Streaming music to your iPhone from your Mac or PC

I have used Airfoil on my iMac at home for a long time… a software program that allows for streaming music out to multiple rooms that have Airport Express devices hooked up to speakers. Airfoil by Rogue Amoeba is $25 for either Mac or PC keeps multiple rooms all in audio sync.

While looking at the latest Airfoil update, I noticed that Rogue Amoeba is now offering a free app for the iPhone and iPod Touch to act as a reciever. No longer is there a need to have your music pushed out to speakers that everyone in the house has to listen to. Instead, your iPhone or Touch can act as a reciever, plug in your headphones and you have the audio coming to you via your desktop. This is a nice little feature for those times you don’t want to have particular music or audiobooks loaded onto your iOS device.

The only limitation you have with Airfoil for iOS is the inability to choose what is playing via the handheld, your listening to whatever is qued up on the desktop.

One reason I may not have noticed the Airfoil app release was how successful Here File File for the iPhone has been for me. It isn’t a free app on the iPhone but the desktop side is free. Major differences is that Here File File is a 1:1 relationship with the desktop so your not steaming music out to multiple rooms/devices. On the other hand, you are able to choose what your listening to (or watching) via your handheld.

It comes down to if you using your iPhone as a remote speaker for your desktop or your looking to control the audio/video streaming to you.

Printed date into iPhone as appointment – no typing

I have been recent very good luck with this method. Sometimes I have to do a word or two clean up but for the most part, if I see a printed date it can be a appointment in my iPhone pretty quickly.

As an example, on the plane last night I saw that William Shatner has a new show coming out. I used to jot that down on a piece of paper, or type into my iPhone as a note. Later, I started taking a picture of these. All the above only work as good as how often you look at your notes.

Here is a snap I took with Genius Scan, a free app that takes a picture and allows you to straighten it up if it’s a curved piece of paper or a whiteboard at an angle. In this case, it is just so you can see the text from the little print in the back of the magazine.

Using an app called Prizmo (full review to follow soon), I took another picture (could have used the same, it can use images in the camera roll too…). The app allowed me to crop down to just the text, it then cleans up and runs OCR to give back just text. The app does very well at magazine text and Business cards.

You can get the text out of the app in a large variety of ways out of Prizmo depending on how you want to use it. In my case, I ‘copied’ the text to use elsewhere in the iPhone.

The text from above is then pasted into a SimpleNote page. This app is free, offering cloud syncing but in this case I’m looking for another feature they have. A date as text in SimpleNote shows as a clickable link.

I did cheat this time by cleaning up the word ‘adaptation’. It is surprising how many times I have used this method that I don’t have to. I could have not done this at all actually since this text doesn’t go past this point. For this instance, I copied the name of the show… tapping the date link opens up the built-in calendar app with a new appointment. I put it as a repeating for a few weeks and pasted the name in. That’s it… the whole process takes less than a minute after you do it a couple times. I could have just taken the picture and run the process later when sitting waiting for my lost luggage.

360 Panorama Updated – Staying on my iPhone now!

Some time back I reviewed several Panorama apps for the iPhone. I take a many images covering a lot of area, which used to mean hand stitching images together on the Mac later. The first solutions for the iPhone where taking individual images that the app made into one. Now, there are several options that use the iPhone internal sensors to see the movement, snap images automatically, then deliver a final single image… no waiting!

360 Panorama didn’t do very well in the review. Today a new version arrived in the iTunes app store and it is a MAJOR update! After six images, the decision to keep the app on my iPhone was no question.

The app can take panorama images in landscape wide or portrait tall, just turn the iPhone. When you have the starting point in frame, tap the ‘Start Capture’ button.

You then move in any direction for the iPhone camera to fill in the area. Being smooth, you can actually go one direction then go back to get an area you may have missed. Too much movement up and down might confuse the camera a bit but general fluid movements will get a full image. Click the ‘Done’ button when your, well… done. If your not happy the direction the image capture is going, start over by tapping the ‘Reset’ button.

When 360 Panorama is done with the image capture, you get an overview of the image, how long it took to take the image and options for style, background and saving.

Rather than a flat 2D image, you can view and save your panorama as a Stereographic by choosing the round circle under the ‘Style’ options.

The background around the image can be white or black to get the impact that matches the image.

Choosing the ‘Save’ button, the image is saved to your built in camera roll of pictures. After the saving step, you can choose to go back to adjust the background view and save again or share out the 360 Panorama image via eMail.

Here is a full resolution output of the app 360 Panorama, click on it to view the full size:

Fun with moving pictures taken with the iPhone

Today, waiting at a street corner on the way to Starbuck, it hit me that You Gotta See This might be a cool app to use for taking pictures of moving things. Thing, like cars and people. My first attempt at people got some nasty looks… so, here is my car expirement.

As you may remember, You Gotta See This is a photo app that senses when your moving your iPhone via the internal hardware and snaps a bunch of pictures after you tell it to start. Normally, you think of a landscape or panorama picture. But, what if you took a ‘picture’ with the app of a moving things. Then, the app places the multiple pictures on a single layout, laying images next to or over each on a backgroung.

So, here is two minutes worth of playing around… it really opened my eyes to having some fun when I see something moving that I want to grab a picture of. Now, I can show movement and the things around it as reference in a single ‘image’.

Knowing that as I move the iPhone, You Gotta See This will snap images – do you move with the car or sweep in the oposite direction of their movement? Below, I took one ‘shot’ of a group of silver cars that were moving from my left to my right and I swept the phone camera from right to left… so, against the traffic. Click on any of these to see the full size image.

Then, I took an image of a red truck going from left to right, with me moving my phone camera left to right, so ‘with’ the movement of the vehicle.

Before you make a decision on which you like better. The following is the same shot using the different backgrounds and image join options within You Gotta See This . Look over the below, as you can see, depending on the direction you move and the image merge option you choose to use causes a completely different effect. Not one option works for every movement photo situation. I have posted the images grouped by type of background and layout – against the traffic then with the traffic in each layout option.

The following images have been resized down to fit the page to save on memory of the post. As mentioned before, you can click on the above for the full view of the image to see the quality.

Yup, You Gotta See This on a iPhone and something moving can result in some fun pics to share!

High Dynamic Range in iOS4.1 compared to Pro HDR app

iOS4.1 loaded, bug fixes tested, now onto the fun new enhancements!

First off, the new button in the Camera area to take High Dynamic Range photos.

If you have not used a HDR app before, this will create much more lifelike photos the way your eyes see the world around you. Software that take HDR photos, takes a image focusing on the bright areas where the dark areas are almost black, followed by taking a picture focusing on the darker areas where the bright areas are completely washed out… then merges the two together so you can see all across the levels of light. Normally, when you take a picture, the brightness is adjusted to the place you tap to focus on, resulting in some areas very dark or very bright. HDR gives you the best of both in a single image.

The additional new option on the camera view screen is to turn on/off HDR. When off, you get the normal image you would prior to iOS4. Here is an image taken focusing on the average area so you can see the bright areas are OK but a touch washed out.

With the HDR feature turned on, you can see the trees clearly, the clouds and blue sky, along with the building bricks crisp. You can choose from the settings area that if using the HDR option to have just the HDR image or the original and HDR image in your camera roll.

As an example, here is a HDR image done with Pro HDR which has been used a lot on this site over the last year.

Of course, the pictures do not align exactly but they were taken seconds apart from each other… I moved a little launching the Pro HDR app.

In the case of Pro HDR, you get the above image as we as the extreme dark and opposite bright images in your camera roll. Not really needed if everything is perfect but this is handy if you want to go back and tune the output since the app will reimport those images to use again if you need.

Looking at the two images (2nd and 3rd from the top in this post), you can see there is a bit of a difference in quality of images between the iOS4.1 HDR and one taken with Pro HDR. The iOS4.1 seems more ‘real’ with it’s colors and depth, while the Pro HDR is sharper and seems to really pull the lights and darks together to their maximum level. It is similar to the world as you see with your eyes versus wearing filtered glasses. The second show the fine detail that you may miss with your naked eyes. This app over the iOS4.1 is especially nice if your taking a picture of a green field with a farm house and light clouds in the sky.

What you can’t see in these photos is the time to take the image. The iOS4 process take just under 5 seconds. You click the shutter, there is some onscreen auto focusing/adjusting going on and within 5 seconds the image is in the camera roll. I know, that is really long now that we have the super fast camera action of a iPhone 4 and iOS4, but not that bad compared to a iPhone 3 with OS 3.x.

In the case of Pro HDR, you getting closer to 15 seconds. After launching the app, choosing to run HDR in auto mode, you tap the screen to take the picture. The screen runs through a series of bright and dark focusing, then warns you to stand still while it goes through taking image one and then image two. This process is taking on the average 10 seconds in our tests. The screen then blanks and the images are saved, then pops up an aligning and finally a merging screen… these two steps take another 5 to 10 seconds depending on the range between light and dark.

A feature that Pro HDR has after the images are merged that iOS4.1 doesn’t provide is the ability to tune the image before saving it to the camera roll. The saving takes another few seconds. So, end to end Pro HDR takes 20+ seconds per image.

In the end, will I delete Pro HDR now that I have iOS4.1? No… the app does a lot of specialized things the built in camera doesn’t for causing images to really pop as well as being able to adjust the image right in the app. It does take considerably longer to take a HDR image though. So, I will use the built in HDR function of the camera in any image that doesn’t have moving things and Pro HDR when I’m have a few extra seconds and need to extra ‘pop’ in the image.