on your listening activity. This new feature has been dubbed “Smart Station” and claims to be a first for talk radio.
Almost nightly I scrabble around in the dark trying to find the 30-pin dock connector dangling from my desk so I can plug it onto my depleted iPad without disturbing the Lady, sleeping beside me. I say “almost” as sometimes I fall into a drunken sleep with my spectacles askew and the iPad still in my lap or – more often – the Lady refuses to sleep with me and goes to her own room.
And every time I struggle to find the plug, I wish for something like the illuminated CordLite cable.
Thanks to Apple, every manufacturer now feels like they need their own voice assistant and so begins the borderline mental illness campaign of conversing with your phone. Samsung announced their own version S-Voice, which is launching with the new Samsung Galaxy S III in a couple of days. Now, LG has decided to jump on the voice wagon by announcing their own voice assistant service Quick Voice.
BBC has added “Live Restart” to its iPlayer app. This will let Brits hit a button to rewind live TV up to two hours. Thus, if you miss the beginning of a live show you can just skip back to the beginning.
This handily closes the gap between live streaming and the watch-later service that lets you go back and catch TV shows aired in the past two weeks.
Quick! If you have any need for an iOS screen-recording app, and you don’t mind wasting $2, then go download Display Recorder right now. Don’t worry – I’ll wait.
The Motive Stylus solves one of the most annoying problems of carrying a stylus for your iPad: Where do you put it? We have seen magnetic styluses which snap onto the Smart Cover before, but none does it quite so securely and unobtrusively as the Motive, which actually folds flat.