Classic Apple iPhone 4 Case
I pray to sweet baby Jesus by way of Saint Steve Jobs that this concept for an iPhone 4 case gets made! I’ve never wanted a case for iPhone 4 because I regard the 4 and the 4S as the most prefect piece of industrial design humanity has enjoyed so far.
But THIS! This idea from a design firm called Les Forges MDK is the only external case for the iPhone 4 or 4S that can be justified.
Vocal iPhone Dictation App Mentioned on Rush Limbaugh May have Made 17-Year-Old Developer Very Rich in a Day
You might be shocked to learn one of the main inspirations behind GeekBrief.TV is Rush Limbaugh. I listen to a lot of NPR, but I also grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. While Rush over simplifies and over generalizes the positions of the people he opposes politically, there are a couple of non political things he does on his show that happen randomly and I love them both. Rush is a huge Apple fan. He reads Apple rumor sites and it’s awesome when he gets giddy about a new release. The other thing he does from time to time is talk about the media business and his how he came to dominate radio ratings.
Today he started his show talking about an amazing new App for iPhone 4S called Vocal. It works with a companion Mac App and give you the ability vocally control a Mac and dictate into writing applications from the iPhone. Rush spent a good fifteen minutes raving about how great it is. Listeners were emailing asking questions because they couldn’t find it in the App Store. Rush talked about the App more and referred listeners to the developer’s website, spelling out the URL: http://mtrbts.me/vocal. To help listeners find the right App, Rush told listeners it was developed by Matt Roberts. He said, “You’ll know you’ve found the right App if it’s by Matt Roberts. He also recommended listeners go to Matt’s site to watch the demo video I’ve embedded below.
In all, Vocal probably got about 20-minutes of air time on a show with 20-Million listeners.
I watched the video planning to write a post about the App. I had no plans to include details about Rush, until I clicked on Matt Roberts Twitter link. Matt is a 17-year-old student in Australia who had never heard of Limbaugh until today. Matt says, Limbaugh’s listeners are making up a majority of his support requests. 
http://twitter.com/#!/ma_ttie/status/149623075246313472
I think it’s very cool that we live in a world where a 17-year-old can build an App that can get 20 minutes of praise on a show that is supposed to be about conservative politics!
Read MoreNokia Believes Kids are Fed Up with iPhones?
Pocket-lint is a popular blog about pocketable tech in general and mobile phones in particular. Nokia’s director of Portfolio, Product Marketing & Sales gave Pocket-lint an interview explaining why Nokia is now a Windows Phone platform.
He said, “What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones. Everyone has the iPhone. Also, many are not happy with the complexity of Android and the lack of security. So we do increasing see that the youth that wants to be on the cutting edge and try something new are turning to the Windows phone platform.”
Before, iPhone I was a Nokia guy and I want to see Nokia offer compelling alternatives to Apple products, but this analysis sounds more like artificial political spin than anything based on any kind of reality. According to Nielsen research, kids between 6 and 12 years of age have iDevices at the top of their 2011 Christmas wish lists.
- 44% want iPad
- 30% want iPod Touch
- 27% want iPhone
Kids 13+ want iDevices too.
- 24% want iPad
- 15% want iPhone
- 8% want iPod Touch
- 14% want non-iPhone smartphone
Windows Phones made by Nokia may very well attract youth gadget buyers, but not because they’re “fed up with iPhone” or confused by Android. The Nokia Lumia 800 is certainly a sexy looking piece of gear, but it will depend on Windows Phone having cool features unavailable on other phones that young buyers want before it can shake iPhone’s desirability dominance.
Read MoreEl Dorado, Arkansas Court House
This is one of my favorite photos I took in 2011. It’s the court house in my hometown, El Dorado, Arkansas. I shot it with an iPhone 4 using the Hipstamatic App.
Read MoreSmooth Tracking Shots on iPhone / handheld cameras
With few exceptions, I believe moving the camera is filmmaking SIN! I’ll give you mercy IF you have tools to keep the camera from shaking. I believe in simply setting up a shot and letting the action take place in front of the lens. Jerky, quick camera moves might be an Avant-garde shooting style, but it’s a style that sucks. If you’re going to shoot in HD and you don’t have the tools to keep the shot smooth, just please follow this one simple rule:
DO
NOT
MOVE
THE
CAMERA!
If you want the camera to move, there are tools like balancing stabilizers, jibs, tracks, and of course tripods. Without them, your shots will be better if you don’t move the camera at all ever. With the right tools, though, you can achieve shots that are down-right cinematic even with an iPhone.
Mobislyder is small little track designed for iPhone, iPod Touch and other small video cameras that gives shooters the ability to capture smooth tracking shoots like you see in film. It has a variety of mounting options including and articulated mount, mobile device mount, 1/4″ standard mount, adhesive ball mount and a 1/4″ ball mount, so really the only limitation on cameras you can use with it is weight.
Glidetrack, the company producing mobislyder has them available for preorder at a special launch price of $129.49 at the time I’m writing this.
Watch this demo to see the kinds of shots you can capture with mobislyder:
Evernote Apps to Help Remember People (Evernote Hello) and Meals (Evernote Food)
I tell myself I’m disorganized because I’m creative and I’m male. Maybe my right-braininess is to blame or maybe it’s something else. I try all kinds of productivity Apps to organize my life and my stuff, but every App I try seems to be designed by left-brained list makers. I would love to partner with a developer to create an organization App designed for creatives, but that’s really not the point of this piece. Just putting that out there!
Evernote almost works for me. Out of every tool I’ve tried, I like Evernote best, and I LOVE that they’re tackling new Apps that improve life. Today there are two new Apps I’m looking forward to trying, Hello and Food.
Hello tackles the problem some of us have with remembering names when we meet people at events. I’ve used an App where I’ve explained that I’m bad with names and asked if I could take a photo. That process seemed a little awkward to me. Hello handles it in a way that makes it kind of cool. Hand your phone to the person you meet, they hold the phone up to their face and the App automatically takes four photos that string together to create a mini animation of the person’s face.
Here’s a video so you can see for yourself…
Hello is free in the App Store. I had to search for Evernote Hello to find it. After testing the App, the feature I wanted to see most was the light face animation. I went back and read the Evernote blog post about Hello again, and it looks like that’s a feature coming soon?
Then there’s Evernote Food, an App designed to help us remember as much about a meal as we want to capture. You can capture photos of food, drinks, dining companions and recipes. Give the meal a title and it’s there for you to remember anytime you want to look reminisce.
Here’s how Food works …
During the years I produced GeekBrief.TV, I had a lot of great meals with interesting people. It would be so cool to have them captured like this. I’m looking forward to capturing even more awesome breakfasts, lunches and dinners with this App in the future!
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