Hasta La Gadget!

If you have a new enough iPhone or iPad, you can now edit photos on the device. Photo Charlie Sorrel

iOS 5 is here, and with it iCloud. ICloud is the biggest step yet towards cutting the cord with desktop computers, and it arguably does away with the old-fashioned idea of files and folders. One of the best parts of iCloud is Photo Stream which, in combination with the new Photos app, lets you forget about the computer completely. Almost.

Camera

First, and most noticeable, are the new Camera and Photos apps. Any iOS 5 device can now snap a photo using the volume-up hardware switch (which is right next to the lens in the iPad 2 and almost laughably hard to use without photographing your finger). iPhone users can also double-tap the home button on the lock-screen to reveal a shortcut button that launches straight to camera for quick shooting.

You can also call up a grid overlay, lock the exposure and autofocus before recomposing (iPhone 4 and 4S-only), and pinch to zoom as you are shooting. When you have snapped a picture, you can swipe right to enter your camera roll. This won’t work if you accessed the camera through the lock-screen shortcut.

Once you are viewing you photos, you can now edit them. This is done the same way as if you were in the Photos app itself. Open an image, tap edit and you can rotate and crop (with or without constraints), correct for redeye and enhance the image. This last just adds a little pep, tweaking the white balance and contrast.

The edits seem to be non-destructive: You save your image, but if you choose to edit it again later you can still revert to the original.

From here you can also share images (email, Twitter, Messages), assign to a contact, print, copy or choose to use as wallpaper.

Photos

Head over to the Photos app and you can use all of the same editing tricks, only you now have access to all the photos on your iDevice, not just your photo roll. Curiously, when editing photos here, you are prompted to save a copy. Thus, you cannot revert, but you still have the untouched original. Editing won’t work on the iPad 1.

You can also rearrange the photos into albums, although it isn’t obvious at first how you might do this.

First, you need to tap the arrow-in-a-box icon, the one usually used for sharing things. Then you select the images you want to use and tap the “Add To…” button. Then choose to make a new album or add to an existing one. Note — if you cancel here, then all your photos are deselected. This is a pain if you start off adding to an existing album and then decide you want a new one instead. You’ll have to start over.

You can also choose to add images to an album from within it, using the same arrow-in-a-box icon. Oddly, you can re-add the same photos and they’ll show up as duplicates. I assume that this is a bug.

Photo Stream

Finally, there’s Photo Stream. Any photos you snap with the camera, or save from various applications (including screenshots), or import using the camera connection kit. are added to your Photo Stream. And any photos in your Photo Stream are uploaded automatically to iCloud (over Wi-Fi) and then beamed down to any other Photo Stream-enabled devices.

Full resolution files are sent back to your computer for safekeeping, and kept in the cloud for 30 days. Smaller JPGs are sent to the iDevices, which helps speed up downloads. If you regularly use your iPad to import RAW photos from your camera, though, Photo Stream will send the whole files up to iCloud. I spend half a day with unresponsive Internet before I realized what was happening.

Any edits you make on the iOS devices will be mirrored immediately on other devices.

The master library is stored on your Mac or PC. On a Mac you can use Aperture or iPhoto, and this is the only place a computer comes in. The workaround is to save files out of the Photo Stream and to you camera roll to keep permanently. You might be glad you bought the 64GB model after all. One thing to note: Once something is in your stream, it is impossible to remove. This, too, sounds like a bug.

Video

Finally, on a related topic, iMovie on the iPad and iPhone has been updated. It will now work with movie files imported from your camera, which means no more tedious workarounds. It now recognizes Motion JPG video from my Panasonic GF1, although it won’t see AVCHD Lite files. It seems like anything that can be imported via the camera connection kit should work. Give it a try.

Photo Stream really shows what Apple’s strategy is for iOS. Sure, we don’t need a computer now, but neither do we need to worry about our files at all. Our photos and videos are automatically backed up and available wherever we want them. No more thumb drives, no more e-mail attachments. It just works.

See Also:

• Photo Stream – Wired
• Syncomatic Automatically Beams Photos from iPhone to Mac …
• What's Inside: The iPhone 4S Camera

Find my Friends and Airport Utility for iOS. And yes, my Time Capsule is called Tardis. What else would it be?

Apple’s iCloud launches today, along with a few new iOS apps. And while we’re still waiting for the iWork and iPhoto updates that will allow us to use the new syncing and Photo Stream sharing services, Apple has released the Find My Friends and Airport Utility apps.

Find My Friends was announced last week at the iPhone 4S event. It lets you see where your friends are on a map, and lets them track you. One neat feature is the “temporary” setting, which shares your location for a limited time. This will probably come in handy when the Gadget Lab crew next hits CES in Vegas (for the evening parties — not for work).

Equally useful for travelers is the new Airport Utility. This lets you configure Apple routers from your iOS device. If you ever lugged a computer along on a trip just so you could configure your Airport Express to turn your hotel’s Ethernet connection into a Wi-Fi one, you’ll love it. Pretty much everything that can be done with the Mac version can be done with the iOS version.

You won’t find either of these apps in the App Store just yet. To get them, you need to jump through a few hoops. To get your copy of Find My Friends, just visit iCloud.com from your iOS device and click the link. It’ll take you right to the store. To get the Airport Utility, go to the Settings app, hit the Wi-Fi tab, tap your network an then tap the “Manage this Network” button at the bottom. Follow the prompts.

Both apps are free, and universal.

iCloud [Apple]

See Also:

• Apple Announces iCloud, Steve Jobs WWDC Keynote
• ICloud
• iCloud's the Limit: How iOS 5, Lion Push Apple's Lock-In Strategy …

Apps, books or music? Looks like we just can’t get enough apps these days. Image: Asymco

Our appetite for downloading apps is tremendous, and just seems to keep on growing, and yet our need to download other forms of digital entertainment isn’t nearly as staggering.

Market intelligence blog Asymco found that the rate we’re downloading iOS apps at these days absolutely dwarfs iTunes music downloads, and crushes iBooks downloads. Only in recent months though have total app downloads exceeded mp3 downloads.

We’re downloading approximately 34 million iOS apps each day, weighing in somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 billion app downloads per month. Mp3 downloads, however, are relatively modest in comparison: We’re downloading 8.3 million songs every day. Up until around 2010, the rate of iTunes song downloads increased steadily, but has leveled off over the past year. In comparison, iOS users’ year-over-year appetite for apps is practically exponential.

Unlike music and literature, apps are relatively versatile. They’re a source of entertainment, they’re a way to discover new information, they’re a way to keep your life organized. While important, music and books are primarily consumption-based forms of entertainment and enrichment — wonderful cultural objects, though not immediately practical.

There’s another factor potentially affecting the number of songs we’re downloading from iTunes: The rise of streaming music services. There are a host of competing alternatives including Google Music Beta, Turntable.fm, Rdio and Spotify. Many of these are also available in app form, negating the need to download a bunch of songs onto your mobile device.

Before smartphones came into wide use, we were all obsessed with loading up our iPods and mp3 players with music. Now, smartphones are replacing the need for a dedicated mp3 player.

Similarly, we just don’t accumulate books the way we consume apps or music. They’re generally a more expensive purchase (in 2010, the average iBooks purchase was $12.31). Compare that to the App Store, where around 80 percent of the content is free, while the average paid apps price is around $1.44. iTunes song downloads generally hover around a buck.

With iOS and Android neck and neck in the mobile race, it’ll be interesting to see how these patterns play out over the next few years. Will we continue to download apps at increasingly astounding rates, or will we eventually hit critical mass and slow down a bit? Guess we’ll have to see.

via GigaOM

Rock out with your, ahem, phone out

GhostGuitar is an app that will revolutionize the air guitar industry. No longer do you have to imagine the awesome sounds that you’re pumping out of your imaginary axe. Instead, you can use your talented hands to pump out actual power chords. As the promo blurb says, “Finally. A real air guitar.”

The app uses the front-facing camera in your iPhone or iPad 2 to track your hands, and then you strum with your right hand whilst fretting chords with your left. Sometimes, you can even pick individual strings.

Once you get used to it, the tracking works surprisingly well. It is most accurate at a couple of feet away – I had trouble getting it to see my hands from, further away, although if I put on a black t-shirt (the official air-guitar uniform) then I’d probably be ok.

You can pick guitars, choose chord progressions, use effects pedals, and there’s even a “Ghost Band” to accompany you.

There’s more. If you can sing (or not, I guess) then you can also record vocals on your masterpiece. Did I say “record”? Yes. You can record your work, and if you make a particularly excellent performance, you can save it as a sound or video file and then share it with whoever you love (or hate) the most.

I was a complete skeptic coming in, but the game turns out to be pretty awesome. It’s no Garage Band, but you’re pretty much guaranteed to get more than $2 worth of fun out of it. A bargain.

GhostGuitar [App Store. Thanks, Jessie!]

See Also:

• Sensor-Powered Pick Turns iPhone Into Air Guitar
• CES 2008: Hear Air Guitar For Real Thanks To Nitrous Roxide …
• Playing Air Guitar With Your Phone is the Perfect Excuse For Your …

Make like it’s 1992 with the Text-Only browser

Back in the swirling mists of the last century, men were men, browsers were text-based and pictures were ASCII. Now you can relive those wild, Deadwood years of the Internet with Text-Only, a — you guessed it — text-only browser.

The free app is built for Android, but there’s a web-based version so you can access it from any browser. And because the web today isn’t really accessible by a text-only browser, it pulls some tricks.

Enter a URL and the app will return a list of articles on that page, without any adds, pop-ups, pictures or other cruft. Think of it as being like Instapaper, only in live browser form.

If the article list doesn’t load, you can give the app the page’s RSS feed address and take things from there. As this involves firing up another browser in order to copy the RSS link, it’s not ideal.

What it is good for is low-bandwidth browsing. And I mean low-bandwidth in two ways: You can pull down the relevant parts of a site when abroad, or when approaching the limit of your monthly data allowance, or just on a slow connection. And you reduce the clutter on a typical page, offering much less distraction.

If bandwidth isn’t a problem, try Readability in your regular browser. Otherwise, Text-Only is nicely old-school. If only it rendered graphics as ASCII art.

Text-Only product page [Android Market. Thanks, Shan!]

See Also:

• Instapaper: A $5 App That Justifies Your iPhone Purchase
• Instapaper 3 Adds Sharing, Curated Articles and Plain Old Speed …
• Catch Clipper Aims to Take On Instapaper