New Macbooks Released – Apple Still Ripping off Australians
While this blog is based in Australia, I don’t often include Australian-related news because I like our articles to be accessible to everyone. However this particular issue, namely the pricing of Apple’s products in Australia, continues to irritate the living shit out of me. For whatever reason, Apple feel compelled to stiff its loyal customers down under by jacking up the price of all its goods and services. We pay more for music in the iTunes store, we pay more for apps in the App Store and we pay considerably more for Macs in the Apple Store.
Recently Apple, no doubt stung by some very negative attention in the national media, dropped the price of apps in the App Store to near parity with the American app store. With this in mind, and as I’m looking to update my mid-2009 15″ Macbook Pro to one of the new models, I checked out the prices in the store. As you can see from the screenshot below, Apple are still charging Australian customers a hefty premium. On the top of the range 17″ Macbook Pro, Australians are being charged over $3000USD – a full 20% more than the $2499USD that Americans are being charged. There is no justifiable reason for this – it’s a simple and cynical rort.
FileBot – Cross Platform TV Show Renamer
If you find you’re getting more and more of your TV shows via Torrent and Newsgroup than Cable and Satellite, then you’ve also undoubtedly encountered the issue of TV show naming. Everyone that uploads a show to the torrents or newsgroups uses a different naming convention and these often mean that your media centre software has a hard time working out what the hell they are.
Filebot is a TV show renamer, subtitle downloader and SFV validator that’s perfect for anyone with a large digital library. It features a well designed drag-and-drop interface and leverages the power of online databases like TVRage, IMDB and TheTVDB to kick your filenames into shape. It’s available (free) for Mac, Windows and Linux over at Sourceforge.
Read MoreFancy taking your iPhone snorkelling?
The iPhone 4 has a great camera and the iPhone 4S improves on the winning formula by upping the pixels and improving the optics. As a result of that, the iPhone is one of the most popular cameras on the planet – it’s been number one on Flickr for some time now. The key to that success is that, unlike your DSLR or point-and-click, you always have your phone with you.
However even the biggest iPhone fanboy/girl leaves their phone on land when going snorkelling. Or at least they used to. The Aqua Phone Case ($25) means you never have to be separated from your iPhone again – it’s a waterproof case with a form-fitting inner seal that can protect against sand, dust and snow. The case also features a touch-sensitive skin meaning that it’s fully functional, even under water. The case is only good down to one metre in water though, so resist the urge to take it wreck diving.
Read MoreAnalog – One Click Photo Enhancer
When I was a kid I got my first camera – a Kodak 126 Instamatic. It took little rolls of film that came in plastic containers, each with 26 exposures. When you’d taken all your photos you’d drop the film off at the chemists and a week later you got your photos and your negatives back. To be honest, it was a pain in the arse. It was expensive and, due to the costs of getting photos developed and printed, a painfully drawn-out process. I do not miss the mechanics of film photography but I do miss the soul that those old photos had.
When Hipstamatic came out for the iPhone it was in response to the somewhat sterile photographs that the iPhone (and indeed all digital cameras) take. With Hipstamatic on your iPhone you could reclaim a little bit of that old film photography feeling, even if it was the result of carefully created effects and not the random effects of light on cellulose and chemicals on paper. Hipstamatic went on to become a phenomenon, inspiring countless clones and knock-offs including most recently Instagram.
Up until recently however there wasn’t any way of bringing those retro photo styles to your Mac and, if you wanted a Lomo or Holga look to your photos you had to use Lightroom or Photoshop. Analog from RealMac Software is the first proper attempt to bring retro photography retouching 
tools to the Mac desktop and more importantly to everyday users, not just Photoshop experts.
Analog comes with 20 effects built-in and 14 different frames. To use the app you simply drag your photo into the window, select an effect, choose a border and export when you’re ready. The focus is clearly on simplicity first and foremost – there is no way to alter the effects or borders – all you can do is rotate, crop, filter, border and export. If you’re the sort of person who likes fiddling with settings then this is not the application for you – if you’re the sort of person that just wants a quick and easy way to enhance an otherwise dull photo then you’ll love it.
The effects themselves are somewhat disappointing. There’s some classics in there, such as cross process, Lomo, Fuji and Holga, but none of them slap you in the face with their funkiness. Best of the bunch are Kyoto (nice light leak filter), Lomia and Noir. The borders are fairly unexciting too, with the usual smattering of Polaroid style squares and film negative embellishments. Once you’ve settled on a filter and/or border, you can export your photo, send it via email or upload to CloudApp, Facebook, Flickr or Picassa.
RealMac have endevoured to bring some variety to the filters by adding random elements to them. Light leaks appear in different sizes and locations, dust and scratches are positioned randomly and grain is applied differently each time, so it’s worth clicking on and off the same effect a few times to achieve the look you want. It’s also worth adding that’s a well written application that performs well and is bug-free.`
We’ve all come to see the possibilities of retro-styled digital photo retouching, but the problem is that apps like Hipstamatic hammered the living shit out of the concept and Instagram slammed its coffin shut. For someone with no technical expertise at all and a taste for cheesy photo effects, Analog will be a big hit. However if you’d rather your photos didn’t look like everyone else’s, or you don’t feel the need to festoon your snapshots in light leaks and bokeh (no matter how simple it is), then this is not the app for you.
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Half Beanie – Half Headphones – It’s the Sports Beanie
Over the years there have been myriad solutions to the issue of headphones that stay on your head when you’re exercising. There have been loops over the ears, in-ear buds and headphones embedded in sunglasses (thanks, Oakley). However this is the first time we’ve seen a combination beanie/headphone solution.
The Sound Disk Sports Beanie from Aerial 7, is being sold for $60USD and combines a sports beanie stitched from wicking fabric (to draw moisture away from your bonce) and two small adjustable ‘sound disk’ speakers. The idea is that you can either cover your ears completely with the sound disks (a la headphones) or position them just behind your ears so that you can stay aware of your surroundings (think lady joggers and dark nights). The beanies are available in black, blue, red and white.
Read MoreDubstep iPhone App Puts a bit of Wobble in your Day
Dubstep emerged from the two step, garage and dub scene in London about a decade ago. It has slowly gained popularity, but exploded into the mainstream last year. The key to many dubstep tracks is the distinctive bass wobble noise which is introduced on the drop and has been known to cause localised earthquakes when played through a decent sound system.
Wobble Base Station enables you to spit out dubstep wobble noises at will – in this sense it’s sure to eclipse the faithful fart generators that have amused teenage boys for years. The app includes 15 drum loops, eight different effects and four percussion sounds which you can modify with the (I’m not making this up) ‘Filth-scope’. If anything signifies the beginning of the end for this genre of music – it’s this app.
TFI Friday TimeWaster – YouTube’s Trending Videos
Some absolutely cracking clips in this week’s trending YouTube video collection. Highlight of the week is the incredible Qu8k homebrew rocket that soars to 122,000 feet and returns safely to earth. Low point is definitely the 10th video which features the most vomit-inducing manufactured group since Boyzone called it a day. If there’s someone you truly hate, be sure to forward on the clip of Heart2Heart.
Wunderkit brings recurring tasks, notes and collaboration to Wunderlist interface
One of our favourite to-do apps is Wunderlist, a lovely looking program that’s available on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android and online in a browser. However as great as Wunderlist is and as useful as it was to be able to sync to-do lists on all of our devices, it was also lacking in several key areas.
Well the good news is that the nice people at 6Wunderkinder have been working hard on a brand new version of the software called Wunderkit, which is now ready for beta testing. The software has moved on from simple to-dos and is now a full-blown task management suite. The core of the suite is still the faithful to-do, but now the concept has been expanded out.
Amongst the new features promised are sub-tasks (so you can break a larger task down into smaller chunks) and recurring tasks (the single missing feature that stopped me from using Wunderlist on a daily basis). The dev team have also created a workspaces concept that works like a project – you can have notes in there, follow people within a project and get an overview of progress in the new dashboard. There’s a full write-up over at 6Wunderkinder’s blog and a waiting list to get in on the (currently closed) beta.
Read MoreIris – Siri’s remedial cousin
By all accounts, Siri is an amazing application and I can fully understand why owners of phones on other platforms would like something similar. As good as Siri is, Apple still put a Beta tag on it, because they cannot guarantee either 100% reliable voice recognition or 100% reliable parsing of instructions. Like many Google products, I suspect that Siri will remain in beta for the foreseeable future.
So how would you suppose a Siri knock-off, created in eight hours and utilising Google voice recognition software, would compare? Let me put it this way – any Android users hoping for a bit of one-upping on their iOS using chums are going to be very disappointed. Iris was created by staff at Dexetra, during a hack day. The name stands for “Intelligent Rival Imitator of Siri” or perhaps they just reversed the name Siri – it’s hard to tell. So what’s it like to use?
Well, Iris might have been a fun project for the coders at Dexetra and while nobody should expect miracles from a day’s hacking and some off-the-shelf code, Iris is good for little more than a proof of concept. The voice recognition they borrowed from Google isn’t very accurate and the responses from the software to the questions asked are often weird. I got the best results with simple fact-based questions. Here are some example questions and responses:
Me: Schedule a meeting at 11 o’clock on Monday at head office.
Iris: Which office?
Me: Are there any Italian restaurants in the area?
Iris: Fries.
Me: Will you marry me
Iris: Will You Marry Me? is the 1992 single by Paula Abdul
Me: Wingardium Leviosa
Iris: Avarda Kedavra
Me: Who’s better – boys or girls?
Iris: No-one.
Me: How many litres in five gallons?
Iris: 18.93litres
Me: Will it be sunny in Sydney this weekend?
Iris: Do you want tell good bye, please!
Me: Remind me to call the vet.
Iris: Hey, yea you, you there!
Me: I’m in the mood for Italian food in North Beach.
Iris: Who do you love?
Is Iris any good in the real world? No – not even a little bit. Is it an interesting technology demo? Definitely. Download it yourself, have a play, just don’t expect it to be organising your life like Apple’s synthetic secretary. You can download Iris (Alpha) now, from the Android market.
Read MoreFive Star Wall – Week 3 – October 2011
This week we’re channelling another era of music listening – the vinyl days. As a lapsed DJ I collected a vast amount of records over the years and can still vividly remember the joy of scrutinising the record sleeve while the album or 12″ was playing. Anyway – for sophisticated music lovers everywhere, here’s a wall by Tim Bonvallet. You can get it, here.
Now your Mac can tell when you’re paying attention
File this one under ‘left field’. Vitamin-R is a cool little task-management menu bar app that breaks tasks down into ‘time slices’ and enables you to reach your goal by steadily ticking off smaller sub-tasks. So far so normal. However Publicspace.net, the developers of Vitamin-R have just released and update to the app that includes experimental support for a brainwave detector.
The latest release of Vitamin-R (1.70) includes support for the MindWave EEG Sensor – a $99 wireless MindWave Brain Wave Sensor that measures “attention” and “meditation” levels. What this means is that the app can now detect ‘attention’ and ‘meditation’ levels, average them over a time slice and pre-select the appropriate focus level in the “rate your time slice” feature of the app. In other words, it’ll now if you’ve been paying attention. Thor help us if this ever makes its way into classrooms and board meetings.
Read MoreFanstastical 1.1 – the best menu bar calendar app for Mac just got better
Once you get into the habit of using it, Apple’s iCal calendar app is extremely useful. Even in its current Lion iteration however, it’s a vaguely unwieldy application that could do with some loving from Cupertino, which is probably why a whole sector of the app market has sprung up to get around its limitations.
Fantastical is a calendar app that lives in your menu bar, meaning it’s always at hand when you need it. It uses a natural language for event entry, so you can type something like, “Lunch at mum’s on Thursday at 12:30″ and it will figure out what you’re saying and create an event accordingly.
When you click on the app’s icon you see a monthly view, which you can cycle through and a list of forthcoming events beneath it – these are colour coded as per your calendar settings. You can enter a search term at the top of the window to refine your events list, viewing only those events with certain keywords in them. It’s all very slick.
So what’s new in version 1.1? You can now edit and/or delete events directly from within Fantastical – this is a feature that users were crying out for and I have little doubt that it will turn the app into one of those essentials that every Mac user should own. There’s also full iCloud support, strong improvements to the CalDav support and a raft of bug fixes. Fantastical 1.1 is $20 and is available now in the App Store.
Read MoreAndroid Freebie of the Week – Taptu
Speaking for myself, I’ve always been a news junkie, but I’m prepared to accept that mobile Internet and powerful hand-held mobile devices has turned plenty of others into voracious consumers of information. The touchscreen interface lead to a reinvention of news apps that was pioneered by Pulse and Flipboard, but other apps have come along since and improved on the formula.
Taptu is like a hybrid of Pulse and an RSS feed reader. It enables you to categorise your news providers by topic and then see them all, whether newspaper, blog or magazine, in the one location. You can import your Google Reader feeds and seek out new ones you haven’t tried before. It also connects with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and scrape interesting content from them. It’s a terrific app, it’s free and you can get it here.
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