Hasta La Gadget!

After a month of sales, Catalyst, the latest World of Warcraft expansion pack has hit 4.7 million copies–a new record that makes the title “the fastest selling PC game of all time,” according to the numbers Warcraft publisher, Blizzard. Catalyst beat out the previous record holder–Wrath of the Lich King, the previous Warcraft expansion pack.

The title was released in United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Europe, Russia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand on December 7th, selling 3.3 million copies its first day. The game went on sale in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, two days later.

Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime was, naturally, rather excited at the news,

We created thousands of new quests, introduced new lands to explore, and extensively revamped the game world for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, making it our biggest and most ambitious expansion yet. We’ve been floored by the community’s response so far, and we’d like to thank them for their continued passion and support for World of Warcraft, and for helping Cataclysm reach this incredible milestone.

Ahead of Catalyst’s release, WoW’s base grew to more than 12 million subscribers.

Working on a major motion picture? Looking to save a few won? Take a cue from South Korean director Park Chan-Wook–you may have the tools in your back pocket. The filmmaker has wrapped the first-ever major motion picture shot entirely on an iPhone. Night Fishing cost 150 million won ($133,000). There were 80 people involved in the filming. The whole thing took 10 days.

“New technology always offers wonders and useful features,” the director told the press, during the premier of the 30 minute film. “Testing them is part of the amusement.”

The film centers around the meeting of a fisherman and a lady shaman. AFP describes the film as “surreal.” “New technology always offers wonders and useful features. Testing them is part of the amusement.”

The veteran director, who was behind such films as Oldboy and Thirst, described the whole thing as a different kind of challenge. “It was a new experience compared with making a meticulously planned movie,” he explained Even a casual and spontaneous shot delivered a surprise.”

PiRAWnha is a RAW photo developer app for the iPad and, while it gets the job done, its a little rough (raw?) around the edges.

The app scans your photo albums for RAW images and presents them as thumbnails. Tap one and you are dropped into some simple editing controls, above which sits your unprocessed RAW image. From here you can tweak exposure, saturation, white balance, and contrast, along with several other basic adjustments. You can also add noise reduction and sharpening, and a histogram is displayed at all times to help out.

So how does it do? Not so well. First, the RAW rendering – which converts the soup of data in a RAW file into a viewable picture – is rather poor. An indoor shot, taken at a ISO 1600, shows a lot more noise than it does on either my Mac or in-camera (using the camera’s self-generated JPEG preview). It also has a lot of red speckles sprinkled over the picture. These spots disappear when you export the processed photo to a JPEG, though.

The app is also very slow. This is thanks to the iPad itself, which has barely enough RAM to do something as hard as RAW image processing. In fact, I got a low-memory warning with every button press when I first launched PiRAWnha. You’ll need to restart before you use it.

And you might want to make some coffee, too. Each edit causes the image to re-render, and it’s slow. A button push can cause a wait of around ten seconds, making editing painful.

PiRAWnha claims to be the first RAW editor for the iPad, but there are plenty of other non-RAW editors which do the job better. The only reason to edit RAW photos on the iPad is to email them, or to make a quick slideshow before you get back to your proper computer. Given that every photo-editing app will handle the JPEGs that come tucked inside your RAW images, and handle them better and faster, there seems little point in PiRAWnha.

As a proof-of-concept I like it, but as a day-to-day app I don’t. Add to this the interface design – you can only edit in portrait mode, for example, and if you tilt it into landscape orientation when viewing thumbnails, they don’t reflow to fill the screen – and you have something that is fun, but not yet fully baked. $10.

PiRAWnha [iTunes]

PiRAWnha for iPad [PiRAWnha]

See Also:

• Photogene 2.0 for iPad: A Desktop Photo Editor on a Tablet …

In a move that is sure to excite the outdoorsman (or outdoors-lady, as it were) in us all, German outfit Ego-Kits has unveiled the E-Powered Downhill Bike Kit so you don’t have to go through all that pesky exercise getting to the top of the mountain to enjoy the thrill of bombing back down. The kit comes with a 1200-watt aluminum motor that mounts under the down tube of 70 percent of downhill bike models, a battery pack (contained within an included backpack), charger, controller module, crankset, chain, and twist grip throttle with a battery charge indicator. We don’t know the price or when the system will officially go on sale, but we do know that when mounted on a mountain bike, it looks cooler than other, more pedestrian electric bikes we’ve seen previously. Jump after the break to see the Ego-Kit in action.

Continue reading Ego-Kits declares victory over nature, gravity with its E-Powered Downhill Bike Kit

Ego-Kits declares victory over nature, gravity with its E-Powered Downhill Bike Kit originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 Jan 2011 09:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Block soap is like dehydrated liquid soap, and has the same weight and concentration benefits as anything that has had the water removed (Yoda, for instance, was tall and wrinkle-free before he was desiccated by centuries of using the Force). The environmental benefits are clear – no water means less to transport around the world in trucks and on boats.

The problem, as anyone who has showered in prison will tell you, is that a bar of soap can be slippery, jumping from your fingers as you lather yourself and precipitating a rather hazardous bending-over maneuver to pick it back up.

Nathalie Stämpfli’s “Soap Flakes” dispensers fix this. They shave bars of soap into soap flakes, which are quick to foam, and the dispensers are hard to drop. One is fixed to a wall, operated by pushing on a lever at the front. The other is like a pepper-mill for soap: twist the top and the soap curls out of the grater on the bottom.

Best of all, they look great. In fact, the handheld mill has a dome that looks just like the plexiglass helmet of the brainiac aliens in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. How’s that for livening up a boring shower?

Soap Flakes: Soap Blocks instead of liquid Soaps [Nathalie Stämpfli via Twitter]

See Also:

• Smart Shower-Dongle Mixes Soap with Water
• Google Cleans Up With Gmail Soap
• Hand Powered Portable Washing Machine Misses the Point