Hasta La Gadget!

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

SmallWorks BrickCase is just like any other open-faced plastic iPhone 4 case, except for one thing: the addition of awesomeness. The back face, and a small section of the top edge are covered in the familiar plastic carbuncles of Lego bricks. Yes, you can actually grab bricks from any Lego set and snap them into place on this case, and the two bumps up top are perfect for mounting a minifig.

The idea was born when the 12-year-old son of SmallWorks’ Jim Thompson saw his dad’s iPhone. Being a kid, he made the obvious connection at once. “This phone would be cooler if it had LEGO bricks on the back.”

Thompson got on it, and after tirelessly making samples and designing molds that would yield Lego-compatible nubbins, the BrickCase was born. You can have one for $20, in black, white, or clear.

BrickCase [SmallWorks]

See Also:

• Tiny Lego Men Assist in iPhone Unboxing
• Machine Made of Lego Builds Anything You Want — Out of Lego …
• Lego Chess-Set Costs More Than a MacBook Air

Last we heard of the HTC 7 Pro, it was taking a casual stroll through O2 Germany’s website, throwing around boasts that it’ll be on sale come January 2011. Well, guess what? That promise has just been reiterated by O2’s German Twitter stream, which says that the 7 Pro will be on sale next week for an unsubsidized price of €569 ($735). That’s available via O2’s usual MyHandy payment plan, where you dish out €29 in advance and then pay off the phone in equal monthly payments over two years. We can’t imagine HTC leaving the rest of the world sitting idly by, twiddling their QWERTY keyboard-loving thumbs, so look out for this WP7 handset to filter through to your local market some time soon.

[Thanks, Mario]

Continue reading HTC 7 Pro arriving on O2 Germany ‘next week,’ priced at €569

HTC 7 Pro arriving on O2 Germany ‘next week,’ priced at €569 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 Jan 2011 07:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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