Author: jamesclay

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Thundering Clouds

Athlone

HDR images often seem to have a real emphasis on the clouds, raising the contrast to really emphasise the colour and shadows that you see in real clouds.

Simply HDR is an iPhone app for applying filters to photographs and adjusting those filters to create different effects.

Though this app is called SimplyHDR, it doesn’t do HDR (high dynamic range) images. True HDR uses multiple pictures at different exposure levels, to compensate for overly dark and light areas that are then stitched together to create a single image. What the Simply HDR app does is create an HDR effect. I see this app much more of a way of applying filters than creating HDR images.

At the end of the day if you like the HDR effect and want to create images that reflect how HDR images could look like, then this app isn’t half bad. Some of the effects are quite interesting and the app can be used to edit images and apply these effects. Personally I much prefer Snapseed for editing my photographs on the iPhone, but then that’s me.

The app is very simple to use, either take a photograph or select one from your camera roll and decide on an effect, or choose one randomly.

Within the filter choices there are various presets.

You can adjust the filter settings to suit your needs.

After editing you can post to Facebook or save to your camera roll.

Overall this is quite a nice app for creating images with a range of filters that can give a photograph an HDR style. It doesn’t create true HDR images, but if you like the effect that the filters give then you may find this app useful.

Get Simply HDR in the iTunes App Store.

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Grand Theft Auto 3 for iOS going cheap…

It’s some kind of holiday over the pond and as a result there are a few games that are going cheap in the App Store and one caught my eye, Grand Theft Auto 3, which is going until Monday 20th February for just 69p.

Rockstar Games celebrates the 10th anniversary of one of the most influential games of all time. The critically acclaimed blockbuster Grand Theft Auto III comes to mobile devices, bringing to life the dark and seedy underworld of Liberty City. With a massive and diverse open world, a wild cast of characters from every walk of life and the freedom to explore at will, Grand Theft Auto III puts the dark, intriguing and ruthless world of crime at your fingertips.

With stellar voice acting, a darkly comic storyline, a stunning soundtrack and revolutionary open-world gameplay, Grand Theft Auto III is the game that defined the open world genre for a generation.

Usually £2.99 this is quite a price reduction. It is an universal app so will work on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

This is a much better looking version than the Chinatown game that came out a couple of years back. The touch interface does take some getting use to, especially if you are use to playing these style of games on the PSP or the PS3.

However be prepared for a big download as the game is 462MB big!

Get Grand Theft Auto 3 in the iTunes App Store.

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Osfoora for Mac

I have been a fan of Osfoora for iPhone and iPad and it is my default client for iOS.

On the Mac however I have either been constrained to the web interface or more usually the free official Twitter app.

There is now a new Osfoora app for the Mac.

Osfoora is a powerful Twitter client with a clean and intuitive user interface. You’ll enjoy a wide set of powerful features such as Muting users, Read Later, Message Conversations, Multiple Accounts, and more.

This is not a free app and is £2.99 which considering what it does compared to the free Twitter app is in my mind a little expensive. However for the price of a venti coffee from a certain chain, I didn’t worry about it too much.

One feature that you may like (and probably worth £2.99) is the functionality to mute a contact.

This isn’t blocking, this merely means that the person’s tweets “disappear” from your timeline. In the preferences you can unmute them and once more you will be able to read their tweets. This can be useful if someone is at a conference and is “flooding” your stream.

I quite like the interface and the way it looks. I don’t think it handles multiple accounts very well, certainly I prefer how the official Twitter app does that.

In the end I bought this app as I like the iOS versions, I think it looks good, it lacks some of the functionality of the other apps, but I suspect that will come in future versions.

Get Osfoora for Mac in the Mac App Store.

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My thoughts – Apple announce OS X Mountain Lion 10.8

It was only in July last year that OS X Lion was released, today Apple announced a sneak peek at OS X Mountain Lion, 10.8 the next release of OS X.

The first thing that strikes you is the iOSification of OS X. In Mountain Lion you will find Messages, Reminders, Notes, Notifications, Share Sheets, Twitter integration, Game Centre and AirPlay Mirroring. Looking at the new features you may have mistaken that you were looking at iOS rather than OS X. The Sneak Peek page does say “Inspired by iPad. Re-imagined for Mac.

I do think some of the features in OS X Mountain Lion are much needed if you have and reply on an iOS infrastructure. If your friends and colleagues have iPads and iPhones and you have a Mac, you will have wanted some iOS features on your Mac. With Mountain Lion it looks like we’ll be getting them.

Mountain Lion is all about communication and sharing, it’s about connecting with friends and colleagues and sharing images and content. It’s about making the Mac more like the iPad and the iPhone and merging the experience. The back end means you can still run regular apps you do now, but the essence of the operating system will be familar to those people currently using the iPad.

If you think about it, that does make sense for Apple. Most people using the iPhone are Windows users, the same can be said for most iPad users. In order for them to move to the Mac, they are going to want to have a similar experience and feel moving from iOS to OS X. I know many people who are very happy with the iPhone and the iPad, but either don’t feel comfortable with OS X or are wary of moving to what they view as an alien and very different operating system. You can imagine how these iPhone and iPad users would feel if the Mac they saw in the Apple Store looked and worked like the iOS device in their hand.

This is emphasised in the sneak peek video which emphasises how similar OS X Mountain Lion experiences are to the experiences on the iPhone and the iPad.

From a marketing perspective if you want to convert iPad and iPhone users to Mac then making OS X to be similar to iOS is the way to do it.

So what about these new features for Mountain Lion?

Even though there are other messaging tools out there, such as Skype, the fact that Messages will allow communication with iOS devices has to be a plus, as it is built into the mobile operating system. The problem with Skype is that it requires you to open the Skype app and as that can “drain battery” I guess most people don’t have Skype on as a default and I suspect that the same can be said for other messaging apps. Messages on iOS integrates well with SMS so if you are use to SMS you will feel right at home with Messages. I also like the idea of sending images and video straight from my Mac, I can see it replacing e-mail for a lot of communication.

One of the reasons I’ve not used Reminders on the iPad or the iPhone was the lack of integration with OS X, so I am pleased to see that there may be a simple, yet useful, to do list app that works across all my devices.
For similar reasons I don’t use Notes on the iPad or iPhone either. Somehow I don’t think I will swap, as Evernote has much more flexibility than the Notes app, I like how I can add audio and image notes. For many people though the Notes app will be just what they needed.

I do like the idea of Share Sheets, it is one feature of using iOS that I repeatedly miss in OS X and falling back on copy and paste isn’t that bad I know, but once you get use to that “share” button in iOS you do miss it in OS X. In case you don’t know what Share Sheets means, it’s a simple button that allows you to quickly share links, content, images and stuff to places like Twitter, e-mail or Messages.

What the sneak peek does show is how Apple are betting on Twitter over Facebook. You see Twitter integration mentioned all over the place, but not a mention of Facebook. That issue with Ping and Facebook must still be a real issue!

I use AirPlay a fair bit from my iPad, earlier I wrote about how useful I found it with my Apple TV.

Adding this feature to OS X Mountain Lion will certainly be useful to me, especially with web based video that isn’t available on the iPad. Of course there is an assumption that Flash will be available for OS X Mountain Lion and that isn’t a given. I can quite easily imagine Adobe deciding not to make a version of Flash for Mountain Lion.

My over riding impression of Mountain Lion, combined with my experiences of using Lion on a MacBook is that we are seeing the end of the mouse more than anything. The use of the laptop trackpad and the Magic Trackpad in the Mountain Lion video demonstrates that Apple see the future of the human interaction with a Mac through gestures and a trackpad and not a mouse.

We of course haven’t seen any sign in the sneak peek of Siri for Mountain Lion, and I guess that either may arrive later or this is something that isn’t going to happen and I can’t see that happening; much more likely it will appear in the final release in the summer.

So will you be upgrading? My iMac is still running Snow Leopard due to legacy apps, somehow I don’t see me changing my OS just yet… on the laptop, more than likely as it already has Lion.

Overall what we are going to get with Mountain Lion is an iOSification of the Mac operating system, the upgrade is much more about new apps and a few subtle changes, rather than fundamental changes to the operating system.

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Apple TV Thoughts


Apple calls the Apple TV a hobby, the reason behind that is, that it will never have the sales figures that the iPad, the MacBook and the iPhone gets. The moniker “hobby” tells analysts that they shouldn’t expect the Apple TV to be a mainstream product that sells in the tens of millions! Apple do say that those who bought the Apple TV really like it.

I am one of those who did buy it, and yes I do like it. I use it a fair bit but there are a few things I would like it do better.

First what do I like about it?

I like the fact that I can stream content from my iMac (in the office) to the TV in the front room. As I have an Apple and iTunes infrastructure for content then this works really well. As well as showing photographs, I like that I can show movies and videos from iTunes on the TV. I like the ease by which I can stream rented videos too without needing to “move” them from one device to the other.

I like how I can use AirPlay to stream content from the iPad to the Apple TV and onto the TV. For example I can use ITVPlayer on the iPad and watch it on the TV without cables. This works much better than ITVPlayer does on the PS3, likewise with BBC iPlayer and 4OD from Channel 4.

I like how Netflix works on the Apple TV, films in my opinion work better on the big screen than on the computer or the iPad.

I like how I can watch movie trailers quickly and easily.

So what do I think needs improving?

It would be nice to add UK-centric services to the Apple TV. Why can’t I add BBC iPlayer, ITVPlayer, etc to the Apple TV? Netflix got added “automatically” why can’t the other services? I suspect it might be a licensing issue, so I have to do it by AirPlay. Now though I like AirPlay it isn’t perfect and I have had a couple of issues with it, notably no audio and sometimes buffering of the video.

Renting movies does seem “expensive” to me, and I would be happy to rent the cheaper SD movies. At the moment I rent the movies on the iMac and then stream to the Apple TV, but would be nice to be able to do that from the Apple TV direct.

I like the idea of renting TV shows, but I suspect that there are so few TV shows that I want to rent that I haven’t done this very much. I either use iPlayer for more recent shows like Hustle, Elgato’s EyeTV to record a series such as Pan Am that I am going to watch later, or Netflix to watch older series, currently enjoying The 4400 as it happens.

There is a selection of internet video services on the Apple TV, but I don’t really use them. I think this is more me than the fault of Apple TV, I am not one to go through multiple amusing YouTube videos… but I am aware of people who do, so I suspect that this is more there cup of tea.

It would be nice to add music services to the Apple TV, but as Apple’s focus is iTunes I don’t see that happening anytime soon. If I was switched into the iCloud then I guess that would enable me to access some of my music, but I would also need iTunes Match so that I could listen to the mp3s I have downloaded from Amazon and my CDs. Though it has to be said there are a fair few radio stations I could listen to!

Now I know that I can “jailbreak” the Apple TV and install Plex on it, but that’s not really a mainstream option. Firecore’s aTV Flash is another option, but costs $29.95.

I guess my final thought on the Apple TV is that for many of the features you need a decent broadband connection, and not everyone has that. I am lucky in that my exchange now has fibre (FTTC) but before it was upgraded my ADSL connection was very slow and I had a fair few problems with it. FTTC does make the Apple TV much more useful and of course downloading from iTunes is much better too with FTTC.

Overall the benefits of the Apple TV certainly outweigh for me the small number of issues I have with it. I think for £99 as a set top box it really is value for money, but I say that with the caveat that you really do need to have an iTunes ecology for content.

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Remove strangers from your photographs

This video is currently doing the rounds on the tech sites, so obviously I thought I would post it here.

No details on when it will be released, but I can imagine as you take the photograph it takes a few more and analyses what is moving and what isn’t and then combines the images into a single image with no strangers.

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Back of a lorry

As you start to look, you do start to find QR Codes in all manner of places. As well as junk mail, advertising, newspapers and chocolate bar wrappers, I recently found a QR Code on the back of a lorry!

Driving up the M5 I found myself behind a big lorry with a huge QR Code on the back. Taking the advice on the lorry to “scan with care” and using my iPhone in a windscreen mount, I was able to take a photograph and also use the Optiscan App to scan the code. When I later stopped at the services I checked the URL and found the QR Code belonged to a waste management company and the URL sent you to a mobile version of their website.

An interesting use of a QR Code, but was it any better than a URL or a short URL? To be honest yes, would be much easier for a passenger to scan in the code then trying to note down a complicated URL. This was in my opinion a pretty good use of a QR Code, but I did worry about people like me trying to scan them in, whilst driving.

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Battleship for iPad – Game Choice #04

If you like using your iPad for games (in the main casual gaming) then you may be interested in the following games that I have enjoyed playing on my iPad over the last few years.

Battleship for iPad £1.99

Experience the sea-assault game that sinks all pretenders. More powerful than ever on iPad, enjoy spectacular HD-quality graphics and stunning sound effects. Launch into the iPad exclusive 2 Player Mode and test your strategic senses in an all-out engagement for naval supremacy – just like the all-time favorite board game!

Now first things first, you can play Battleships using pen and paper and that is probably the best way to play.

My son got for Christmas a plastic version (not the official version) that was quite fun, but had one drawback the co-ordinates were the same colour as the board and as a result in poor light I actually needed a torch to read off the co-ordinates!

So in a fit of frustration I decided that there was bound to be a version for the iPad and I would buy that…

There are a few versions available for the iPad, in the end I went with the official version. No real reason, the reviews on the others were mixed and in the end I quite liked the look of the app.

As a game it works. As well as the classic version there are a few alternatives that are quite fun.

The AI when playing on your own isn’t perfect, but then again, Battleships is really more luck than skill once you’ve got a strategy sorted. Against a human however the game works well.

Annoyed with EA by the number of adverts for their other games, especially as I paid for this app; I’ve noticed that with many of the EA games they are shoving adverts into their games. It’s annoying and doesn’t work, well it doesn’t work for me.

If you have the boardgame and assuming it isn’t sitting on a shelf gathering dust then you’ll probably enjoy the iPad version.

Get Battleship for iPad in the iTunes App Store.  – No longer available.

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Netflixing

Even though I was less than impressed with the range of films and TV shows on the new Netflix service in the UK I decided I would give the service a go (having heard good stuff about the service in the US0 and you get a free trial for a month, so it wasn’t going to cost me anything.

I left it for a few days as I expected that everyone else in the UK would be trying out the service and this would have an impact on Netflix’s servers.

So far I have watched the service on my iMac through the Safari browser, through the Apple TV and using the iPad App.

The iPad app works really well, and I have had no buffering issues, and was really pleased with the quality, which was a good as BBC iPlayer and even Home Streaming from my iTunes collection.

Netflix “appeared” on my Apple TV menu, without me needing to do anything. The navigation was fine and again streaming quality was excellent.

Through the Safari browser, most of the time it was okay, but I did have more issues than through the iPad or Apple TV. Netflix uses Silverlight and though I updated the plugin I did have a few stuttering issues. I know this wasn’t a bandwidth issue as if I streamed the same content on the iPad, it worked fine. I also found that I couldn’t interact with the video controls on the Silverlight player, so the pause button didn’t work, but the space bar did to pause the video.

Overall I was impressed with the technical side of Netflix and if I was to continue with a subscription then I know it would work with my system.

As for the content, I think I *may* be able to justify the £5.99 a month it costs, but I would expect to either see an increase in the quantity of content on the service or regular new releases. Netflix is not the place to see new stuff, but from a back catalogue perspective I do expect to be able to see more than there is in there now.

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Action Movie FX App

What the Action Movie FX app does is allow you to shoot a video and add a special effect.

This is a clever app and I am still surprised by how good it is and the fact that it works on a phone…

Well maybe I shouldn’t be surprised as the Star Wars I The Phantom Menace was rendered on computers that had a similar power to the iPhone!

There are two effects that come with the free app, but you can purchase more effects.

The process is quite simple, shoot the video, add the special effect, adjust the timing and wait for it to be rendered. Then you can share the video either to Facebook, via e-mail or save to your camera roll.

Basically this app is a bit of fun and very clever.

Get Action Movie FX in the iTunes App Store.