Posts Tagged "iPad"
Review: TinTac Hoxton messenger bag
Inspired by cockney rhyming slang (TinTac = sack = bag) and the Hoxton area in London, the TinTac Hoxton is designed as an everyday commuter or casual bag. The Hoxton is a casual messenger-style bag that is big enough to carry a 13″ MacBook, but is probably best suited for iPad users.
Design
The bag is made of soft but sturdy canvas and has a very comfortable nylon shoulder strap. The 3 internal compartments and 2 pockets offer plenty of places to pack things and thanks to the bright interior colours, you’ll be able to find your things later as well. The Hoxton is available in beige, grey, green and brown with matching interior fabric colours.
Yay!
The bag is fairly simple – in a good way. There aren’t thousands of internal compartments with subdivisions to get stuff lost in, it’s just a well though out bag for everyday use.
It’s nice and light, so it’s comfortable to wear for long periods of time. It’s also not too bulky and fits easily underneath the seats on a plane or on your lap if you’re on public transport.
A magnet keeps the bag shut and two front slip pockets with headphone cable flaps allow you to get at your music player or phone without digging around inside the bag.
I was afraid the light beige colour option I picked would get dirty easily, but after several weeks of being dragged to Brussels, Hamburg and all around Munich, it still looks great.
Meh…
The overall quality feels very good, however I did notice the zipper on the back compartement came apart once or twice. But since it’s an internal zipper, it’s not a real worry.
Conclusion
I really like this bag. It’s a bit too small for most notebook computers, but in a pinch I can fit my MacBook Air in it. But it’s perfect for an iPad, camera and the other bits and bobs I usally lug around.
It’s more of a “lifestyle” bag than a computer bag, but for those of you that have embraced the iPad way of computing, the TinTac Hoxton is highly recommended.
At £40 / €47 / $60, it’s great value for money and I could see this bag being a popular gift this holiday season.
Review: Eye-Fi Pro | X2
What’s the most annoying part of digital photography? That’s right, fiddling around with the memory card or USB cable to copy your photos to your computer.
Well the Eye-Fi cards promise to have a better solution for copying photos: these cards can transfer your digital snaps wirelessly. Yep – despite being the same size as a normal SD card, an Eye-Fi card can connect to your computer over a wifi network. Let’s take a closer look at the Eye-Fi Pro | X2 – their latest and greatest.
Getting started
You need to download special Eye-Fi software for the initial setup. You connect your Eye-Fi card to the supplied USB adapter and configure it to connect to your existing wireless network, or you can either have it create its own ad-hoc network for when you’re on the move.
Then, just pop the card into your camera and away you go.
How to use the Eye-Fi card
The Eye-Fi card works just like any other fast SD card. Pop it in your camera, take pictures (RAW or JPEG or both) and movies – that’s it.
Once your camera has been on a few seconds, the Eye-Fi card will power up its wireless feature and look for your existing network. Once connected, the special Eye-Fi software on your computer will copy the photos over the air onto your PC or Mac.
If you haven’t got a wireless network nearby, the card can alternatively create its own wireless network. You connect to this network (named something like “Eye-Fi 132456″) and then the copying magic starts.
Performance
Despite having pretty impressive wireless performance, it will take a bit longer to copy the huge files produced by today’s modern cameras over wifi than it would over a USB card reader. However, you can optionally choose to only copy your JPEG images, leaving your RAW copies on the card ready to by copied over USB later.
The software is an Adobe Air app, so it isn’t the best Mac app I’ve ever seen, but overall it isn’t too bad. Once you have your card configured, you won’t need to use it too much anyway. Kudos to Eye-Fi for having a cross-platform solution for us Mac users that works.
Other handy tricks
Geotagging
Certain Eye-Fi cards can also make use of the wireless chip inside to geo-tag your photos. They do this by looking at nearby wifi networks. These are later matched by the Eye-Fi software to a database that knows the geographical location of tonnes of wifi networks around the world and uses that to give your photos a rough geographical location.
It’s not perfect, but it’s usually good enough to help you figure out which side of town you took a particular photo.
Endless Memory
Need to take a ton of pictures? No problem! If you’re on a wifi network, your Eye-Fi card will shove pics over to your computer and free up storage for new pictures, which means you’ll never run out of storage. This is only useful for certain scenarios, but if you need to take a lot of pictures and don’t want to have to switch cards it might come in useful.
Picture uploads
I didn’t test this feature, but Eye-Fi also offers an online storage and sync option, that allows you to share pictures with friends or between devices.
iPad app
One other great feature is the fact that you can use the Eye-Fi card with the free companion iPad app, allowing you to use your iPad as a giant photo preview screen: snap a shot, wait 2 seconds and it shows up on the iPad. I used this feature to turn my iPad and a camera with an Eye-Fi card into a rudimentary homemade wedding photo booth.
Conclusion
If you just need to grab a few photos quickly, the Eye-Fi a great solution. I could see it being particularly useful in scenarios where you’re frequently taking a small number of shots and need to quickly preview them on a larger screen.
The geo-tagging feature is also quite nice and a good alternative to using geo-tagged iPhone pictures as a reference.
The Eye-Fi Pro | X2 does exactly what it claims. The wireless performance is pretty good and it can be a huge timesaver if you often need to preview your pictures in between shots.
Recommended
Read MoreDIY iPad Wedding Photobooth
When we were planning our wedding, we saw lots of wedding photo booth ideas. You can either rent a traditional photo booth, or there are various DIY setups involving digital cameras.
I started thinking and thought it would be cool to have a setup that would allow people to see their snaps rights away, without having to go around to the camera itself. With a DSLR that supports remote control from a laptop, that is fairly easy to set up, but as it turned out, my cameras don’t support remote control over USB. So I started looking into alternatives and soon hit on the idea of using an EyeFi card and my iPad. (A few weeks after I started planning our photo booth, a story popped up on Engadget about a similar, albeit more professional, setup.)
What you’ll need
- A digital camera with remote shutter release (I used the Panasonic GF-1 with a cheap wireless remote shutter release from eBay)
- An EyeFi SD card in the camera (make sure it’s a newer EyeFi card with support for “direct mode”)
- An iPad connected to the EyeFi network running the free EyeFi app
- A tall tripod
- A table or stand of some kind for the iPad
- (optional) A frame, backdrop or props of some kind for guests to pose with
Camera, remote shutter, iPad and EyeFi card
The photo booth setup – the iPad is just off to the side on a table
One of the snaps from the photo booth
Other Tips
- Turn on face recognition if your camera supports it and make sure the autofocus is correctly detecting your guests.
- Turn off any power saving options on the camera and iPad.
- If your setup is indoors, connect the iPad and camera to AC adapters, if possible.
- You’ll need a fairly tall tripod or something to stand it on to get the camera up high enough. Ours was a bit low so I ended up adjusting the perspective using Adobe Lightroom.
- Explain the setup to someone beforehand and ask them to keep an eye on things to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Open iPad GarageBand files on your Mac – a workaround
Update: That didn’t take long! Apple has just released an update for GarageBand on the Mac that officially adds support for iPad projects. It’s 181MB and seems to include add all the software instruments found in the iPad version that were missing
So ignore the workaround below, update GarageBand and you’ll be all set.
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Three things on the iPad that feel rushed
Most people would agree that the iPad is a fantastic 1.0 device. This is of course partly due to the shared iPhone OS heritage, but the overall experience is nonetheless is extremely well-rounded and polished.
But there are a few areas that feel a bit crummy, when compared with the rest of the experience. Considering how many apps Apple had to completely overhaul for the iPad’s presentation in January, it’s no surprise to find a few rough edges, on the otherwise fantastic device.
File syncing
I understand why Apple is hesitant to add any kind of file system to the iPhone OS, but considering how much emphasis was placed on the iPad apps at launch, you would think that they would have come up with an elegant way to get documents on and off your iPad.
Unfortunately, in reality it’s a huge pain. Ted Landau took the time to document all the steps it takes to actually get a document into iWork on your iPad, none of which are particularly intuitive. Plus you then have the hassle of managing revisions and tracking multiple copies of the same file.
The iPhone app SimpleNote and Notational Velocity on the mac show how document sync can be done right. Some apps are also adding Dropbox support, which gives you an idea how file sync in general could be improved. Given the fact that Apple has already done a lot of the hard work by creating the MobileMe and iWork online services, one can only hope that we’ll see seamless, cloud-based file syncing added sooner rather than later.
Safari caching
If you open multiple tabs in safari on your Mac, switching between them is instantaneous. In mobile safari, you can never be sure whether the tab will open immediately, or whether it will need to be reloaded over your wifi or 3G connection. On the wifi-only iPad, where users can’t be sure they’ll always have access to an internet connection, webpage persistance is particularly an issue. The fact that Offline Pages (iTunes link) is currently one of the top free iPad apps in the App Store would seem to underline this point.
Mobile Safari’s limiting caching abilities are most likely due to the limited amount of RAM in the iPad, which has just 256MB, however as Rentzsch has pointed out, it should be possible to offload pages to the solid state drive as a workaround, although it’s not a trivial problem.
Calendar event creation
Making event creation in calendars difficult seems to be one of Apple’s favorite UI slip-ups. The calendar app on the iPad is gorgeously designed and it makes browsing through calendar entries a visual pleasure.
But the interface for adding entries seems to have been cut & paste directly from the iPhone version and doesn’t make any use of the additional screen real estate the iPad offers. You get the impression the designers spent all their time working on the rest of the UI and simply stuck the editing controls in there at the last minute.
Consistency between the two platforms is of course a good thing, provided it doesn’t slow the user down unnecessarily. I would argue that you could better use the iPad’s screen real estate to make a much more efficient and intuitive event creation UI.
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