Hasta La Gadget!

SynthCam is probably the coolest cellphone photography app we’ve seen in quite a while. In short, it allows you to snap iPhone pictures with a very shallow depth of field, blurring the background of your pictures and making the subject pop out. This is usually the domain of SLRs and other large-sensor cameras.

How does SynthCam work this magic? By crunching numbers. To use the app, by Marc Levoy (professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University), you frame the image, hit the “shutter” button and then move the phone in small circles, keeping it perpendicular to your subject. The camera records video and then process the frames to keep the subject sharp and blur the background. Because it shoots video, the resolution is lowered, but the effect is startlingly like the real thing.

In his demo video, Levoy says that the effect works by simulating the larger apertures found in SLRs. Move the tiny iPhone lens in circles, the thinking goes, and you create a bigger aperture, much like scribbling a Sharpie will make a bigger mark than just tapping it on the paper.

This seems simplified, although it’s a good enough layman’s explanation. What the app is doing is tracking the subject and watching how the background moves behind it. This does simulate a larger aperture, kinda, but the behind-the-scenes processing is doing more than just stitch images together side-by-side.

These 15-second exposures have some nice side effects, too. Low-light noise can be reduced by keeping the camera still throughout the exposure and then combining the results to make a brighter, less noisy image. But better is the “tourist-removal”, as it could be called. A long exposure will only record things in the frame for the whole time. Any passersby will just disappear.

The app can be had right now for the iPhones 4 and 3GS or iPod Touch running iOS 4.2 or better, and costs $1. Combine this thing with Instagram and you just found a way to spend the rest of your day.

Synthcam product page [Marc Levoy]

Synthcam [iTunes]

See Also:

• Review: Bokeh Masters Kit Adds In-Camera Effects To Your Arsenal …
• Sigma's ƒ1.4 Portrait Lens, Tailor-Made for Today
• Instagram for iPhone, Like a Lomo-Twitter for Your Photos

The end of the month is here, and that means it’s time to do a little housekeeping on our list of the absolute best iPhone apps. Who will be inducted? Who will unceremoniously get the boot? More »

Maybe Windows Phone 7 can gain some presence with the help of the iPhone’s hacker community.

Recently released as a public beta, a new hack transforms the interface of the iPhone to mimic the main screen of Windows Phone 7.

So gone will be the springboard UI we’ve all grown accustomed to on the iPhone and Android OS, and in its stead will be the tile-based interface of Windows Phone 7.

Of course, the iPhone theme doesn’t work exactly the same as the real thing. The authentic Windows Phone 7 uses tiles to represent “Hubs” containing the main experiences of the phone. So for example, the photo hub has your camera, and after you snap a photo it brings up another feature to share the photo on a social-working site or e-mail the pic. Microsoft calls these “threaded” experiences.

The iPhone hack doesn’t replicate the threaded Hub functionality of Windows Phone 7. It just repurposes your individual apps into Windows Phone 7-like tiles and mimics the process of adding or removing these tiles. Check out the video below for a demo.

Windows Phone 7 offers a fresh and brand-new UI compared to competing smartphones, but that hasn’t been enough to win over a large number of customers yet. Microsoft has been cagey about initial Windows Phone  7 handset sales numbers, but according to a new report by NPD, the OS is off to a slow start. Windows Phone 7 debuted with 2 percent of the smartphone OS marketshare, which is lower lower than the debuts of WebOS and Android, according to NPD.

So maybe you’ll more likely see an iPhone running this fake Windows Phone 7 theme as opposed to the real thing.

It’s a neat theme, and if you’re tired of the iOS UI but don’t want to ditch the iPhone just yet, this will be a fun hack to tinker with. Visit the ModMyi forum for a quick tutorial on installing. Jailbreaking is required.

From Gizmodo

If you don’t have anything nice to say, good news, you may be a prime candidate to run a tech company. Tech CEOs have never been ones to pull punches when it comes to discussing how competitors are run. In fact, they seem to thrive on issuing such outspoken critcism–and yes, we certainly thrive on reporting it.

Netgear CEO Patrick Lo had all kinds of less than flattering things to say about the way Apple is run, and how the company will stumble once Steve Jobs takes his exit, “which is probably not far away.”

The iPhone, Lo told The Sydney Morning Herald, will ultimately fail, due to Apple’s restrictions on the device, comparing it to VHS vs. Betamax and, closer to home, Mac vs. PC. “Ultimately a closed system just can’t go that far,” said Lo. “If they continue to close it and let Android continue to creep up then it’s pretty difficult as I see it.”

Lo attributed Jobs’s policy to his “ego,” stating, “Steve Jobs wants to suffocate the distribution so even though he doesn’t own the content he could basically demand a ransom.”

As for Microsoft’s ability to compete in the mobile space? The picture is even less rosy, “”Microsoft is over. Game over, from my point of view.”

Lo sees Android overtaking the iPhone globally–something that, according to mobile analyst group Canalys, already happened in the fourth quarter of last year.

Layar’s been the go-to platform for augmented reality on Android since 2009, bringing you the useful, the creepy, and the just plain weird — and now it’s unleashing the beast on iOS, again (it’s already available as a dedicated app). The Netherlands-based company just launched Layar Player, a free tool that allows anyone — with a little developer know-how — to create their very own AR iPhone app. Accompanying the announcement are three brand new Layar Player-enabled apps: the Bing-sponsored Snowboard Hero, which incorporates a special AR mode for collecting points; a contractor locator called Layer Trade; and VerbeterdeBuurt, an app that acts as an AR community bulletin board. The company’s press release touts the “democratization of augmented reality,” and while we can get behind their AR-for-alll message, we’ve already seen Layar used in ways that give us the willies. Don’t get us wrong, we’re still excited about the endless AR possibilities, but we’re hoping, at least for now, that iPhone app developers can keep the AR monsters at bay.

Continue reading Layar Player lets AR loose on iPhone apps

Layar Player lets AR loose on iPhone apps originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 29 Jan 2011 08:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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