News - page 55

Evernote is planning on giving away over $100,000 in prizes in its second annual worldwide developer competition: the Evernote Devcup. Devcup challenges software developers and designers to create awesome products that integrate with the Evernote API for desktop, mobile or the web. The competition, which opens in 4 days, will award developers with over $100,000 in prizes and give finalists the chance to present their work to the attendees at Evernote’s Trunk Conference in San Francisco.

Imagine the scene: You are a student in England, living in a broken-down house further broken down into noisy, thin-walled apartments (or “flats,” to use the local term). One of your junkie friends has sold you a (totally legit, honest) iPad for just £50, and you need somewhere to stash it for both security and protection.

You look around your decrepit kitchen and see a chipboard door hanging from one of the cupboards. You rip it off and attack it with a saw, screwing and glueing until you have a sturdy box for your non-stolen tablet. To close the hole in the top you pull the artists beret you’ve recently taken to wearing from under a pile of dirty laundry and cut it to fit over the gap. Behold! An iPad case.

But what to do next? If your name is Eric Rea, you quickly form a company called Fine Grain, open up a Kickstarter project and start hawking your new invention under the name “BOWDEN + SHEFFIELD Minimalist iPad Cases.”

Rogue Amoeba’s AirFoil started out as a way to stream any non-iTunes audio to your AirPort Express mini-router, back when AirPlay was still called AirTunes. Then it was expanded with a free iOS app which would let you stream music from AirFoil on the Mac to AirFoil on your iPod or iPhone, handy for hooking up to a stereo.

Now we have AirFoil Speakers Touch 3 for iOS, and it adds in proper AirPlay support, letting you send music from pretty much any iDevice you own.

You know how many tech companies strive to make our experience of their products easier and more transparent so that — in the case of things like the iPad — the product disappears and lets us enjoy whatever it is that it does?

Koss didn’t get that memo, and has launched Striva, an “initiative” which takes something as simple as a headphone and makes it as complicated as an old-school router.

Gameloft released a teaser video for the upcoming N.O.V.A. 3 game which is rumored to be powered by Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3. This is the third installment in the N.O.V.A. franchise, which stands for Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance, and picks up with Kal Wardin crash-landing towards Earth. Gameloft has been known for their console-quality mobile games and N.O.V.A. 3 doesn’t look to disappoint.

There appear to be a few ways to stop your earbuds from dropping to the floor when you unplug them from your waxy canals. One is to just run the cable from the iPhone/iPod in your front pants pocket up through your shirt/t-shirt/muscle-vest and out through the neck hole. Pop out the earbuds and there they dangle. This is so easy and well-known that even clueless teenagers can manage it.

The second method, I have just discovered, is to use the Props from Quirky.

The Ozaki iCoat Finger Case turns your iPhone 4/S into a see-saw, or teeter-totter. Kidding! While it *does* do that, it also protects your phone whilst storing a tiny, stubby stylus on its back. This design not only makes it awkward to hold the phone while in the case, it also stops it from fitting into pretty much any pants pocket or sleeve designed to accommodate even an iPhone already inside a case.

A new music service by Microsoft is expected to rear its face at E3 and should give us a better look into the “Spotify-like” Zune replacement code named “Woodstock.” While we generally wouldn’t be too interested in Microsoft news, the new service is reportedly going to be cross-platform and will indeed be available for Android and iOS.

Mobiles Republic is proud to announce the addition of euronews content to their popular free news applications News Republic, APPY Geek and Biz Report. Euronews is Europe’s leading international news network, covering world news with its 400+ journalists from more than 25 countries. In addition to world news, euronews will provide Mobiles Republic with the latest stories in the field of business, high-tech and culture.

Yay, the “Google Drive could launch next week” rumors can finally end. Google has officially announced the availability of it cloud storage service Google Drive. Starting today, anyone willing to sign up can get 5GB of free cloud-storage to start and if that’s not enough you can always choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month (although I’ve heard people getting even cheaper deals when they sign up). When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB. Google Drive competes with the likes of Dropbox, Sugar Sync, and other cloud storage services by offering:

Do you yearn for the time when your music required a hulking great box to play it? When that music came not in convenient playlists but separated out onto various discs and mechanical cartridges (aka “tapes”)? Do you wish to relive those wonderful days of the Midi System, the Mini System and even, back in the depths of the 1970s, the Music Center?

Then you’re in luck. By applying the latest in touch-screen technology and cutting edge software design, you can now have all the inconvenience of old-school recorded music rendered with the convenience of multi-touch. Behold: The BeatBlaster.

As an Englishman, I know all about rain. I’m intimate with sleet, drizzle, and driving rain both horizontal and vertical. I know about rain that slowly soaks you even though it seems that none is falling, about freezing rain that stings as hard as hail, about the rain that seems to ignore your umbrella and creep into even the best-sealed seams of your clothes.

Other countries might have spectacular monsoons, or driving rainstorms that flow for days, but for variety and ubiquity of precipitation, it’s hard to beat the British Isles. Which is why I’m sad that Dark Sky — an app that predicts the rain forecast for the next hour only — currently only works in the continental United States.

FOR SALE>£100,000 ($161,000): 6mm ƒ2.8 Fisheye-Nikkor

That’s what you’ll see at the top of Grays of Westminster’s used Nikon manual-focus lens listings. The London dealer has gotten its hands on this incredible chunk of glass, a 5.2-kilo (11.5-pound) mountain of a lens that makes the camera behind it look like a vestigial tail.

Ever been half way around the world wishing you could watch your favorite local sports team as they go up against their longtime rival? NimbleTV hopes to grant that wish by offering a subscription-based TV platform that would allow users to access all of their television from anywhere in the world, on any device. NimbleTV will host your TV subscription plan and deliver it to you using their cloud-based software. The NimbleTV service is a global platform that features:

Photoshop Touch is a great iPad app, but it’s tightly focused on quickly gussying up your images and sharing them to the Facebook. To replicate the desktop Photoshop experience on your iPad you need to go somewhere else, and for me that “somewhere else” is Photogene, which this weekend was updated to v3.4. There are a few other additions, but the main new feature is compatibility with the new iPad’s Retina Display.

Minecraft fans, rejoice. Minecraft Pocket Edition just got updated to 0.3.0, and the new release finally adds the feature you’ve all been waiting for: crafting. Oh, and cows and chickens too.

The term iSheep has been around for quite some time to describe those who purchase Apple products for no other reason than the fact that they’re Apple products and to denote that they all look the same. While I believe every facet of life has its “sheep,” Samsung makes an obvious reference to these iSheep in its latest Samsung Unpacked teaser video where they use sheep to depict “everyone else.”

If Kickstarter were a forest, you wouldn’t be able to see it for all the iPhone camera adapter cases littering its leafy, money-begging hummocks. And here we bring you another photo-friendly sapling of an invention, only this one is a little different. It’s called the Magnifi, and it works with pretty much any piece of imaging equipment that ends with “-scope” (or “-lars, as we shall see in a second).

You have a camera, and maybe you have an old flashgun lying around the place. Problem: while you know what to do with the camera, even in all-manual mode, you are terrified of that flash. Used on top the camera it washes everything out and makes it look like a drunken birthday party photo taken in a bar. Used off the camera… well, in that direction there be dragons.

You really should learn to use off-camera flash. But seeing as you never will, Photojojo’s neat set of flash-filters will at least give that old strobe something to do.

The Blackmagic Cinema Camera is calling itself a “digital film” camera, and with a 2.5K sensor and a 13-stop dynamic range, that description mightn’t be far off the mark. Amazingly, it’s also cheap — in the relative terms of movie cameras, that it. The Blackmagic comes in at “just” $3,000.

Time Warner recently added the ability to live stream national and regional sports networks from the TWC TV app for the iPad, iPhone, Android 4.0 smartphones and tablets, and TWCTV.com. Any Time Warner Cable video subscriber living in New York, Dallas, or Charlotte will now have the ability to live stream their favorite sports channels at no extra cost by using the TWC TV app.

Remember the Padcaster? It was a photography rig made to turn the new iPad into a shallow-focusing movie camera, and it was [teased](https://www.cultofmac.com/156157/padcaster-turns-new-ipad-into-shallow-focusing-movie-camera/) by the makers Manhattan Edit Workshop last month. Now, the Padcaster has been revealed at NAB 2012, and it is just what we thought it would be — a way to mount big lenses on the iPad 3 and turn it onto a movie camera.

We’ve all been there, that moment when the bill for that great mobile plan you signed up for comes in. Monthly access charges, usage charges, surcharges, taxes, governmental surcharges & fees — the list goes on… and on… and on. The FCC and others call this “bill shock,” while I call it well… we’ll save that for another day. Regardless of how we feel about these charges and fees, they are the services we signed up for and agreed to pay. Unfortunately it’s not always easy to monitor our usage and it can be very easy to incur overage charges when it comes to services like data and text messaging.

It’s been a busy day for photo sharing community 500px. They managed to launch a major update to their iPad app as well as release their first ever Android app. While Instagram is all the rage these days and has amateur mobile photographers giddy inside, 500px is a photo community built around passionate photographers and enthusiasts who discover, publish, share, buy and sell thousands of photographs every day. You won’t be snapping pictures with this app but you have the opportunity to:

The Retrospective 7 is another one in Think Tank’s great lineup of stealthy-ish camera bags. This one distinguishes itself by slapping a pocket on the side which is designed to hold an iPad or an 11-inch MacBook Air.