Q: How Does Bob Marley like his donuts?
A: Wi’ Jam in [1].
And Jamn is also the name of this little pocket software toolkit for musicians. It’s an iPhone app which shows you the notes in a any scale in any key, but it has a rather clever gimmick that makes it a lot easier to read: the notes are on a wheel.
If you stayed in any but the most flea-bitten of hotels in the last few years, you will have seen an iHome dock on the nightstand, ready to be mostly ignored until you need a place to charge your iPhone at night.
And as you eyed the clock/radio/speaker you may have chuckled to yourself and muttered something about the poor hotel owner, who just wasted like tens of thousands of dollars on now-obsolete 30-pin connector-equipped boxes.
If only he's waited, he could have had this new Lightning version, which also works with older models.
Admit it: When your iPhone/iPad/camera lens/spectacles get greasy fingerprints all over it, you don't reach for a microfiber cloth,right? Nope. You do exactly what everyone else does, and polish off the dirt with a corner of your shirt.
But what if you could continue with your filthy (if rather popular) habit, but with the magical results of microfiber? Thanks to the Voy Voy Summer Oxford, you can.
Despite being so huge and heavy that it’s barely possible for one person to lift, some folks still manage to take the regular-sized iPad out of the house for extended periods of time. And if you’re doing that with the Retina iPad, you’ll know that once the battery has run down you’re looking at three to four weeks to recharge it, even if you were to plug it straight into the high-tension power lines overhead (hint: Do not do this).
That’s why the Justin Ultra-Slim Power Case was invented.
Yahoo has bought the developer of the fantastic iOS apps PhotoForge and KitCam. Ghostbird’s software team will now work for Yahoo, helping to make Flickr even better. And – as ever with these things – development on both apps will stop.
Do you like the look of the new iOS 7 AirDrop feature that lets you beam things from iDevice to iDevice? Me too. But even if you have iOS 7 installed, you still can’t beam things to and from a Mac, which is arguably a more common need for basement-bound, friendless nerds like you and I.
Enter BeamApp, which does what it says on the virtual, HTML-based tin.
Pentax’s new Q7 has been styled to look like it was put together by somebody in shop class when told to “make a camera” out of whatever wooden offcuts were laying around the place. It can even be had in 120 different color combos, presumably all hideous.
But the Q7 does add one thing that’s worth noting: A bigger sensor. And judging by how the lenses now match that sensor in terms of 35mm equivalence, it looks like this was the plan all along.
You know what’s great? Magnets. You know what’s equally great? Filtered photos. Which makes this little DIY project – using both magnets and homemade filters – double great, right? Right guys?
It looks like the new photo filters in iOS 7 are lossless. That is, the original, untouched image file is saved as is, and the effect is applied on-the-fly. This is how non-destructive editing apps like Lightroom and Aperture do their thing.
Years ago, I submitted a bug report to Apple. The problem? Teeny, tiny subtitles in the iOS Videos app, so small that even an eagle with binoculars couldn’t read them. I got a mail from Apple to follow up, and then, just one or two releases later, subtitles got big enough to read (the Lady and I have different native tongues so we usually watch everything with subs).
Now, in iOS 7, they’re not only big but completely customizable.
Our serial-inventing friend Dotan Saguy is back, this time with yet another super-smart iAccessory. It’s a little carrying case for your everyday iPad essentials, and it is designed to integrate with your iPd Smart Cover. It’s called the Smart Cargo, and it’s as ingenious as Dotan’s other Kickstarter projects like the Smarter Stand.
If there’s one note that’s almost guaranteed not to be in any of the zillions of to-do apps spread across your devices, it’s “Find new to-do list app.” However, should you actually have that entry scribbled down somewhere that you can actually find, then you can now cross it off the list: The app in question is called Silo, and it’s pretty slick stuff.
The Grablet Nomad is a twist on the iPad case we glimpsed at last year’s Macworld Expo. Essentially, it adds a front cover to the strappy, grabby case, but the folks at Grablet couldn’t stop themselves from making even the front cover into an all-singing gizmo.
People talk a lot of crap about their minimalist apps, promising “distraction-free” interfaces as if distraction had anything to do with how many buttons you can see on the screen. In the future I will send those people a link to download Slicereader, a reading app so truly minimal that it doesn’t even have an open/save dialog.
Launchbar users can enjoy a brand new feature in v5.5 of the find-everything Mac app. Launchbar – if you’re not familiar with it – is an app that you trigger with a shortcut (I use ⌘-Space) and then type into the pop-up window. Launchbar instantly presents results, letting you launch apps, send emails, play music, browse your iPhoto library and a whole lot more. And now it has snippets.
Lightroom 5 is now officially official, and you can grab the final version from Adobe for $150 (there’s a one-month trial built in if you want it). Should you upgrade from v4? Probably. Unlike Photoshop, which adds more and more flashy-but-pointless features just to keep people upgrading, Lightroom is still young enough that the new features are super useful and – ironically – they also make it less and less likely you’ll need to resort to Photoshop to polish and fix your images.
This is your best chance to grab the best turn-based, world-conquering strategy game on the Mac at the best price.
To coincide with the announced availability date of Civilization 5’s second expansion pack, Brave New World — which will be out Jul 9 — all Civ 5 games and DLC have had their prices cut 75 percent for the weekend. That means the original game is just $10; the Gold Edition game — which includes everything Civ 5 released up to this point including all DLC and the first expansion pack, Gods and Kings — is just $12.50.
Oh man, does Mischief ever look amazing. It’s a Mac (or Windows) drawing app which feels like it uses pixels, but stores your strokes as vectors. This means that you can daub away with your favorite pressure-sensitive stylus, but enjoy the infinite zooming and tiny file sizes of vectors. Adobe Ideas does something similar on iOS, but this is a whole lot bigger.
You’ve all used those personal guided museum tours, right? The ones that use a button-covered box and a pair of filthy headphones to tell you all about the painting/sculpture/diorama in front of you?
Well, imagine that instead of a stupid box and worn out headphones you got to use your own iPhone. And instead of having to tap in a number to hear the guide, you just relied on GPS to know what you’re looking at. And finally, imagine that instead of being a guide to a dusty old museum, the “museum” was instead the whole of New York.
That’s Urban Wonderer.
Tall Chess might as well have been called “LetterChess:” it’s like a cross between the amazingly addictive Letterpress and actual, you know, chess. It’s an iPhone 5 game (hence the “tall” part – it uses the whole of the iPhone’s screen to show the board), and it lets you play the great game against folks you’ll find on Game Center.
Booq’s new Fibre Snapcase is yet another shell-style iPhone 5 case, but this one at least has the distinction of using the neat linen-y material also found in Booq’s excellent Mamba device bags. I kind of like the look of it, but I wish that it had gone little further.
Still using that Ikea wind-up kitchen timer to take your time-lapse videos? Ditch it, because somebody has finally come up with a purpose-made iPhone motion rig that is cheap, fits in your pocket and can do double (triple?) duty as a panoramarator[1], and a passive sound-amplifying iPhone dock.
Shelfy is a new iPhone app which lets you quickly and easily keep a record of the books you have read, and the books you want to read. And unlike apps like Delicious Library, it doesn’t assume that you have a stack of physical paper books to scan: Input is strictly via search, and all the better for it.
Dispatch is the iPhone e-mail client I have been looking for for years. It’s kind of like Drafts for email, only in reverse – the emails come in from pretty much any service you like, then you quickly triage them. Then, you send the results off to another app or service on your iPhone.
Remember the Wally iPhone wallet? It was Kickstarted back in the misty far-off days of February, and is now a fully-available product that you can, like, buy. Don’t remember it? Then let me jog your memory: The Wally is a minimal and lightweight leather wallet that sticks to the back of your iPhone using hi-tech future adhesives. And the good news is that it’s currently shipping at 20% off – just $40.
