2012-02-08
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Schreer Design has created an analog amplifier for the iPhone called the iVictrola Gramophone, based on the old Gramophones of the late 19th and 20th centuries. The amplifier comes in two parts, including a sound magnifier and horn, which is adjustable up and down.
The best part? This is 3D printed. (via)
2011-11-11
2011-08-10
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2011-07-08
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Patrick Rhone at Minimal Mac, in part of a complaint about the iPhone SLR lens mount.
I’m also puzzled by it (since for $200 or so you can buy an old DSLR, or a good chunk of a new one, and it’ll have a better sensor, and be no less portable), but that commentary also pretty much explains why I don’t apply filters to my iPhone photographs, and probably never will- the camera is good enough.
2011-04-18
Photosynth for iPhone- quick thoughts
Microsoft Research have been working on Photosynth for ages. If you’ve not heard of it, here’s the Wikipedia cheat sheet:
Photosynth is a software application from Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington that analyzes digital photographs and generates a three-dimensional model of the photos and a point cloud of a photographed object.
Today saw the launch of an iPhone app building on that research.
It’s not the first stitcher (Autostitch has been available for a couple of years at least), nor is it the first live stitcher (360 and Panoramatic both came out last year, I think), but it is notable for being free (unlike the three previously mentioned apps), and for having a particularly slick UI.
When taking a panorama with Photosynth, after taking the first shot (by simply tapping the screen), any movement of the phone/camera is reflected on screen. Once the centre of the image (represented by a green dot) gets outside the dotted line marking the edge of the panorama, a new shot is taken, extending it outwards. This continues until you mark the stitch as done.
Then there’s a short wait while the final image is rendered (and saved to the camera roll, although there’s no notification of this). While that’s happening, you can edit a title, but not description, let alone tags. Oddly, you can “add nearby businesses”. Once it’s complete, you can share to Facebook, Photosynth or Bing. Sadly, email, Flickr and Twitter are missing- but then there is a copy you can work with.
Generally, this is very good for a version one. Although I had one crash while stitching, the image was saved anyway. I miss the option that 360 offers of stitching to a white (rather than black) background, and more share options would be nice. I also suspect I take better source photographs when I’m shooting individual photos, but a bit of patience would fix that. Overall, it’s definitely worth downloading and playing with.
2010-12-13
Choosing Your Market
I was taken by this section from Tim Bray’s post about Android, the iPhone, and the US Department of Defense:
the total DoD head-count is estimated at around 2.5 million. If you pick demographics that you might want to pitch mobile devices to, here are a few that are similar or larger in size:
Korean teenagers
Euro-zone business travelers
Canadian retirees
World of Warcraft players
Indian cricket fans
This whole consumer-device business is oddly pure.
I’ve always been annoyed at the amount of bending over backwards that the UK government does for military manufacturing, not only because making things whose primary purpose is destructive is pretty rubbish, but also because it seemed better to me to have a market of millions of people buying small things than a tiny market of maybe twenty sovereign states (maybe) buying a few score million-pound things.
2010-08-25
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I’ve been using Autostitch iPhone a lot this summer. It makes it easy to combine shots and so makes wide-angle panoramic photos a possibility, despite the fixed field of view of the phone’s camera. (You can see an cropped example, of Tromsø from the Hurtigruten coastal steamer, on Flickr. Above is the raw image that the phone produced.)
However, not all of my photos are with the iPhone, and so I need a desktop equivalent too. So I downloaded four Mac panorama stitchers and ran some photos I had previously stitched on the phone together.
Annoyingly, despite all costing at least ten times as much, they (with one exception) all performed far worse. Calico Panorama at least managed to get everything in the right place, and smoothed out the variations in exposure (which are unavoidable without manual controls). AutoPano Pro was also competent, but that UI is eyebleedingly awful. PTgui also did fairly well, but DoubleTake was clearly completely confused.
I also tried PhotoStitch, which was bundled with the Canon PowerShot S90 I recently bought. It needed to be told what the alignment was, and crashed after producing a version that was worse even than DoubleTake’s attempt. Poor show.
I suspect I’ll try a few more sets of images in Calico before deciding whether or not to stump up the cash, but there seems to be a wider lesson here. A piece of $2 software with barely any UI feels more able to do its job than a variety of desktop applications costing anywhere from $20 to $80, and it’s making me consider rethinking my workflow just to take advantage of it.
2010-06-28
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“Like most Nikons, the iPhone 4 tends toward slight over-exposure and over-saturation. Picky pros might find it objectionable, as sometimes highlights or large areas of bright colors lose all detail, but this type of rendering is what an average consumer would say really ‘pops.’”
Jacqui Cheng and Chris Foresman, in iPhone 4: the Ars Technica review.
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“The colors pop. Pleasantly, but almost unnaturally, super saturated and contrasty, the kind of processing I love in Nikons, taken to the extreme. That’s the iPhone 4’s secret sauce. Color and contrast. Apple’s not going for accuracy, they’re going for your eyeballs.”
Matt Buchanan & Woody Allen Jang, in Test Notes: iPhone 4 Camera for Gizmodo.
