Hasta La Gadget!

Photo Stats makes sense of the metadata in your iPhone photos

Photo Stats is an iPhone app that neither edits your photos nor organizes them. Instead, it makes cool infographics that let you know a lot more about your photos.

You all know about EXIF metadata, but I bet that the only time you ever look at it is to quickly check which camera or lens you or another photographer used, or to find out if such a noise-free picture was really taken at ISO 3200.

Photo Stats makes that info a lot more friendly. It takes the metadata from the photos on your iPhone and wrangles them into cool infographics. These will show you your average shutter speed, your most popular ISO settings, as well as graphs laying out the times of day you shoot the most photos. This info and more is displayed on a single screen, or you can swipe between the various graphs.

It’s fun, and would be totally worth the $1 asking price if it weren’t for one thing: It only pulls photos from your camera roll. Thus, of the almost 2,000 pictures I have on my iPad (I’m running the app in pixel-doubled mode), it only sees 176. And as many of these are screenshots, or piped in from apps like Instagram, they aren’t counted as “photos.” This means I get stats for just 17 photos.

This isn’t the fault of Photo Stats. It even has an infographic showing which apps you used to snap your pictures. The problem is, none of the apps I use seems to be saving this data.

If you only use the built-in camera app, though, then Photo Stats is a great little app, especially if you’re a stats nerd. Available now, $1.

Photo Stats [iTunes]

See Also:

• Field Notebook Records EXIF Metadata for Film Photographs
• Nerd President Elect: Official Portrait Reveals EXIF Data
• Stolen Camera Finder Finds Stolen Cameras
• How to Geotag Your Photos
• Everything You Need to Know About Google Plus and Photos

Apple finally admits that if your boot drive fails, you can’t boot from your boot drive

For Mac OS X Lion users paranoid about traveling without carrying an emergency boot disk for their computer, worry no longer. Even if you have already hacked your own installer on a USB thumb drive, you can now make an officially sanctioned one using the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant.

It’s easy. Download the 1MB application (from Apple’s support site, not from the Mac App Store) and run it. You’ll be prompted to connect a USB stick and warned that everything on that stick will be erased. Agree, enter your password and wait for a minute or two, and that’s it.

This Recovery Disk obviously doesn’t contain the full Lion installer. Instead, it acts like the Recovery Disk Partition that Lion hides on your boot drive when you first install it. Thus, you can “reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari.” To use it, restart the Mac, hold down the “option” key and pick your new USB drive from the list.

If you choose to reinstall Lion, you’re still going to have to wait for it to download. So, short of making sure you only have a disk breakdown when in range of a fast Internet connection, you might still want to make your own installer stick.

Worth noting is the compatibility of sticks you make with Apple’s little app. If you make a Recovery Disk on a Mac that shipped with Lion, it will only work with that Mac. If you made it on a Mac which has been upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion, it will work with any similarly-upgraded Mac. Thus, you’ll have to make a separate stick for each Mac you have with Lion pre-installed. This isn’t a big problem as you only need a 1GB stick to do it.

You should probably go do this right now.

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant [Apple via Mac Stories]

About Lion Recovery Disk Assistant [Apple]

HP is pushing its new TouchPad tablet in any way it can, including discounts and coupons to its app store. (Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com)

HP needs to get its tablet in your hands, and the company is doing everything it can to make that happen.

HP has tried slashing the tablet’s prices. Over the weekend, the company discounted its new tablet by $100 when purchased through HP’s web store and other participating retailers, bringing the price of the TouchPad down to $400 and $500 for the 16GB and 32GB versions, respectively.

HP has tried rebates. The company’s first rebate for early TouchPad adopters — available to those who bought it when it was first released in July — knocked $50 off the tablet’s price.

HP has tried bundled software freebies. At the TouchPad’s launch, the company partnered with Box.net to offer 50 GB of free cloud storage, a $240 yearly value.

To some, HP’s actions are those of a desperate company.

“Consumers aren’t buying the TouchPad at the iPad price point, so HP is hoping a lower price will make its tablet look more attractive,” said Forrester research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps in an e-mail. “Cutting prices may cause consumers to buy the TouchPad out of curiosity, but it undermines HP’s efforts to market a premium iPad competitor.”

HP’s webOS platform is the underdog in today’s mobile space. A DigiTimes report expects Apple to take 61 percent of the tablet marketshare in 2011, leaving the remainder up for grabs between the myriad Android tablet manufacturers, BlackBerry PlayBook makers Research in Motion, and HP — and possibly Microsoft, if its Windows Mobile OS comes to tablets anytime soon. A veritable David to competing Goliaths Android and iOS, HP has a lot of work to do.

In the company’s most recent effort, it will send out a $50 credit for purchasing apps in HP’s App Catalog to anyone who bought a TouchPad from July 1 to August 4. It’s an attempt to boost support for the webOS catalog from the consumer side. If the company can get enough TouchPad owners to start buying webOS apps, HP may have a good chance at convincing app developers that webOS is worth developing programs for.

The company is also trying to bolster its application ecosystem on the developer side, recently launching the “webOS certified developers program,” essentially a promotional deal for developers who want to get noticed. The program offers referrals and more visibility for the up and coming webOS developer who wouldn’t otherwise get noticed in a very crowded application environment like Apple’s or Google’s.

“We’ve seen great developer interest in the webOS platform from companies big and small,” an HP spokeswoman told Wired.com in a statement. As a result of its developer push, the company expects a boost in apps over the next 12 to 18 months. “We currently have more than 600 TouchPad apps and more than 9,000 total apps in the webOS app catalog,” the spokeswoman said.

For comparison, Apple’s App Store with around half a million apps, and the Android Market with over 250,000 apps.

With the 4G version of the TouchPad coming soon at a pricey $700, we’ll have to wait and see if tablet shoppers are willing to shell out such a hefty chunk of change for a non-iOS tablet. Considering how poor Motorola’s Xoom sales were in the wake of its high starting prices, the outlook doesn’t look so good.

A recent study found that out of eight open source mobile platforms, Android ranks at the bottom in terms of openness. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

By Ryan Paul, Ars Technica

Market research firm VisionMobile has published a report that evaluates the openness of eight major open source software projects. The study — which was partly funded by the European Union — focuses largely on open governance, inclusiveness, transparency, and ease of access to source code. To quantify relative openness, the researchers established criteria and a numerical rating system with points.

The projects that VisionMobile analyzed include Android, Eclipse, the Linux kernel, MeeGo, Firefox, Qt, Symbian (based on the governance model of the Symbian Foundation prior to the the platform’s transition back to a closed model), and WebKit. They ranked these projects in an “open governance index” based on the percentage of points that they received. Google’s Android mobile operating system ranked the lowest, with only 23 percent. The Eclipse integrated development environment ranked the highest, with 84 percent. Android was the only project in the study that scored less than 58 percent.

Android’s low ranking in the index came as no surprise to us. As we have written on several occasions in the past, Google’s mobile platform falls far below the standard of openness that the search giant promised when Android initially launched. The VisionMobile report identifies some of the key problems with Android’s governance model, including Google’s “unilateral Android project decision-making processes” and “closed contributions process model.”

“Visibility to the roadmap is limited, as there is no Android roadmap publicly available. In fact, development of the Android private branch and the roadmap is controlled by Google, with little input from external parties or the Open Handset Alliance members,” the report says. “When launched, the Open Handset Alliance served the purpose of a public industry endorsement for Android. Today, however, the OHA serves little purpose besides a stamp of approval for OHA members; there is no formal legal entity, no communication processes for members nor frequent member meetings.”

The lack of transparency in the Android compliance program is also identified as one of the weak areas in Android governance. The report says that “Google tightly controls the Android platform and its derivatives” by using its unilateral control over the full Android compliance criteria, which are “undocumented and somewhat capricious.”

Although the actual Android compatibility definition is public, the specific parameters of the compliance testing are a closely guarded secret. Skyhook is currently pursuing litigation against Google for allegedly doctoring the compatibility testing parameters for anticompetitive purposes.

The report quotes an internal Google e-mail (made public as a result of the ongoing Skyhook litigation) in which Google’s Android compatibility chief Dan Morrill described the company’s compliance testing practices as “using compatibility as a club to make [OEMs] do things we want.”

Browser openness

Android was, of course, just one of the eight projects discussed in the report. The study’s scores for Firefox and WebKit are also intriguing. WebKit had a slightly higher score (68 percent) than Firefox (65 percent).

The main areas where Mozilla lost points related to the lack of public data about project contributors, the size of the developer base, and the number of commits from community members. Mozilla’s impressive new contributor metrics dashboard, which was announced in April but is currently undergoing a security audit prior to public launch, will likely address those shortcomings.

Eclipse was identified as the most open project in the study. In particular, VisionMobile lauds Eclipse’s Project Dash and general commitment to transparency. The organization’s vendor neutrality and well-defined governance structure are highlighted as positive governance attributes.

A look at the criteria

The full score tables and numerical criteria are included in the report. A close look at the scoring turned up some interesting discoveries. The criteria is a bit subjective in places, but generally looks good. There were, however, a few aspects that might be debatable.

Oddly, VisionMobile’s criteria assigns a one point bonus for mandatory copyright assignment, a practice that is not generally regarded as a hallmark of good open governance (for some good background on the issues with copyright assignment, see the commentary by Dave Neary and Michael Meeks).

The VisionMobile report itself acknowledges that none of the projects included in the study require copyright assignment and that copyright assignment is probably unnecessary. (It’s more common for contributor agreements to stipulate a perpetual copyright license rather than outright assignment.)

Another aspect of the criteria that might be controversial is the scoring for licenses. The study awards a higher score for using a permissive license than using a copyleft license. Although permissive licenses increase the flexibility of downstream code use, they aren’t necessarily conducive to more open governance.

Money matters

The report contends that greater openness generally leads to greater success among open source software projects. At the same time, it acknowledges that Android’s popularity contradicts that conclusion. The Android “paradox” is discussed at length in the report; it suggests that “Google’s financial muscle” and engineering resources, rather than openness, have driven Android’s success.

The full text of the VisionMobile report is available under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded from the firm’s website.

Mac OS X Lion merges some aspects of iOS with the Mac environment, like the new Launchpad feature for launching apps.

OSX Lion has already begun to blur the lines between Mac and iOS. But in a note to investors today first reported by Barron’s, a Jefferies & Co. analyst believes the two will completely merge by 2012.

How will this be accomplished? On the hardware end, analyst Peter Misek posits that Apple could use the A6 quad-core processor to unify its mobile and computing devices.

“We believe Apple is ready to start sampling the A6 quad-core app processor and will be the first to such multi-device platform capable of PC-like strength,” Misek says.

We’ve already said that it’s possible that Apple plans to eventually eliminate its professionally-targeted device lines, especially since size is such a determining factor in consumer purchases now. Having one unified experience across devices, especially when they’re so similar in size (11-inch MacBook Air? 10-inch iPad? Completely different user experiences?), would certainly make sense and simplify consumers’ computing. OSX Lion, which debuted recently, married some aspects of iOS with Mac OSX, but a little less successfully than many had hoped. And more widespread cloud-based storage like iCloud will keep things smooth and consistent no matter what device you’re using.

One of the key points Misek’s note makes in Apple’s merging of the two distinct operating systems (well, slightly less distinct now with OSX Lion) is that Apple hopes to provide a seamless experience for its users across multiple devices.

“Users want to be able to pick up any iPhone, iPad, or Mac (or turn on their iTV) and have content move seamlessly between them and be optimized for the user and the device currently being used,” he says in the note. If OS X and iOS are separate entities, that’s more difficult to accomplish.

And by using a single processor type across handheld devices like the iPhone, as well as larger ones like the MacBook Air, implementing that single, unified OS becomes much more straightforward than needing to adapt it to different chipsets. Of course, higher-end products like the iMac or MacBook pro may require a little bit longer to completely merge into this ARM-based ecosystem.

“Apple can use a 32-bit ARM architecture to address the vast majority of the OS X ecosystem’s needs in 2012-13 except for high-end professional devices,” Misek wrote in his note. “When 64-bit ARM is available in 2016, we believe Apple will have a single OS and hardware architecture.” Rumors about Apple switching to using ARM architecture in both its MacBook Airs and Macs have persisted for a while now.

In addition to making sense for users, unifying OSX and iOS would also benefit Apple. iAd would have a significantly larger audience. App developers would potentially have less differentiation to deal with between products, especially now that HTML 5 is really taking off. Misek believes lower research and development costs would be required as well, as innovation would be performed on a single OS instead of paralleled across multiple ones, and content licensing would become a more streamlined process.