There are a few dozen apps on the iPhone App Store for creating panoramas from photos on your iPhone. None of them stood out until I noticed AutoStitch.
Years ago, I’d used the free windows version and was amazed at how easy it was to use. You just add the photos you wanted to stich together, and it would quickly and automatically align them, distort them, adjust the levels, and then stitch and blend them together. The iPhone version of AutoStitch is just as easy to use and produces great results. The only downside is that it is fairly processing intensive, so doing a big panorama with dozens of photos can drag your battery charge down by a few percent.
AutoStitch is normally a bargain at $2.99, but as of this writing, it’s $1.99. I suggest you check it out.
DP Review brings news that a SD card reader for the iPhone is coming soon from ZoomMedia. The ZoomIt will allow you to copy photos from your digital Camera’s SD card to your iPhone. From there you can email the photos, or upload them to a service like Facebook, Flickr or your WordPress blog. They also claim to support other file types, like audio, video and documents. In the future their app will support various DRM restricted file types.
All I can say is: It is about time! The iPhone camera is handy, but its doesn’t even come close to the quality and capability of a compact point and shoot camera. I’d hoped that EyeFi’s WiFi-enhanced SD cards would provide the ability to transfer photos directly to your iPhone over WiFi, but their iPhone app only goes so far as to let you upload photos you take with the iPhone’s built in camera to your computer via your service. Also, only the high end version of their card would be able to communicate directly with your iPhone over an “Ad Hoc” WiFi network when there is no access point involved.
This is the first product I’m aware of that uses the iPhone Device SDK that Apple announced a year ago when they previewed iPhone OS 3.0. I hope we’ll see more soon. The ZoomIt is supposed to ship in April with a list price of $59. They are offering a $10 discount for pre-orders, but it seems their online store is down for the time being.
A few days ago, Apple announced that the iPhone App Store had served two billion downloads of 86,000 3rd-party applications. It’s hard to remember, but when the iPhone launched in 2007, the closest thing the iPhone had to 3rd party apps was the included YouTube app, the Yahoo-backed Weather app, and the Maps application built on Google maps. Now it looks like Apple may be preparing for a post-Google world.
It came out this week that Apple quietly acquired a mapping startup called Placebase earlier this summer. The first clue was actually a tweet by a Placebase business partner in July and was confirmed when someone checked Placebase’s CEO’s, (Jaron Waldman) LinkedIn profile and found he listed himself as being on the GEO team at Apple. Placebase’s CTO also lists himself as an Apple employee. Placebase might be viewed as a mapping also-ran, but they actually launched after Google Maps debuted, and as of the summer of 2008 Om Malki reported that they had managed to carve out a profitable niche providing custom mapping with a product called PushPin that went above and beyond what was possible with Google Maps.
No one outside of Apple know’s what their plans are for mapping in general, and Placebase in particular, but there is plenty of speculation that it means that Apple is getting ready to kick Google Maps off the iPhone. That’s possible, Apple isn’t as close to Google as it once was now that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has left their board, but I don’t think it is anything like a foregone conclusion.
For one thing, apparently the iPhone Maps application has recently started showing mobile, location-targeted ads delivered by Google. It’s widely believed that this is going to be a huge new advertising market, and you can be sure Google is giving Apple a cut. Given the required scale of a location-targeted ad market, it is hard to imagine that Apple could do as well on its own as it could by taking advantage of Google’s relationships with vast number of advertisers, and given that the iPhone is the only clear winner in the web-Phone market, so far, Google needs them to provide the users to help make that ad market happen.
We’ll have to wait and see what the outcome of this acquisition is. Apple is already incredibly well positioned to capture a big chunk of the value from mobile location-based apps. They can let others do the hard work of figuring out what applications people will find compelling while taking a cut of every app store sale, a subsidy from mobile carriers, and, of course, a nice fat profit from each iPhone sold to run those apps.
A lot of interesting news at the Apple event today, it’s iPod focused, but it brings news that the new 3.1 version of the iPhone firmware has been released. A few quick highlights:
- “Genius” app recommendations in the app store. I haven’t tried it yet, but I think its
- Premade ringtones “only” $1.29 available directly from your phone.
- Saving video from mail and MMS into the camera roll.
- Ability to save edited video as a new clip, rather than overwriting the original video.
- Various other little improvements.
The iPhone and iPod Touch make fantastic remote controls for multimedia applications running on your Mac or Windows PC. One of the earliest is the Apple’s free Remote app, which lets you control iTunes and the AppleTV. Apple also released the Keynote Remote app for $0.99 that lets you control their Keynote presentation software, but 3rd party developers have created dozens of remote control apps. Some are designed to work with specific applications, others provide remote trackpad/keyboard functions that you can use with any application, and a number combine the two approaches. All of these work over WiFi, though Bluetooth might be a powersaving option in the future.
I’ve been really interested in remote control applications lately because I’ve been looking for a better way to control the Windows computer I have hooked up to the TV in our living room and now that my wife has an iPhone too, I don’t have to mess with an infrared remote anymore. I thought I’d share some of what I found. I’m planning on separate posts for the one’s I’ve tried out.
App Specific Remotes:
These are designed to work with specific applications. They often offer special features, like the ability to display “cover art” and playback controls for the album or movie being played:
Boxee Remote (free) Works with Boxee media center software for Mac, Windows and Linux. Automatically detects when Boxee asks for text input and brings up keyboard. Playback controls during playback. Cool gesture mode for quick navigation.
Remote (free): Apple’s application for controlling iTunes and AppleTV. Provides media library browsing and playback controls. Works with both Mac and Windows versions of iTunes.
XBMControl (free): Looks like it tries do duplicate an XBox DVD remote for controlling XBMC. Doesn’t look like it has keyboard support.
XBMC Remote ($2.99): Provides media library browsing and playback controls for XBMC (and the XBMC-derived PLEX and Boxee media center applications), open source media center software for Windows, Mac and Linux.
VLC Remote $2.99. Provides file browsing and playback controls for VLC Player, a free, open source media player for Mac, Windows & Linux.
vmcMote ($7.99): Provides library browsing and playback remote control for Windows Vista and Windows 7 Media Center.
Multi App and General Purpose Remotes:
Air Mouse Pro ($2.99 on sale): Provides a remote trackpad, an accelerometer controlled mouse, remote keyboards, and applications specific remotes for controlling Macs and Windows PCs. This looked really nice, but when I was researching it a couple weeks ago, it was hard to tell how well it worked with the Windows apps I wanted to control.
HippoRemote ($4.99): Provides a remote trackpad and keyboard for Mac, Windows & Linux PCs. Also has custom control profiles for dozens of applications. It uses the keyboard & mouse portion of the popular VNC remote desktop protcol which is already part of OS X Leopard and most recent linux distributions. They provide a custom VNC server for Windows, but I chose to use a generic VNC server. This is what I ended up buying, and it’s worked really well. I plan to do a more thurough review soon.
Keymote ($3.99): Custom control profiles for many popular Mac applications and allows creation of custom remotes. This seems to be focused on creating shortcut key combinations, and it’s not clear to me whether this provides remote mouse & keyboard support.
Remote Jr ($4.99): Works with Mac & Windows with installation of remote control software. Quick launching of apps using the OS X Dock and Windows quick-launch toolbar. Can be used remotely over EDGE or 3G. When I looked at it a few weeks ago, their Windows support seemed pretty weak, but now they have support for a variety of popular Windows apps. Looks pretty cool and full-featured.
RemotePad (free): A bare-bones open source remote mouse and keyboard app. Works with Windows, Mac, Linux. I found it too limited and unreliable for my use.
Rowmote & RowmotePro ($0.99 & $4.99) Rowmote emulates the Apple hardware remote for controlling your Mac. The Pro version adds a remote keyboard and trackpad.
Snatch ($3.99): Trackpad and remote keyboard for Mac and Windows. Also allows creation of custom remotes for Mac and Windows.
Other Remotes
These work with additional hardware to serve as universal remote to existing equipment, like DVD players, stereo systems, TVs, etc.
Bobby Universal Remote ($19.99): Works with a $135 remote control unit + additional hardware.
RedEye (free): Works with an $188 IR dock.
poster photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaqian/ / CC BY 2.0
