Hasta La Gadget!

Magic Shutter is an iPhone camera app that mimics the effects of shooting at slow shutter speeds, and of using flash to freeze a subject. Here it is in action:

The app actually does use some programming magic to achieve its effects. For instance, if you choose the “flash” modes, you can choose front and rear curtain-sync effects. Front curtain sync takes a sharp image and then records subsequent frames in a kind of still video, allowing those frames to build into a blur. The original, sharp image is laid over the top. Rear-sync does the same, but snaps the sharp photo at the end, making the light streaks appear behind a moving car, say, and giving a more expected effect.

Light-painting mode lets you snap a light-source and then wiggle the camera to draw shapes, as if the light were burning an image into a film while the shutter was left open.

Magic shutter looks like a lot of fun, and certainly makes the iPhone do some impressive new tricks. Output resolution is limited, though, to under a megapixel due to limitations that Apple sets on accessing the camera at full resolution for video.

An update early in the new year will boost the output resolution, but as the source video is no bigger, this won’t add much.

The app is ready for your blurry experimentation now in the app store, at a price of $3.

Magic Shutter app [iTunes via iPhoneography]

See Also:

• Hipstamatic Gentrifies iPhone Camera
• Best Camera: 'Like Photoshop for The iPhone'
• Pro-Camera Adds Image Stabilization to iPhone

Toss away up to four chunky USB chargers and replace them with one small, slick charger. That’s the promise of the Green Wall Charger from VogDuo.

At its heart the VogDuo box is a pocketable four-way charger for any and all USB-powered gadgets, and for that alone it probably deserves a place in your travel-bag (you’ll need an adapter, though, as the handy fold-out prongs are US-only). But it also comes with its own special schtick: a timer. Hit the set-button to choose between two, four, six or eight hours and press start. Once done, the circuit is cut and no power is drawn from the mains.

Want to charge your iPad? The charger provides standard five-watt USB ports, which aren’t really enough to charge the iPad (the Apple charger puts out 10-watts). A Y-connector is provided in the package, though, so you can just hook the iPad up to two sockets simultaneously.

The Green Wall Charger will be on show at CES in Las Vegas next month, where we should find out about pricing and shipping dates.

Green Wall Charger [VogDuo]

See Also:

• Europeans Realize Dream of a Single Charger for All Cellphones …
• AT&T Zero Charger Switches Itself Off
• Mystery Charger Glows Like iPhone Battery Icon
• USB Hub Packs Clutter-Reducing iPhone Charger

This article was written on June 28, 2006 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

You want to play on the bleeding edge of software so you go ahead and start testing Firefox builds. Maybe you are playing it a little safe and testing Firefox 2.0 or maybe you are pushing the limits and testing Firefox 3.0! Either way you are bound to run into some compatibility issues whether it be when installing extensions or when visiting sites.

I have previously put together a guide that became quite popular on how to test Firefox builds. The guide contained everything that I had learned up to that point, but I have learned some more since then.

Extension compatibility is a major issue when testing Firefox builds. The Nightly Tester Tools extension is really amazing and will save you an unbelievable amount of time. It lets you force your Firefox extensions to become compatible with the version of Firefox you are running. When installing an extension, as pictured, there will be a checkbox that you can select which will allow the Nightly Tester Tools to make the extension compatible. Before Nightly Tester Tools came along you had to manually change the version numbers in each extension that you installed.

There are also some sites that check to make sure you are running a compatible browser before you are able to see the installation dialog box. The most notable site for this is Google. If you try and install the Google Toolbar in Firefox 2.0 you will get a dialog box that says “Google Toolbar requires Firefox 1.0 or later.” You can often get around these sites by simply viewing the page source for the site and searching the HTML code for “xpi”. The result should be the direct link to the Firefox extension and doing this for the Google Toolbar will result in dl.google.com/firefox/google-toolbar.xpi. You can do the same thing with Google Notebook and find the direct link to be dl.google.com/firefox/google-notebook.xpi.

Hunting for those download links can be a little tedious at times and to make it easier you can change the User Agent. To do that you can either use the User Agent Switcher extension or you can follow these steps:

1. Type about:config in the address bar of FireFox.
2. Right-click and select New->String.
3. Type general.useragent.override and press OK.
4. Type Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4 and press OK.
5. You DO NOT have to restart Firefox for this setting to take effect.

Your Firefox browser will now be treated just like Firefox 1.5.0.4 gets treated. If you wanted to choose a different browser then you can view this long list of User Agents that are available. You could also make Firefox pretend to be Internet Explorer but you may run into issues when viewing some sites.

Hopefully this will help you along as you run into compatibility issues when testing Firefox. Unfortunately there are some extensions that are truly incompatible with future Firefox versions and need to be debugged in order to work properly.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

CyberNotes: Week In Review With Sunday’s Summary!Download Firefox Portable 2 RC2A Look Back at Firefox in 2006Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryCyberNotes: Vista Program Compatibility Mode

It may shock your senses, but this actually isn’t the first time we’ve heard of lasers being used to track birds and their habitats. But this go ’round, an Idaho University team is using a satellite-borne laser in an effort to “predict in which part of a State Forest the birds might be living.” In particular, the crew is developing methods that’ll help them track the North American pileated woodpecker, namely because these creatures are pegged as being great indicators of overall bird diversity. Currently, the laser is only capable of analyzing vital characteristics of a woodland, but scientists are using this information to take a stab as to where the aforementioned birds would be. Essentially, this laser spotting approach enables gurus to spot highly dense sections of forest — plots where the pileated woodpecker loves to hang — from above, dramatically cutting down the hide-and-seek that would previously take place on foot in much larger areas. Now, if only they could get lasers onto the birds, we’d have an all new brand of rave to consider.

Satellite-borne lasers tracking woodland happenings, who knows what else originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Dec 2010 06:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The original Google phone got us all excited a couple of weeks back when an OTA update was presumed to be the oven-hot Gingerbread upgrade, only to disappoint us. Now we’ve got the most lucid statement from the Android chefs yet on when the real Gingerbread Nexus One will stand up, which is placed in the relatively ill-defined window of “the coming weeks.” Hey, better weeks than months, right?

Nexus One will get Gingerbread OTA update ‘in the coming weeks’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Dec 2010 05:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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