Those of you of a certain age might remember the Game Boy Camera, an ingenious add-on for the original Nintendo Game Boy that snapped tiny 128×112 pictures.
It was briefly one of the most exciting ideas in handheld consoles – suddenly the Game Boy wasn’t just for games, it was for other fun stuff too!
Better still, if you had the money to spare, you could buy a Game Boy Printer and print out your pixellated works of art to give to friends.
All that’s ancient history, which is precisely what makes it the ideal starting point for an iOS app.
It’s called 8 Bit Pocket Camera, and it’s lots of fun and, at just a dollar, excellent value.
Joey Chun had an idea, and the idea was this: a cute iPhone stand with a sturdy fold-out arm, so you can use it as a viewing stand, or to keep your device still while recording video and taking photos.
This is gorgeous. Everyday is a $2 app that reminds you, once a day, to take a photo of yourself. Then it combines all the photos you’ve taken into a timelapse movie of your changing features.
Our roundup of must-have iOS apps from this week includes Camera+ – quite possibly the best, and certainly the most popular, photography application for the iPhone. It’s so good that it has replaced Apple’s official Camera app on my iPhone’s home screen, and is now my go-to application for snapping all my photos
Also to feature is Readlines – an application that makes great use of your iOS device while it’s sat in its dock on your desk, and turns an otherwise boring blank screen in to a big, bold stream of random headlines from your Google Reader RSS feeds.
Tap Forms Databaseon your iPhonemeans you can forget sifting through every piece of paper in your home to find your insurance details when you need to make a claim, or panicking because you’ve forgotten your PIN at the ATM when you need some cash – it’s now with you wherever you go.
Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-haves, including HubbleSiteand Inception: App Edition, after the break!
Camera+ – ($0.99 for a limited time) iPhone – Photography
Camera+is quite possibly the best, and certainly the most popular, photography application for the iPhone. It’s so good that it has replaced Apple’s official Camera app on my iPhone’s home screen, and is now my go-to application for snapping all my photos. With dozens of effects, touch exposure and focus, 6x digital zoom, and multiple scene modes, Camera+ is the ultimate way to get the most out of your iPhone’s photos.
In addition to a major updated that includes over 50 awesome new features and improvements, Camera+ has also been reduced for a limited to time to just $0.99. Anyone who’s used Camera+ on their iPhone will agree that you won’t find a better day-to-day photography app, and with the recent performance tweaks and new features, $0.99 for this fantastic application is a steal!
New over at Photojojo is this bizarre $35 add-on for iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4: an 8X zoom lens kit.
You get more than just the lens. The kit comes with a slide-on case for your phone, on to which you attach the lens itself. There’s also a mini tripod so you can keep the whole thing steady.
It certainly looks weird, but it’s so cheap that I can see plenty of photo nerds jumping at the chance to play around with iPhone zoomery.
If you do, let us know what you think of it, or link to some of your sample images.
If iPhoto leaves you cold, or perhaps doesn’t run so well on your older Mac, there aren’t many options for a similar application that combines photo editing and photo library management. Not many, except for Picasa.
Google’s free photo app is a great alternative to iPhoto, generously packed with features and a good choice for people who want to quickly upload photos to the web.
In most respects, it compares very well to iPhoto, including features like face recognition and geolocation data. It comes with a selection of quick edit presets, and easy (but basic) slider controls for detailed editing.
What’s particularly nice about Picasa, though, is its speed. It roars through photo libraries that leave rival photo managers struggling to catch up. On first run, it will zip through your iPhoto library – not copying any files (so don’t worry about disk space) – but indexing all your data there and building up its own copy of the iPhoto library.
Picasa is one of those things it makes sense to have around. It’s free, it’s packed with useful stuff, and even if you don’t put it to immediate use, there might yet come a day when you’ll be glad you have it to hand.
(You’re reading the 28th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more, or grab the RSS feed.)
PhotoCopy looks pretty amazing. It’s a plugin (for all the major editing software — see below) that takes any still image or video clip and applies a special filter that mimics a particular style. For still images, the filters can mimic the styles (included as presets) of 40 photographs taken by well-known photographers, 72 individual paintings from classic artists or 30 unique photographic processes (some of which are pretty unusual — I’ve never even heard of “salt print”). Video can be transformed into styles sampled from famous movies, like Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner or Gone With the Wind. There’s much more — check out PhotoCopy’s details at developer Digital Film Tool’s website.
The photo version of the app is available as a plugin for Photoshop (including Elements), Lightroom and Aperture for $95; the video version is $195 and works with After Effects, Final Cut Pro or Avid.
Back in the web’s Dark Ages, before anyone even dreamed of creating a logo for a markup language, and when messing around with default link colors was adventurous web design, the closest thing anyone had to online video was the animated GIF.
It was just a small series of still image files glued together, but when played in sequence they looked like movement. A million “UNDER CONSTRUCTION” animated signs bloomed across the early web.
Since then, the animated GIF has gone out of fashion. You don’t see them so much. But you might see more soon, and enjoy making your own, thanks to a new photo toy for iPhone called GIFvid.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD 2011 — Given the explosion of visual art inspired by mobile devices running Mac iOS and apps developed to help artists create work on them, it came as a bit of a surprise to see the way Macworld organizers chose to display digital art at the 2011 Conference and Expo.
The Expo’s art was placed in “digital art galleries” displayed on 27″ Samsung wide-screen TVs housed in unobtrusive kiosks, dispersed in the cavernous hallways of the 2nd and 3rd floors, where only a portion of the conference’s attendees — media personnel and those who purchased something other than Expo Only tickets — was likely to see it.
This is curious in the light of recent attention given to the digital creations of artists producing work on the Mac platform, which in years past could be seen framed, on brightly-lit wall space, in the middle of well-trafficked concourses.
Click on images in the gallery above to see artist and title information, as well as the curious distortion effects rendered in iPhone photographs of art (made, in many cases, ON iPhones) displayed in a digital TV slideshow.
Instagram has become an iPhone photography phenomenon (although not everyone likes it), but like any online community with that many participants, it can be hard to find the really good stuff.
So English developer Elliott Kember has put together Instagre.at, a site that slurps up popular photos from Instagram HQ and spits them out in a very desktop browser friendly way that lets you navigate with your arrow keys.
You can flit left and right through the popular images, but try hitting the down arrow too: it lets you drill into further lists of images using a particular Instagram filter, or by a particular user. Use the up arrow, or the Escape key, to go back to the popular list. Neat stuff.
This week’s photographic obsession is Dominik Seibold’s Hough Transform Camera, which I can explain in two different ways: the simple way, and the science way.
If you saw our previous posts about light painting using an iPhone or iPad, you’ll enjoy this brief video demonstration of how to make a very cool New Year greeting.
The lightpainting was done using Penki, an app developed by the people who sparked off this idea in the first place, Dentsu London/BERG.
All that’s needed in addition is a ruler, a camera with a flash (for the portraits), and a shiny table. And perhaps a few rehearsals to get the timing right. There’s a pile more lightpainting images in the Penki Flickr pool, if you feel the need for some further inspiration.
Fresh to the iOS App Store is Trimensional, which takes real 3D photos on your iPhone, and is this week’s Best Thing Ever, without a doubt. It’s one of those photography apps that stands out against all the rest because it’s so different. And at one dollar, it’s a bargain.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2011 — The TRYX could have been designed by Jonny Ive’s evil twin brother: It’s charismatic and completely striking — but in a dark, angular way. I really couldn’t believe my jaw was dropping over a camera’s looks when I first saw it up close, but that’s exactly what happened. The TRYX’s form factor also has one really cool trick up it’s sleeve: the rim of the case swivels around and turns the whole thing into a sort-of tripod. It’s very slick, and it feels and looks satisfyingly well-designed.
Casio has made sure to back up the good looks with substance, and absolutely stuffed the 12-megapixel point-n-shoot with equally stunning performance too: Ultra-wide angle 21mm lens; HDR; touch-screen controls; the ability to capture seamless, 360-degree panoramic images with a single sweep; some sort of high-speed zoom system (which we didn’t get to try out); even a self-timer that’s motion-activated; and arguably the most impressive function: the ability to capture slow-motion video at 240 frames per second.
It’s coming in April, and it’s yours for $250. Press release with full specs here.
There is an interesting new video photography app called, 8mm Vintage Camera by Nexvio, Inc., that brings your iPhone and iPod Touch back in time to capture the beauty and magic of old school vintage movies.
It accomplishes this by mixing and matching different films and lenses and it does a good job of it. The total number of combinations allow you to get a glimpse into retro filming with 25 old school looks from bygone eras. It even comes complete with retro colors, flickering video, light leaks, dust and scratches (my favorite), and frame jitters. You can add any of these to your video with a flick of your finger.
No word on whether Jobs plans to attend the three-month show. “I am not sure whether he’s even aware of the show opening in Palo Alto,” said Tompert. “But who knows.”
Artist Michael Tompert takes Apple’s products and wrecks them with blowtorches, sledgehammers, handsaws and handguns. His large-scale prints of the detritus are surprisingly colorful and beautiful.
“It’s an alternate viewpoint,” explained Tompert at a preview of his first gallery show, which opens in San Francisco today. “They’re beautiful inside. They’re beautiful when you open them up.”
At a preview last weekend, Tompert’s three kids sat on the floor playing with iPhones and iPod touches underneath their father’s artwork. The irony was lost on no one. In fact, it’s our obsession with Apple’s products that Tompert is commenting on.
Feast your eyes on this beautiful gallery of Apple products destroyed in the name of art. The work is by artist Michael Tompert, whose show opens tonight in San Francisco. But you don’t have to be in California to enjoy the pictures. We have all 12 prints — plus detail shots — in the gallery below.
The photo above, called “Breathe,” shows a 2008 MacBook Air shot with a 9mm Heckler & Koch handgun.
Artist Michael Tompert, who’s first exhibit of Apple-inspired artwork opens today, tried to destroy an iPad by hitting it with a sledgehammer.
“I hit it with a sledgehammer about 10 times,” said Tompert at a preview of his art show, which opens today. “It did nothing. It’s incredible. It was really, really hard to destroy.”
Instead, Tompert took a blowtorch to the iPad.
“I had to blowtorch it for 15 minutes until the inside boiled and it exploded from inside,” said Tompert.
Publicity stunt? Sure. But that still didn’t stop photographer Jesse Rosten from lighting his latest shoot with nine iPads mounted on several pieces of plywood. Now that’s an Apple-centric strobist!
So you’ve got your iPhone 4 and you know it has not one, but two cameras inside it.
“How I wish it could take pictures with both of them at once,” you cry.
Well, your plea is answered in the form of 2Side Cam, a $1 app for iPhone 4. In “2Side” mode, it takes two photos – first one with the outward-facing camera on the back of the phone, then a second later another with the user-facing camera.
