Hasta La Gadget!

Ah, the games that grown-ups play. It’s a situation that’s beginning to feel an awful lot like the Google Voice fiasco that made the rounds in mid-2009, but if it ends in a similar fashion, you won’t find us kvetching about the teases. As the story goes, a bona fine Google Latitude app made its appearance in Japan’s App Store hours ago, only to be yanked before it could sashay over to any other nation. TechCrunch reckons that it was El Goog doing the pulling — it’s quite possible that the folks in Mountain View weren’t quite ready to publicly reveal it, and with all that Chrome action going down yesterday, it’s not hard to imagine how an impending launch was overlooked. At any rate, the description of the app as well as most of the screenshots were in English, so we’re cautiously optimistic that it’ll resurface in the near future once a few Is are dotted and Ts crossed. With iOS 4 supporting background location, there’s hardly a reason to wait any longer, right?

Google Latitude makes brief appearance in App Store, gets yanked post-haste originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Dec 2010 09:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on July 19, 2006 by CyberNet.

Adobe has released Adobe Lightroom Beta 3 to Windows and Mac users alike. The goal of Lightroom is to give professional photographers a way to easily manage and edit their photos. The software really targets those people who use an uncompressed image format (RAW) instead of the common JPEG compression. By using a RAW image format you are able to adjust details of the exposure and contrast to precisely match what you would like it to.

While Lightroom really seems great for some purposes I don’t believe that it is meant for everyone. It will be interesting to see how well this software ends up taking off.

NOTE: You will have to register with Adobe if you plan on downloading the software.

Thanks for the tip James!

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The idea of using an iPhone or iPod touch as a universal remote has been tossed around for years, but it’s always required either a finicky external dongle or an extravagantly expensive home automation rig. Instead, we’ve been treated to a host of single-device remote apps for everything from FiOS, DirecTV, Comcast, and Dish Network DVRs to the Apple TV to the Boxee Box to… well, you name it. A little company called Peel has a dramatically different idea, though — it’s launching the Peel Universal Control system, which is designed to take your iPhone or iPod touch head-to-head with universal remote heavyweights like Logitech’s Harmony system.

The company is made up of a bunch of former Apple engineers, and their solution is extremely novel: instead of attaching a dongle to the iPhone itself, they’re controlling your A/V rack using a pear-sized (and Yves Behar-designed) wireless IR blaster that’s supposed to live quietly on your coffee table. The blaster (called the Peel Fruit) connects over ZigBee to a tiny network adapter (the Peel Cable, also designed by Behar) that attaches directly to an open Ethernet port on your WiFi router — a two-part hardware setup that seems fussy, but is designed to obviate the need for software configuration during installation, and allows the IR blaster to run for nine months on a single C battery.

Continue reading Peel turns your iPhone into a universal remote — using a wireless external IR blaster

Peel turns your iPhone into a universal remote — using a wireless external IR blaster originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Dec 2010 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s something you shouldn’t buy for your kids: Bicygnals. They’re lights and turn-signals for a bike, and they’ll probably be all but useless.

The Bicygnals consist of a pair of lights, one for the front and one for that back of the bike. Thumb switches on the front lamp-array control the turn signals, and a 2.4GHz wireless signal is sent to the rear lights to trigger those. The front light has a 5 LED headlight and 8 LED indicators, while the rear unit has a 3 LED red light flanked by 6 LED indicators. 4 x AA batteries power each unit.

Lights are important on bikes, but indicators will be ignored or simply not seen by motorists, who are just not used to such things. It’s much better to teach your kid how to shoe his intentions clearly and correctly with hand-signals, which drivers are accustomed to seeing. Let me put it another way. If a car driver used hand-signals instead of indicators, would you even notice?

When I was a small kid, we could do a Cycling Proficiency course (and test) at school. I still remember everything 30-something years later. Slapping a pair of novelty lamps onto a bike will do nothing but make kids think they’re safe when they’re not. And if your kid can’t ride safely one-handed while making a signal, he shouldn’t be riding on the road. $70.

Bicygnals [Bicygnals via Oh Gizmo]

See Also:

• Spooklight: Accelerometer Brake Light for Bikes
• Owleye Solar Bike Lights Also Charge via USB
• Hands-On: Spaceship Bike Light Blinds Puny Humans

The future is a scary place, yes — but one thing we don’t need to fear is being unaware that we’re thirsty. Research and development firm Cambridge Consultants will be showing off its intriguing “i-dration” concept fitness water bottle at CES in a few weeks, combining a series of sensors on the bottle itself that communicate with an app you’ve got installed on your smartphone. The bottle will measure ambient temperature, how much fluid you’ve pounded, and how often you’ve consumed it; the phone, meanwhile, will use its accelerometer to measure how hard you’re working out and combine that with heart rate data from a chest strap. After crunching some numbers, the app determines whether you’re low on H2O — and if you are, it’ll make a blue light on the bottle pulse. If it seems like a roundabout way to stay hydrated… well, that’s because it is, but Cambridge’s angle is that this is a demonstrator for cool new ways that sensors can be tightly packed and integrated with smartphones to create “hardware apps.” Speaking of, we could use a tall, cool glass of water. Follow the break for the full press release.

Continue reading Futuristic water bottle uses technology, science to let you know you’re thirsty

Futuristic water bottle uses technology, science to let you know you’re thirsty originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Dec 2010 08:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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