Gadget & Tech

Since the v3.0 operating system allowed applications to access the iPhone’s hardware, iPhone photo applications have switched from being after-the-fact processors to full-on camera suites, letting you do everything from capturing images to post processing to (in some cases) uploading to FaceBook and the Twitter.

The latest is the rather appropriately professional-looking Pro-Camera, which can be yours for $3. Pro-Camera offers the self-timer and digital zoom found in other applications, but it brings some rather nice new features, usually found in proper, standalone cameras.

Most successful will probably be the anti-shake, which uses the accelerometer to detect your jitters and stabilize the image. Using a similar method, you can also overlay a horizon line to keep the pictures straight, or display a grid overlay. Read More

Gizmodo has information that Apple has been shopping around the old media haunts for content deals. Now that they’ve conquered music, movie, and TV downloads, the next logical step is print.

Apparently Apple approached the New York Times back in June. They wanted to talk with the paper about putting their stories on a “new device”, presumably the iTablet. Apple also talked with McGraw Hill and Oberlin Press, two major textbook manufacturers, and convinced them to move textbooks over to iTunes. Once Apple is ready, they’ll start selling iTunes textbooks at a substantial discount. Unfortunately, these books will be DRM filled to prevent resale. Read More

The D300s remains a capable, even impressive camera.The D300s retains the same sensor, excellent 51-point auto focus system, fantastic chassis build quality and ergonomics as the D300. Low-light performance is solid on ISO1600. It’s no 5D Mark II or D700, but it still stands up. Color saturation remains top-notch, and it seemed to handle white balance even a bit better than 5D Mark II. Read More here

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration.
A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss
and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

for a first look of Google Wave click here

What’s up with Google’s obsession with UFO mythology?

abducting the second “o” in “Google” and UFO hovering above crop circles that spelled out “Google”?.

Google provided a relatively mundane explanation for its alien fixation. According to a post on The Official Google Blog by site designer Micheal Lopez, the series of cryptic images and riddles was a tribute to science fiction author H.G. Wells, whose 143rd birthday was Sept. 20, 2009. Read More

Seagate today updated the Barracuda line to include the industry’s first drive to use an 6Gbps SATA interface. The 2TB Barracuda XT has twice as much theoretical bandwidth as existing SATA II drives and gives the disk up to 600MBps in burst transfers. Read More

Anyone who deals with Apple on a regular basis knows it is a company that gives information on its own terms. But now even the federal government is having problems getting a clear answer regarding Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice application for the iPhone.
On July 28, Google announced that the calling and message service application had been rejected from Apple’s App Store. Three days later, Google, Apple, and AT&T, the iPhone’s exclusive carrier in the U.S., received inquiries from the Federal Communications Commission regarding the app’s rejection. In its answer to the FCC, Apple said that the application was not rejected, but was still “under review.” In Google’s response–the most interesting parts redacted until Friday–it told the FCC that a series of conversations took place between Apple Senior Vice President of Marketing Phil Schiller and Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Alan Eustace during the month of July, including one on July 7, where Schiller told Eustace that Google Voice was being rejected for duplicating the phone dialing function of the iPhone.
The discrepancy between what Google said and what Apple said in their answers to the FCC, of course, leads to many more questions. In response, Apple released the following statement Friday:
“We do not agree with all of the statements made by Google in their FCC letter. Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google. Read More

The Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, the world’s largest volunteer effort to help protect oceans and waterways, gets underway Saturday with hundreds of thousands of volunteers expected to pick up trash on beaches around the globe. The International Coastal Cleanup has been held on the third Saturday of September since 1986.
The volunteers keep track of every piece of trash they find and report it to the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, which uses that information to produce an annual country-by-country, state-by-state index of marine debris.

Greenpeace Water Patrol volunteers and students from Laguna Province lead a trash cleanup at Laguna Lake, south of Manila, Philippines. September 20, 2008. (Photo courtesy Greenpeace Southeast Asia)

Of the 43 items tracked during the Coastal Cleanup, the top three items of trash found in 2008 were cigarette butts, plastic bags, and food wrappers/containers, according to the Ocean Conservancy’s latest report.

During the 2008 Cleanup, some 390,880 volunteers removed 6.8 million pounds of debris from 6,485 sites in 100 countries as well as 42 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

They removed more than 400 pounds of debris for every mile of beach cleaned. Read More

AT&T’s decision to delay iPhone MMS to early fall doesn’t stop ambitious folks such as ourselves from finding a way around it. And we have. You wanna do it to? click here for complete instructions for enabling MMS on iPhone 3.1.

Soon to be proposed FCC rules may stop the likes of Comcast from discriminating against P2P applications on their networks, and AT&T sure will have a tougher time justifying why it won’t let the iPhone’s version of SlingPlayer run on 3G while giving WinMo and BlackBerry users all the bandwidth they can handle. Julius Genachowski, the new chairman of the entity, is slated to discuss the new rules on Monday, though he isn’t expected to dig too deep into the minutiae. Read More