This Week's Sponsor:

PowerPhotos

The Ultimate Toolbox for Photos on the Mac

Posts tagged with "camera"

Movie Stiller: Video Stabilizer for iPhone

In the past, there have been a couple of times I wished that video I shot with my iPhone turned out to be stable. Camera shakiness, in fact, is the first problem for users addicted to shooting flicks with their mobile devices; and especially in situations when you need to be quick to capture a special moment, you’ll be disappointed to find out the video is un-watchable due to your not-so-stable hand. Whoever hasn’t experienced this at least once either has non-human hands or uses a tripod.

Movie Stiller, a new app from Creaceed (the same developers behind Prizmo), aims at helping you get better videos by stabilizing the ones you have in your Camera Roll. Once you fire up the app, choose a video and wait for Movie Stiller to load it and compute it; in the Settings, you can set a stabilization strength, a default scale and process rotation. Movie Stiller works like this: the more you stabilize a video to avoid shakiness, the more Movie Stiller will add black borders around the current frame. You can then make the image bigger to avoid borders, but that will let the video lose some details. Thus the need of achieving an optimal setup depending on each video.  In my tests, I’ve found the app to work fairly well with videos that had “average shaking”. Don’t expect to optimize your adventurous tornado shoot with Movie Stiller.

The UI of the app is minimal, but stylish. A few taps are needed to get through the stabilization process and you can also export directly to the Camera Roll once it’s finished. Overall, it’s a pretty nifty app to enhance the quality of videos that “could have been better”. Get it here at $2.99.

Game Center Achievements…For A Camera App

Achievements are that sort of thing that keeps gamers going even when frustration and disappointment take over the initial excitement for a new game. You beat the game, you can’t have any more quests, but you want all the trophies / achievements. Many friends of mine do this on their PS3 and Xbox 360 – I’ve never been a fan of achievements, personally. Clearly I must be an exception, as even Apple itself implemented the functionality in Game Center. Not to mention other gaming networks for iOS like OpenFeint and Plus+, which have been offering achievements and leaderboards for quite some time now. Read more

1 Megapixel Rear Camera On The iPad 2?

Several rumors are pointing to the next generation iPad as a slight redesign of the original iPad, with tapered edges, flat back, bigger speaker and front / rear facing cameras. According to 9to5mac, which has done further digging into the latest iOS 4.3 SDK, the iPad 2 will have a 1 MP rear camera capable of shooting photos and videos, and a VGA front-facing one for FaceTime and other camera functionalities.

We’ve done some digging in the latest SDK it looks like Apple’s much rumored second-generation iPad will not feature some fancy 5 megapixel camera, but will instead shoot your flicks and take your pics with something close to a 1 megapixel camera. That’s awfully close to the fourth-generation iPod touch’s 0.7 megapixel back camera so we speculate they could be the same thing. That means you’ll be able to take some unwieldy 720P video with your iPad (whether you’ll be able to view that 720P video natively is another question).

The aforementioned SDK files reference to this device carrying a 1 MP camera as K94 and K95; the site speculates these codenames might refer to the next generation iPad. The current one, for instance, has codename K48. Multiple codenames for the iPad 2 might suggest that different versions are in the works, like iPad WiFi, CDMA and GSM. Other references found in iOS 4.3 beta seem to suggest the same thing.

A 1-megapixel camera on the iPad 2 would be significantly lower than the one found on the iPhone 4; we also have some doubts on the actual photo quality that would result from such a camera lens, which will have to display pictures on a 10-inch screen. Previous rumors indicated Largan Precision as the supplier of camera lenses for the next iPad, and a report in November also confirmed Largan was set to ship “5-megapixel lens modules for tablet PCs”.

Further Evidence of Camera in iPad 2 and Photo Booth and FaceTime Apps

After digging around the 4.3 Beta 2 of iOS for iPad, Mac Rumors has found fairly solid evidence that pretty much confirms not only a camera addition to the iPad but also the addition of a Camera app (obviously), FaceTime and Photo Booth apps.

An image (homeScreenOverlayFaceTime~ipad.png)  used by the iPad in the Setting’s app to preview the wallpaper was found by Mac Rumors to contain three extra icons that do not exist on the image contained in iOS 4.2, those additional icons were those for a FaceTime, Camera and Photo Booth app.

FaceTime and Photo Booth are also largely dependent on the presence of a front facing camera, whilst a Camera app would seem rather redundant without a rear facing camera and so it could be thus presumed that this latest discovery seems to confirm previous reports of both a front facing and rear facing camera on the iPad 2.

Mac Rumors also says they found filters for Photo Booth that included the effects of Thermal Camera, Mirror, X-Ray, Kaleidoscope, Light Tunnel, Squeeze, Twirl and Stretch.

[Via Mac Rumors]

Security Cam for iPhone Keeps An Eye On Your Stuff, With Motion Detection

Now this is an interesting app I’ve recently discovered in the App Store. Months ago, I began thinking about setting up a homemade wireless security system in my house; I saw that the system could be easily put in place with a couple of hundred dollars, and I was getting serious about purchasing all I needed to get it up and running. As usual with my personal projects I dream about and save in my “someday” list, it didn’t happen. Work got in the way, priorities changed, I didn’t set up a home security system. As my to-do list suggests, I may actually do it “someday”.

Home security and monitoring, anyway, is a personal requirement (and hobby, I guess, or obsession) that can change according to one’s needs, workplace and items to protect from unwanted eyes and hands. This is why I think Security Cam, a $0.99 app for iPhone, may be just what the average user is looking for. Read more

MegaReader Update Redefines What Multitasking Is

For those completely obsessed iPhone users who literally cannot take their eyes off the phone there is a new app made for you; MegaReader. In it’s latest update (version 2.1) it’s developers have added a feature that allows you to experience real life multitasking by reading and walking at the same time so that you never have to take your eyes off your iPhone again!

All it does is overlay the text on a live video feed of what’s in front of the phone and is similar to the Samsung Galaxy app that allows you to text and walk and the iPhone app Email ‘n Walk, which as the name suggests overlays an email client over the live video feed!

Click through to see MegaReader’s developers demonstrate the new feature to its full potential!

Read more

Apple Enters $3.9 Billion Dollar Component Supply Deal

At Apple’s financial report yesterday there was an interesting revelation by Tim Cook that Apple had recently begun entering agreements with suppliers of key components. The agreement is presumed to be around $3.9 billion dollars and would secure the key strategic resources used in Apple’s products going into the future and there are suggestions it’s for high resolution displays.

As to what components are being secured, Cook didn’t elaborate but did say the deals were similar in nature to the flash memory deals of late 2005. That deal, and subsequent deals around flash memory secured supply for many of Apple’s portable devices including the iPhone and more recently the iPad.

Read more

Also in iOS 4.3: “Find My Friends”, iPad 2 Camera Files

iOS 4.3 looks like the beta OS that keeps on giving. We’ve already seen how the new OS contains gestures that hint at deeper multi-touch capabilities for iOS devices, and new camera effects that suggest software like Photo Booth may come to the iPhone or iPad. References of new iPhone and iPad models were also found in iOS 4.3.

A new feature called “Find My Friends”, discovered by MacRumors, points to a new social networking system based on geo-location and tied to MobileMe. Such a service – again, basing only on the name – may allow users to check on friends’ location like Google Latitude or Loopt. We have seen Apple experimenting with location and social patents before; a new functionality in iOS 4.3 like “Find My Friends” would be great to let nearby iPhone users communicate with each other while using the MobileMe infrastructure. Read more

iOS 4.3 To Introduce New Camera Effects?

According to Italian blog iSpazio, the iOS 4.3 firmware file includes some references to new effects that could be implemented in the native Camera app. By taking a look at an info.plist file, iSpazio found out that there are mentions of new effects such as X-Ray, kaleidoscope, light tunnel, compress and thermic camera.

It is unclear whether these new effects will be part of the actual Camera app or a video chat application Apple might introduce in the future, as they sound really similar to distortion and color manipulation effects already present in Apple’s iChat and Photo Booth for Mac.

Could this be a hint at iChat for iOS coming in the next months, or more features in Camera.app?