2048px – An iPad 3 Retina Wallpaper Site
As you may have heard, the iPad 3 has a much higher resolution screen than previous versions which means that all the existing wallpapers out there look a bit pixelated on that amazing screen. 2048px is a site devoted to high resolution Retina wallpapers for iPad 3s. It sports a cool Pinterest style interface and has some great walls in the archives.
Read MoreDooo – The Cool New To-Do App That’s Not Too Complex
Another week, another to-do app, seems like this particular corner of the app market is one of the most crowded, but that doesn’t mean there’s not room for innovation. Dooo is a smart to-do app that combines a cool interface with a sensible column based format for today’s tasks and other on-going tasks. The best feature though is the ability to record voice to-dos. perfect for those hurried ‘must remember’ moments. It’s out now and costs $0.99.
Read MoreDragonDrop – Slick Drag and Drop Tool for Mac
Wooderoo – Classy Wooden Case for iPad
Wooderoo have produced an awesome wooden case for iPad designed to meet the diverse needs of tablet users. Hand made in Walnut or Cherry, it’s a surprisingly flexible case, able to protect your iPad or double up as a work station (even allowing for Apple keyboards) or movie viewing platform. It retails for €149 or $190USD.
Read MoreBillr – Bill and Tip Splitter App for iOS
We’ve all been there. An enjoyable meal comes to an end, the last dregs of coffee are knocked back and the waiter brings over the bill. Then begins the haggling – someone didn’t have a starter, someone else drank twice as much as everyone else – and so on and so on. It’s for precisely these moments that Billr has been devised. It’s an iOS app that enables you to enter your group’s details, list the cost of the meals, set any tax levels and then either show everyone what they owe on the phone or send them a text or email. Groovy.
Read MoreThe Antikythera Mechanism – Prototype XRay Profiling Machine Discovers Its Secrets
Great story over at BBC news about the latest efforts to understand the ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism, an amazing geared computer probably used for astrological calculations. A British X-Ray company created an advanced prototype profiling XRay machine which created a layered model of the interior of the mechanism. Full story, here.
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Bike Mount for iPhone and Android
There are some downright awesome GPS based apps out there for cyclists that not only provide you with accurate navigation but in-depth tracking of your progress. The big problem has always been where to put your phone though, because it’s not like you can keep an eye on your speed if your phone’s in your pocket. These bike mounts are available in both iPhone and Android flavours and include full protection for your phone along with a touchscreen membrane that means you can still use your apps.
Read MoreHow to Emulate Instagram, Hipstamatic and Camera+ Filters on your Mac or PC
Hipstamatic might have kickstarted the retro camera craze with their ground-breaking app, but it was Instagram that famously popularised it. Over 50million Instagram users worldwide use the app to turn otherwise dull looking snapshots into moody creations thanks to the apps simple built-in filter schemes. But what if you’d like to emulate the look of those apps on your Mac or PC? Here’s how.
Read MoreSoundCloud App for iPad – The Wrong Trousers
$free – Soundcloud
If you’re the sort of person that’s into electronic music, who enjoys listening to DJ mixes and bleeding edge releases or if you’re an original recording artist, then you may have been using SoundCloud for a while. For most other people it’s probably only recently that it crept into the sphere of awareness and even then it’s not exactly a mainstream service.
SoundCloud started out life in 2007 as a service pitched squarely at the music industry, at recording artists, producers and record labels. It enabled the transfer of music into the cloud long before the likes of Dropbox or Google Drive. It enables users to share (publicly or privately) their songs, riffs, beats, vocals or mixes in an environment specifically tooled for the transfer and storage of audio. It’s also a great place to discover brand new music as evidenced when its popularity exploded last year, going from 3million to 10million users within 12 months.
The service used to be entirely browser based, but last year they released iOS apps and a couple of months later an Android version. I’ve been using SoundCloud since 2009 and greatly anticipated an app of some sort so that I could use to listen to new mixes streamed over the Internet. Unfortunately I have found both apps to be very lacking, they seem counterintuitive and while they’re not obstructive to the listening process, they don’t exactly help.
The app’s split into sections by tabs – a dashboard, a stream, activity and search. The dashboard gives access to the friend search, your uploads and suggested people (for you to follow). The stream shows uploads on the site from people you follow in order of age. The activity tab shows anything that’s been going on with your account such as people faving your music or following you. The search screen enables you to find sounds or people. So far so good.
The central problem with this app, and the main reason I think it fails, is that you can’t see what everyone else is listening to. On the SoundCloud website there is a page called Explore Tracks. Within that section you can view the hottest tracks on the site, the latest tracks and even browse by tag cloud. It’s an awesome way to discover cool new music and it’s nowhere to be found in the iOS app. There’s absolutely no way to find out what others are listening to, what’s hot, what’s not, what’s new – you can only do very specific searches.
It’s hard to believe that nobody at SoundCloud considered just how dull their app is – it’s fine if you know the exact name of an artist you want to follow, but useless if you want to discover a new one. I can’t help feeling that they’re missing a big opportunity to turn their service into the Spotify of new music, because if they had any sense they’d leverage the crowd-sourced opinions of people who like discovering that new music and charge a subscription to listen to it.
Stick with the web site.
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One Bit Photo – Ultra Retro Camera App for Android
16-bit’s passe, 8-bit’s old news, if you really want to add a retro look to your photos then 1-bit is the only way to go. Those of us who were around in the 80s will be all too familiar with this particular look, since it was state-of-the-art at the time. It brings to mind an era of dot matrix printers (MX-80, anyone?) and dial-up message boards. So if you want an authentic looking highly pixelated monochrome look for your imagery, OneBit Photo is a safe bet. It’s free, ad-supported.
Read MorePunchline – Professional Titles and Transitions Plug-in for Final Cut Pro X
Final Cut Pro X is an awesome application, but the titles and transitions that come with it can get old pretty quickly. So it’s always a good idea to supplement your collection and if you’re not an accomplished Motion user, that means buying an off-the-shelf package.
Punchline is SugarFX‘s latest plugin for Final Cut, bundling a collection of professional titles and transitions together to give your videos a slick appearance. Once installed the suite appears in the in-app browser alongside all your regular elements. To use any of them you just drag and drop onto the timeline as you would any element.
There are 32 elements in the suite, including 11 titles and 21 transitions, all of which are fully customisable so you can put your own spin on them. There are a variety of looks on offer, but they’re primarily of a panel or grid design and, from my point of view, well suited to more action based footage, due to their kinetic design.
Drop a transition on the title element and you can finetune the look to get it the way you want. The colours (background, line and text) can all be tweaked and the font typeface, style, size and tracking can all be changed as required. In addition you can change the blending mode for the text to give it either a bold stand-out or transparent look.
The transitions follow the same look and feel as the titles offering arrows, centre-in/out, grid, panel and slant elements. Colours can be changed as required and the blending mode changed from punchy normal to softer overlay. It’s a versatile collection that offers greater variety and flexibility than some other suites.
Punchline’s a strong and professional looking plugin that works perfectly with Final Cut Pro X. Advanced features such as the ability to configure individual panels by simply dragging markers on the timeline make this a worthy addition to any Final Cut user’s arsenal of titles and transitions. The elements all have a similar style that evokes speed and motion and would work particularly well with any kind of racing or outdoor pursuits footage.
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Bodum’s Pebo Vacuum Coffee Maker – Perfect for Coffee Geeks Everywhere
I‘ve never been much of a wine drinker, but I do love a good cup of coffee. And while I don’t go to the effort of roasting my own beans, I do take some care to enjoy a good blend brewed properly. The vacuum brewing method apparently retains all the oils that are lost with other techniques, however you will have to wait for between 5 and 11 minutes depending on the amount of water you use. The Pebo is yours for $80USD.
Expendables 2 – Trailer
SmartTalk Solar – Hands-free iPhone Speakphone
Speaker-phones for cars are all well and good, but many of them have a glaring Achilles heel – they all need charging up regularly. This particular model, from Griffin, has no such issues because it taps the sun for its energy thanks to an internal rechargeable battery and built-in solar charger. Amongst the $69 SmartTalk‘s neater features is MultiPoint pairing which enables you to connect two different phones simultaneously – perfect for his and hers voice calls.
Read MorePlaceTagger – Cool New GeoTag Apps for iOS and Mac
As we have often lamented on this website, DSLRs don’t often come with GPS capabilities and this means that the task of geo-tagging your photos (adding GPS location co-ordinates to each image) is a royal pain in the arse. Fortunately some bright spark invented the GPX location file which enables you to record your location on a GPS enabled device and then match up the times of the photos with the GPS file to give accurate geo-tagging. Phew.
The latest geo-tagging app to utilise those awesome GPX files has hit the App Store and is called PlaceTagger. It’s available in both iOS and OSX formats for recording of location (on your iPhone) and tagging of your photos (on your Mac). This new version brings geotagging to the iPad, enabling you to use the Apple Camera Connection kit to geotag JPGs directly on an iPad. If you’re a DSLR user who’d like to streamline location data in your images EXIFs then look no further.
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