TriggerTrap Mobile – Use Your iPhone to Control Your DSLR for Awesome Time Lapses and Triggered Photos
The speed with which technology progresses never ceases to amaze me – even more so the convergence of that technology, where one kind of tech crosses over into another. And that’s precisely what TriggerTrap is about – it leverages the power of your iPhone to bring innovative new forms of photography to the table. Even better it’s very modestly priced at about $20 for the cable/dongle for the iPhone and $10 for the accompanying iOS app.
Amongst the features that TriggerTrap makes possible are timelapses (including both eased and HDR timelapses), sound activated exposures, shock and vibration exposure, metal and magnetism proximity sensors, facial recognition and motion detection. It also includes a cable release mode for standard long exposure shots and a star trail mode to make those trendy night-sky photos that are all the rage now.
We’ll be reviewing TriggerTrap Mobile soon.
Read MoreMetroTalk – An Awesome Google Voice Client for Windows Mobile
Damn if these Windows Mobile apps aren’t starting to look very tasty. MetroTalk is a fully featured Google Voice app designed to make the most of Metro. It has full Mango support and includes push notifications to let you know when you’ve received an SMS or voicemail.
Read MoreMetanota – Slick SimpleNote Friendly App for Mac
SimpleNote is a cool cloud-based service that enables you to store plain text notes online and access them anywhere with slim apps on mobile, laptop or desktop devices. MetaNota is a Mac OSX application for writing and keeping notes that can sync with SimpleNote. It’s a great looking app, with full tag management and intelligent auto-formatting. It’s currently available in a free ad-supported format, but there’s a pro ad-free version coming soon if you like it.
Read MoreKippt – Slick Web Clipping Service
If you find Evernote to be a bit too ‘kitchen sink’ for your web clipping needs, then might I suggest you have a gander at Kippt. This cool free service enables you to bookmark cool stuff, read articles later, share your finds and perform fast tag based searches on it all.
Minimalist Wallpapers – Spring Collection
It’s been a wee while since we did a nice round-up of minimalist wallpapers and so, in order to save you all from the pain of clicking endlessly through the main online wallpaper archives, I’ve done it for you. The signal to noise ratio in ‘minimalist’ walls is higher than ever, some people clearly believe the word is Greek for ‘Acid and Neon Nightmare’. Anywhere, here we go.
Hearty – by Tito – Download
Grungy 2 – by Alexander GG – Download
Blur – by murasaki55 – Download
Vintage – by ApproxArt – Download
The Final Frontier – by PhilippIllgen – Download
Christmas – by JK99 – Download
Orange in Aqua – by Tiberium - Download
Crossing the Gap – by GJvdH – Download
Amazing Mily Way – by Jonathan Besler – Download
Stillness in the Storm – by Ben Gustafson – Download
Win a Canon 5D Mark III with CameraBag 2 Photo Competition – Plus We Have Five CameraBag 2 Licences Up for Grabs
We took a brief look at Camerabag 2 back in February when the software was first announced. It’s now our go-to instant effects app, with considerably more flexibilty than Analog or Snapseed. It enables you to apply a variety of Hipstamatic or Instagram style effects to your photos using a cool layered interface that can fine-tune the effects to your pleasure.
To celebrate the on-going success of Camerabag 2, developers NeverCenter are giving away a Canon 5D Mark III and some free licences to their product. In order to be entered into the competition you merely have to post an image that has been altered in some way with their Camerabag 2 software and tweet the following phrase: ”Here’s my entry to win a free Canon 5D Mk III in the @Camerabag 2 #giveaway (http://bit.ly/cb2_5d)”. There are 30 day trial versions of the software available at the website so just download a PC or Mac copy and have a play with some of your images.
We also have five licences to the software to give away. In order to win one of these, simply tweet this story with the tag @geekosity and we’ll draw five names out of the hat in a couple of weeks time.
Good luck to everyone.
Read MoreTV Premium – Watch UK TV Channels Live on iPhone and iPad
Well, I can’t see this one lasting very long at all, so enjoy it while it lasts. TV Premium is an app that broadcasts pretty much every single UK (and many US) TV channels live and in the clear to your iPhone or iPad. It costs one dollar and there is no subscription fee or further ‘in app’ purchase required. Even more amazingly, it actually works. So if you’re a UK expat missing your TV shows from the old country or just someone who fancies watching the quality output the BBC produces, then get all over it while you can. Let the countdown until removal for copyright infringement or until over-subscription causes the video feeds to become unwatchable, begin …
… and it’s gone and the feeds have stopped functioning in the app. Ah well, you know how it goes, if it sounds too good to be true …
Read MoreScreen Filter – Advanced Night-Time Screen Dimmer for Android
The built-in screen brightness features that come with Android devices leaves something to be desired – it’s a very blunt tool. Screen Filter brings a bit of science to the subject by dimming the screen in such as way as to reduce brightness but preserve screen legibility. It’s a great app to have on hand for reading ebooks at night while not disturbing your partner or for in-car use so the screen doesn’t hurt your eyes at night.
Read MoreGet Fit and Stay Fit – The Best Health and Fitness Apps for iOS
The health and fitness section of the App Store is one of the busiest areas of the shop, featuring thousands of apps that promise to get you healthier and fitter. It’s also fair to say that the health and fitness section of the App Store has the widest range in quality of those apps outside the wretched ‘Entertainment’ section. With so many fitness apps vying for your dollar-spend and with so much blatant copying going on, it’s difficult to separate the good from the bad, the flab from the fit and the snake oil from the Omega 3.
In this feature we’re looking at a total fitness suite, a selection of apps that will cover your entire fitness regime, from exercise tracking to health monitoring and food consumption. With summer on its way in the northern hemisphere, why not spend a couple of bucks, bust out those trainers and get trim for the warm season.
Read MoreAustralian High Court Toss ‘Piracy’ Case Brought by US Studios Against ISP iiNet in Landmark Ruling
When will the media companies get the message? Their insane crusade against ‘copyright theft’ is getting them nowhere, it simply alienates the self same public that they’re trying to market to. In the latest setback for the American film and TV studios and the American government who feel that they can set the legislation of any country, not just their own, the Australian High Court has tossed a case brought against large independent ISP, iiNet. Full story over at Delimiter.
Read MoreBeatsurfing – Innovative New Touch Based Music Production Interface
Pocket – Read-Later Aggregator for iOS, Android and Kindle
Aggregated news readers have become a sizeable niche market on pretty much all mobile computing platforms. There are two main varieties of these readers – the user-curated ones and the producer-curated ones. Flipboard, Zite and Longread are all producer curated news readers, while Instapaper, Readability and Pocket are user-curated.
Pocket used to go by the name of Read It Later and it was the best of the read-later news apps available for smartphones and tablets. It has now been redesigned, rebranded and relaunched and, more importantly, is now free (it used to cost $3). We’re taking a look at the iPad version of the app, although it is also available on iPhone, Android (phone and tablet), Kindle Fire and in your browser.
So for Pocket to be useful to you, you need to get into the habit of forwarding on interesting articles to it. The idea is that when you encounter some interesting online story or feature, but you don’t have the time there and then to read it, you send it to Pocket and later on, when you do have time, you read it. If you’re not the sort of person who can get into the habit of sending on those links then your Pocket library is going to look somewhat bare.
When you start the app, your articles are presented in a cool Pinterest style block array with headline and image or headline and text depending on the story – you an also switch to a simple list based layout. You can further refine your list of articles by viewing just articles, just videos or just images. I must admit that using an app like this to store interesting images never occurred to me – I’ve always used it purely for long text based articles.
When you view an article you can view it in a reduced text format, or simply the original article on an embedded web page. None of these aggregating apps are very good at extracting just the text from articles and about 50% of the time you’ll have to view in original article mode if you want to read it at all. Pocket’s no different in this regard.
When viewing in article mode you can ramp the point size of the text up, switch between a serif and a sans-serif font and boost the leading to make the on-screen text more legible. There’s also a night mode that inverts the display and a brightness setting so you can dial down the screens’ intensity for less over-powering light when reading in bed at night.
Should you decide the article is worthy of onward sharing then there’s also a long list of apps and services you can send to, including bookmarking services like Pinboard and Delicious, link sites like Reddit and LinkedIn and a long list of Twitter apps. You can also copy it, email it or open the article in Safari. Once you’re done with an article, you can mark it read (with the tick button) and it’ll get moved to your archives. There’s also a bulk archiving tool on the main screen of the app.
Pocket’s a great read-later app, but it’s not one that will prove useful to all people. If you prefer to have your news served up for you in a channel based format then Flipboard or Zite are a better option. But if you’re the sort of person that likes collecting interesting articles and prefer to give them the attention they require at a later date when you can fully absorb the details, then Pocket’s fine. I wouldn’t say it was any better than Read It Later and I definitely feel the cool black and tan colour scheme of the old app was much better than the trendy rainbow colours of the new one.
Pottermore Opens its Doors to the Muggle World
I‘m a big fan of Harry Potter and the wizarding world that JK Rowling created. I read all the books to my son and now he’s older he’s reading them all to himself. So I was very interested in checking out Pottermore – the virtual extension to the Harry Potter universe that Rowling has created for fans of the books and films. I’ve had a bit of an explore and while it’s definitely aimed at children and not grown-up muggles and squibs, it still makes for interesting reading. There’s loads of background details, new information and great tidbits of information from Rowling herself, including things like the fact that she deliberately kept the books measurements imperial and not metric because it better suited the olde worlde atmosphere.
Read MoreApple’s iPhone Will Fail – Hilarious Bloomberg Article from 2007
Oh the beautiful joy of hindsight. This article has recently resurfaced thanks to a bump from Reddit and it makes for extremely amusing reading. Matthew Lynn of Bloomberg (the poe-faced business media group) didn’t have much good to say about the original iPhone on its launch four years ago. Amongst the gems in this spectacularly incorrect article are, “The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks,” “Apple has never been good at working with other companies. If it knew how to do that, it would be Microsoft Corp,” and “Apple will sell a few to its fans, but the iPhone won’t make a long-term mark on the industry.”
I did check and Matthew Lynn is still working for Bloomberg – but you have to ask yourself how anyone could take his prognostications seriously after this massively poor assessment of Apple and a product that changed the world. His opinions seem to have been flavoured by his clear hatred of Apple and its customers – so much for unbiased reporting.
Read MoreUnoDNS Competition Winners
We ran a little competition in conjunction with UnoTelly, the company behind the region-unblocking service UnoDNS. The five prizes on offer were 25% discount vouchers off subscriptions to the service. We are happy to announce the five winners as Suzie from Sydney/Australia, Charlie in Brisbane/Australia, Katrina in Rose Bay/Australia, Courtney in Canada and Tony in Canada.
Congratulations to our five contest winners – you’ll all be receiving an email shortly advising you of the result and your voucher code.
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