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Olloclip 4-in-1 Lens for iPhone 6 Review

olloclip 4-in-1 Pocket-Sized Lens Kit for iPhone 6

For convenience and high-quality results, it was hard to beat the Olloclip accessory lenses for the iPhones 4 through 5s. The 4-in–1 model was especially good, cleaning up a lot of the optical aberrations of the earlier models.

Then came the iPhone 6, in regular and plus sizes, and your old Olloclip was suddenly useless.

The Olloclip is a widget that slides over the corner of the phone and places a wide-angle, fisheye or close-up macro lens over the iPhone’s camera. The new iPhones’ design meant that the old Olloclips wouldn’t fit. But did the folks from Olloclip just pull out a Dremel and cut a groove to let the old model slip over the new iPhone’s sticky-out lens?

Of course not. They came up with a whole new design, a design that’s bigger, but which adds support for the front selfie camera. So how does it compare?

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iPad Air 2 Review: Why the iPad Became My Main Computer

My current iPad Home screen.

My current iPad Home screen.

Last week, I came across Kyle Vanhemert’s story for Wired about the iPad and pondered, with a bit of fascination and surprise, his conclusion that “nobody knows what the iPad is good for anymore”. In particular, two arguments from the piece stood out to me.

First, Vanhemert argues that iPhone software is unequivocally superior to iPad apps:

An iPad might still be the best option for idly surfing around the web. But if you want to look something up, the iPhone has a huge advantage: It’s right there in your pocket. Today’s iPhones are arguably better than the iPad for reading news and ebooks; they’ve got nice big screens but you can still hold them with one hand. iPhones are certainly better than iPads for taking and sharing photos, if not “enjoying” those photos, which isn’t really something people do anyway.

Then, he makes the case for MacBooks as portable devices that are more comfortable than iPads:

And while iPads are indeed easier to use than Macs in terms of the software they run, as physical devices to be held and manipulated, iPads are often more awkward. MacBooks effectively have built-in kickstands. They can balance on coffee tabs, laps, stomaches. They’re light enough that it isn’t burdensome to move them between these perches. By contrast, you always have to hold a tablet.

I don’t want to elaborate on the particulars of specific apps and use cases, but, in broad strokes, I disagree with the article’s overall assessment of iPads being better suited as “consumption” devices.1 While I see some good points in parts of the article’s thesis – that Apple has struggled to explain the iPad in many ways, for instance – the underlying characterization of the iPad experience strikes me as shortsighted and repetitive.

Therefore, three months after I bought an iPad Air 2 and three years into my iPad-as-a-computer experiment, I’d like to offer some thoughts on my current iPad setup and how the device has changed my computing habits.

Because not only do I know what the iPad is good for in my life – the iPad Air 2 finally let me replace my aging MacBook Air as my main computer.

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Why Every Photo Storage Startup Dies Or Gets Acquired→

Casey Newton on Picturelife selling to StreamNation:

No wonder people keep building superior services: it’s impossible to store your photos with Apple, or Google, or Amazon, and not imagine you could do it better. And the need grows larger every day. Last year, trend forecaster Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins estimated that we upload 1.8 billion photos to the internet a day, up from 500 million the year before. But while services like Picturelife have attracted thousands of paying customers — I’m one of them — they haven’t found enough to build a sustainable business.

I liked Picturelife. For a while, I used it to browse photos, even though I still kept a copy in Dropbox for backup.

These days, I’m using iCloud Photo Library, with no other backups or workflows involved. I pay €0.99/month for iCloud storage and all my pictures are on my iPhone, iPad, and iCloud.com. I realize that this is an unpopular choice – primarily because of iCloud’s not-so-great reputation – but the service has been working flawlessly for me and I like how I don’t have to think about managing it. It’s built right there into the Camera and Photos app and it demolished the need for a third-party photo app for me.

I hope this post won’t jinx it.

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Watch Apps and Tap Distance→

David Smith writes about changes to WatchKit Apple launched yesterday with the fifth beta of iOS 8.2:

In all my design work for my WatchKit apps the question that I keep asking is: How will this make my app more convenient to use? If I don’t have a good answer for that then I’m likely heading down the wrong path.

Watch apps shouldn’t try and be full blown apps, replicating the full functionality of their big-brother iPhone apps. Instead they should be sleek, svelte companions that take advantage of their immediate availability to their user. This leads me to the problem I’m so glad Apple has addressed. The tap distance required for the user to perform any action.

This, I hope, is how developers of the iPhone apps I use every day are thinking about Apple Watch. Making Watch apps that emphasize quick interactions in a natural and direct way instead of cramming iPhone apps into a small display.

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Realmac Launches Crowdfunding Campaign for Typed Blogging Platform→

Realmac Software (makers of Ember, Typed for Mac, Clear, and RapidWeaver) have launched a crowdfunding campaign for Typed.com, a blogging platform they’ve been building for the past few months. The highlights: it’ll support Markdown, multiple users and blogs, custom domains, and responsive designs out of the box.

As they explain the campaign page:

Most blogging software is clunky, with bloated writing tools that get in the way. Typed is different. Typed.com uses Markdown syntax for writing content, combined with a beautifully focused interface. It’s a joy to use.

We know a thing or two about building apps that have great user experiences: Typed.com is built by the same team that made Clear, the award winning to-do app for iOS and Mac.

This is an interesting new venture for Realmac and I hope it succeeds. I welcome innovation in blogging services with this kind of features and sustainable business model. You can back the project here and watch the video below.

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Desk App’s 2014→

A great overview of Desk’s 2014 by its developer, John Saddington:

The bottom-line, though, is that it means that it is quite possible to “make it” as an indie developer and eek out an income that is substantive and worthwhile. I hope this report, if anything, gives some encouragement to all of those that are interested in seriously (or semi-seriously) pursuing an independent app that creates great value for users and customers.

Desk is a new text editor and publishing app for OS X, and John has clearly put years of thought and passion into it. What struck me in his blog post is how he reinvested the app’s revenue into advertising instead of settling on what he had achieved, going after a very committed audience that produced interesting results.

Fascinating story, and good business sense. See also: Joe Cieplinski’s thoughts.

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Automatic: Your Smart Driving Assistant on Your Smartphone [Sponsor]

There’s a mountain of data inside your car waiting to be unleashed, and all you have to do is plug in a quick little connector and download a mobile application.

Automatic is a smart driving assistant that plugs into your car’s data port and lets you connect your smartphone (either iPhone or Android) with your car. By  talking to your car’s onboard computer and using your smartphone’s GPS and data plan to upgrade your car’s capabilities, Automatic will allow you to easily diagnose your engine light, never forget where you parked your car, and save hundreds of dollars on gas.

Automatic learns your driving habits and gives you suggestions through subtle audio cues to drive smarter and stop wasting gas. Thanks to a map view available on your phone, Automatic can display a trip timeline after every driving session, showing you how you’re doing with a Drive Score; the app can even track local gas prices and tell you how much you’re spending.

In case of engine problems, Automatic can decipher what the “check engine” light means and show you a description of the issue with a possible solution. And thanks to a feature called Crash Alert, Automatic can detect many types of serious crashes and automatically alert local authorities as well as your loved ones when you can’t.

Automatic is currently available in the US for iPhone and Android devices, with a 45-day return policy and free shipping in 2 business days.

MacStories readers can go to automatic.com/macstories to get $20 off and buy Automatic at just $79.99. For more information, check out Automatic’s website.

Our thanks to Automatic for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Todoist App Coming to Apple Watch→

This morning, Todoist announced an Apple Watch version of their app. Joe Rossignol writes:

Todoist aims to bring its popular to-do app for iPhone and iPad to the wrist with a simplistic Apple Watch app that will provide task management at a glance. When paired with an iPhone, the app will enable users to view their upcoming tasks and categories, reply to comments, and schedule or mark complete tasks. Todoist tells us that the video below is missing the task filter view, but plans to add the feature soon.

The past few weeks in the tech news cycle have been full of intriguing, but ultimately useless, examples of Apple Watch “concepts”. This is an actual WatchKit app coming soon to Apple Watch.

I’m excited because Todoist is my task management service of choice, and the ability to quickly mark a task as completed or defer it from my wrist could be interesting. The app looks standard – as I suspect most initial Apple Watch apps will be like – but make sure to hit the source link for a short demo video.

Also: considering Todoist’s integration with IFTTT and Zapier, how cool would it be to trigger automated workflows from an Apple Watch?

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Twitter Instant Timeline→

Vindu Goel writes about Twitter’s new “instant timeline” feature, which will allow users to sign up and start reading tweets without curating a following list manually:

Over all, however, the quality of the instant timeline was so good that I was almost tempted to dump my regular Twitter account, where I follow more than 700 other accounts, probably one-third of which are no longer important to me.

But:

The first part of the sign-up process is unchanged. After you pick a user name and password, Twitter asks for access to your smartphone’s contact list. Once you grant that access, the service scans it for people with Twitter accounts and suggests them as people to follow.

The feature has currently rolled out to a small percentage of users on Android. On multiple occasions, Twitter stated that getting people to sign up and enjoy the service without the burden of choosing accounts to follow is a priority for the company, and the results reported by The New York Times sound encouraging.

Still, I wonder how scanning contacts to find accounts based on common interest would work for people who have heard of Twitter but don’t have friends who use it (example: my parents). Keeping this instant timeline in addition to the traditional way of creating an account and picking people to follow sounds good though, and I’m curious to see when it’ll roll out to iPhone users.

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