tech, news, productivity, views and stuff
Useful video comparing speed of iPhone 4S with the iPhone 4.
I remember when I had a work 3G and I went out and got a home 3GS the speed difference was certainly very noticeable.
I am at this time tempted to upgrade my home 3GS to the 4S, mainly because of the camera, but the speed it appealing too.
I have always liked Instagram, the photo creation, editing and sharing app for the iPhone. I reviewed it last year on my e-Learning Stuff blog and said:
As a free app it is certainly a really useful photo app. As a social network, well it is certainly no Flickr and not a Twitter either. The social network can only be accessed from the phone and that limits it in my opinion. As a photo app it’s great, as a social networking tool, less so.
Since then I have posted nearly 500 photographs to the service, which is more than one a day! I know that this is no Photoshop and nor is it something that professionals would use. But as a fun social app that creates interesting effects it’s great. I really like the images that the people I follow come up with and likewise I find it useful on what images I am taking people like. I find it an easy to add images to flickr that I can then add to my blog posts and I have been doing that for a while now.
Today we see an update to Instagram to version 2.0. They have completely revamped the camera experience.
It has live filters and live tilt-shift. There are four new filters.
I quite like that you can now turn the borders on and off. You can also rotate the photograph if you need to. Finally filtered photos save in high-resolution to photo library.
As for the update it seems to work and just as easy to use as the previous version.
Sometimes I am find an app for the iPhone and I go yay, excellent. Paper Camera is one of those apps, the other one that I found recently that had a similar impact was ToonPAINT.
What Paper Camera does, through a clever interface, is convert the live camera footage into a sketch or pencil drawing image in real time. You can then press the shutter to capture the image through the live filter.
Now though this is very clever and useful, when I saw this app a few months back, I realised that what I wanted to do, was apply the filter to images in my photo library too. Well a recent update has added that function, so I can now apply the excellent filters to images I have taken before. This means I can do stuff at home or on the road, rather than always having to take the images live.
Some images work better than others, so you may not always get the image that you hope for.
I do like the range of filters and the three slider bars for adjustment do make it possible to create some really nice sketch effects.
Paper Camera costs just 69 pence and is well worth the money for the clever images you can create using it.
I have mentioned Camera+ before as one of my favourite camera apps for the iPhone.
It is a very powerful photography app and it allows you to use the iPhone camera in ways which the standard camera app doesn’t even come close.
Plenty of ways to share the images too.
They’ve just upgraded the app to version 2.3 which allows you to add captions when you add a border to your image.
Quite a nice subtle feature, though the caption “fits” with the border you choose, you can’t change the font or colour of the caption.
At the offer price of 69p it’s currently very affordable and good value for money.
Check out Camera+ in the iOS App Store.
So are QR Codes going mainstream?
A few weeks back I mentioned how I had seen one for the first time on mainstream television. Now as I was opening a bottle of red wine (present from a friend) I noticed the QR Code on the back of the bottle.
I have found in the past that the iPhone is not the best phone for reading QR Codes and in the end I found that the best QR Code application was Optiscan.
Optiscan lets you create, scan and share QR codes straight from your device.
Having tried a few free apps, I found that if you have an iPhone 3GS then this app works the best. As the camera in the iPhone 4 is better, you can have more success with some of the free apps, however (as I have it already) I use Optiscan on my iPhone 4. I like how fast it is, how it can capture virtually all QR Codes I aim it at and the subsquent actions I can then take. For example it is very easy to e-mail my history of scans so I can use them on a desktop computer.
So though I have had very few issues with Optiscan with other QR Codes, I did find scanning the QR Code on the bottle quite a challenge. It took a fair few attempts to get it captured, but once I did it bought up a URL which then opened in the mobile browser.
Impressed it was a mobile version of the website and in French!
However one click and I was in the English version.
Now there wasn’t much on the site, no more than was on the bottle really.
However at least if I wanted to buy the wine myself I now had a record of it on my phone. Much easier with a QR Code than typing in an URL on the phone (which to be honest is the point of QR Codes really).
So that’s a TV programme on cooking, a bottle of red wine, wondering where my next encounter with a QR Code will be!
I recently reviewed this app on my e-Learning blog, it was good value then at 69p, however for this weekend Halftone is free, so well worth checking out.
What it does is take a photograph and convert it into a comic style image that can then be used on a blog, in a presentation, or on a print document.
Tthis is a nice simple cheap free app that allows you to create a vintage comic panel from one of your photographs in a particular style.
150 million images have been uploaded to the photo service Instagram have announced in their blog.
…we’re excited to announce that more than 150 million photos have been shared on Instagram and Instagrammers now share photos with one another at a rate of 15 photos per second. If you don’t yet have Instagram, you can find it for free, exclusively in the Apple App Store.
I really do like Instagram, it’s quick and easy to use and also importantly I think fun.
The filters, though nowhere near what you can do with pro tools such as Photoshop, are nice and to be honest with Instagram you are not trying to be a professional photographer, no you are messing about with an image and sharing it with friends.
As well as posting to Instagram you can share the link with Twitter, Facebook and upload the image to Flickr. You can also do Tumblr, Foursquare or even e-mail.
I use the images I have taken a fair bit too, by uploading them automatically to Flickr I can then use the Flickr embed code to add them to my blogs.
If you have an iPhone then do check out Instagram and have a play. If you have an Android phone, well maybe one day you will be able to join the fun!
Related Post: Instagram on the Desktop
Clicking a link on Twitter I did enjoy watching this little video about an iPhone case.
Yes I know I need to get out more, but, well there is no but! I really need to get out more.
I do like this case and am tempted to get one for my iPhone, compared to other iPhone cases I didn’t think $59.99 was too bad a price, especially as it will replace my wallet.
The company also make similar covers for MacBooks and the iPad, but think I like the case for the iPhone best. Though you can the MacBook cover
Finally OneNote for the iPhone is now available in the UK.
If you work within a Microsoft Office ecosystem and have access to OneNote on your PC then this app will be a really useful addition to your iPhone.
Microsoft OneNote Mobile is an easy-to-use note-taking application for capturing all of your ideas and to-dos on the go, brought to you by Microsoft Office.
With OneNote Mobile, create searchable notes with text, pictures, bullets, and checkboxes. Then keep your notes in sync using free Windows Live SkyDrive cloud storage to access, edit and manage them from virtually anywhere, from your PC or almost any web browser.
Worringly it does say…
**Free for a limited time**
So get it now before it becomes expensive!
No idea why it was US only before, but geographical limitations on apps and services seem to be the norm these days.
By the way if OneNote sound a lot like Evernote then yes you would be right. Having immersed myself in an Evernote ecosystem, I probably won’t be using OneNote. Evernote is available on the iPhone and the iPad for instance, as well as native apps for Mac OS X, Windows and through the browser. However if a lot of people in my college start to use OneNote and we’re sharing notes then I may need to use it more, so pleased to see the iPhone App now available in the UK.
I don’t play games that often on my iPad and those that I do are often word games such as Boggle or Scrabble. I also like card games and Mondo Solitaire is a fantastic app with all the versions of Solitaire that you can think of.
Though I have bought a few other arcade types, one that my family really enjoyed was Lego Harry Potter.
Play as Harry, Ron, Hermione and many more as you explore Hogwarts and engage in countless hours of gameplay spread across 40+ levels based on the Harry Potter books and movies. LEGO® Harry Potter™: Years 1-4 brings the world of LEGO® Harry Potter to life on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, giving gamers the power to play with LEGO characters and models in a brand new way. Based on the first four Harry Potter books and movies, LEGO® Harry Potter: Years 1-4 builds on the foundations of previous LEGO® video games by offering a mix of fun, accessible gameplay and light-hearted humor – appealing to all ages. Players can explore the wizarding world and feel as though they are at Hogwarts.
In celebration of the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows- Part 2, LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 is only £1.99 which compared to the cost of console versions and PSP versions is really really really cheap! This is really good value for what is a compelling and fun game. That is key, though only £1.99 this is a great game that you can spend hours playing.
What Lego have done with their games is add a tongue in cheek element to the films they have made games of and as a result if you know the films you can smile at the little jokes that are interspersed in the little clips included in the game. So a perfect combination if you like Lego and Harry Potter.
The game itself covers the first four books/films of the Harry Potter universe and you start in Privet Drive before finally fighting you know who at the end of the Goblet of Fire.
As with many Lego games (those on the PSP, PS3 etc) the game is a combination of puzzles, logic and, in the case of Harry Potter casting spells.
What surprised me was how much all members of the family enjoyed the game and how quickly they picked it up. The controls work well within the touch interface and simple to use.
I do like the fact that Apple have made this a universal app so it works on the iPod touch, the iPhone and the iPad. Personally I think as a game it works better on the iPad because of the bigger screen.
I know that my family are awaiting the next installment of Harry Potter for the iPad and would also like to see other Lego style games too. We’ll have to wait and see, in the meantime why not try playing this excellent Lego game.
Update: Price has now gone back to £2.99 still excellent value for money.