While you’re dipping into your pockets for holiday fare, we give you full permission to indulge yourself and spoil your inner iNerd. There are plenty of hardware accessories and other iProduct modifications you can add to your phones, tablets and MP3 players, but we’ve selected ten of the best — and geekiest — to make your life easier. Whether you spend most of your time making movies, playing videogames, or collecting vinyl, there’s an iPhone, iPad, or iPod mod for you. Take your shopping cart for a spin past the break. Read More »
Yesterday we shared an iPhone add-on that turned your cell into a vintage camera. While you’re still busy drooling over that, check out Devin Ward’s vintage radio hacks. The Los Angeles electrician takes tube-amp radios and replaces the original wiring with new electronics and a speaker — basically leaving you with a swanky-looking shell that you can plug your iPod, iPhone, or other iDevice into. You can read more about the technical fine print on his Etsy page, where he sells the rehabbed radios for around 200 bucks each. Whet your vintage whistle, below. Read More »
Looking like a cross between an old timey film camera and an Optometry gadget (or torture device, depending on where you stand with visits to the eye doc) is the iPhone Lens Dial. The arcane-looking device allows you to rotate its disc and employ three different lenses: a 0.33x Fisheye, a 1.5x Telephoto, and a 0.7x Wide Angle. The warped, wide, and zoom-tastic lenses are made with optical-quality coated glass and are contained in aircraft-grade aluminum that has two tripod mounts for portrait or landscape shots. With a $250 price tag, serious photogs probably need only apply for this one. Weekend warriors might opt for this $50 version. Take a closer look at the Steampunk-friendly iPhone attachment past the break. Read More »
Before Instagram stole Hipstamatic’s thunder, the iPhone app was the preferred retro photo program. Now the company is trying to win back some of our love by creating a disposable camera — but one that actually won’t make you feel lonely while shoegazing at the one hour photo counter. The Hipstamatic D-Series will prevent you from seeing your photos until you finish 24 shots on the “roll.” Lucas Buick — founder of Hipstamatic — is excited about the new app, even if you’re still unsure about it. “It really is a completely different way to experience photography that a lot of people have forgotten about, but it wasn’t so long ago that people don’t remember it, and that’s the key,” he said. The “disposable” cam will definitely be the preferred choice for those who can’t afford something like a Lomography camera, but still want that sometimes frustrating experience of snapping a good old fashioned photo. Even if the program seems somewhat ridiculous to you, it’ll be free to try when the app is rolled out later this month. Will you be downloading this one, or pass on it altogether?
One of the main reasons that we’ve yet to make the big switch over to an iPad or Kindle yet is that we happen to adore the way books look sitting on our shelves after we’re done reading them. The inbook Charging Station, which we just spotted over on Swiss Miss, offers an interesting answer to our design crisis; their docking stations, which are compatible with iPods and iPhones (iPod/nano/touch, iPhone 3G, 3GS & iPhone 4G), are made using one-of-a-kind vintage books. Click through to take a look at just a few of the options (we’re partial to the Winnie the Pooh pictured here), and head over to their Etsy shop if you like them as much as we do!
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Well, multimedia artist Evan Roth certainly thinks so. Kottke clued us in to his newest project, a series of ‘multi-touch finger paintings’ that he calls Open Twitter, Check Twitter, Close Twitter. To create them, he places tracing paper of the screen of his iPhone and then, well, checks Twitter with an inked finger. The series has one painting for each day in September, which seems to us to be a very reserved number of times to check Twitter. If the little blue bird’s not your thing, however, Roth has other finger paintings in the same vein, such as Slide to Un-lock, Sent from a device with tiny keys, and Launch Mail. Read Mail. Close Mail. all of which are pretty much self-explanatory. The kicker is, these tiny paintings are all actually kind of beautiful, the thumbprints humanizing the black and white globs that look for all the world like tiny Rorschach tests of the digital age. Click through to see some of Roth’s iPhone finger painting, and then head over to his website for even more.
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It might be a generalization to say that most people who prefer Apple products are creative, design-minded types, but in our experience, they are. So it only makes sense that if you’re the proud owner of an iPhone, you want the place it calls home to be just as aesthetically pleasing as the precious cargo that it’s holding. After the jump we’ve rounded up 10 of the most interesting iPhone dock options on the market; as always, be sure to leave links to anything that you’ve recently spotted in the comments.
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Last week we heard the interesting news that Oldboy filmmaker Park Chan-Wook had completed work on a new short called “Paranmanjang” (or “Night Fishing”) that was shot entirely on an iPhone 4. Now, thanks to our friends at Cinematical, you can check out a trailer for the film, which will play in next month’s Berlin International Film Festival, along with a behind-the-scenes feature on the unique filmmaking process.
“It would seem as if Park approached the gig as a fun way to challenge and further his mastery of light and color — either that, or because some sucker bet him that he couldn’t make the image of a woman shaking a fishing rod while cawing like a seagull utterly terrifying (spoiler alert: he could),” writes Cinematical’s David Ehrlich. “The footage is inevitably kissed with a digital sheen inherent to the phone on which it was shot, but the rich dynamics of the images suggest that this is the result of some serious skill.” Click through and let us know in the comments if you’re as surprised by the outcome as we are.
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1. Christopher Nolan is looking to cast two major female roles in The Dark Knight Rises — a villain and a love interest. Among the actresses who are scheduled to test: Keira Knightley, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Biel, and Kate Mara. [via Heat Vision]
2. MySpace has officially begun the process of laying off around 500 people, but according to an anonymous tipster, the company worked them like dogs in recent weeks on a secret spin-off project called “Burn.” [via Gawker]
3. Sorry, AT&T. It’s not just the iPhone; Verizon will also get an embedded chip in the iPad for use on its network. Do you think Jon Stewart will be excited about that, too? [via BusinessWeek]
4. If you count the large number of people who DVR his show, Conan O’Brien is ruling late night TV among the under 50 set. Also interesting: The average age of Conan’s audience is 33, while Jon Stewart’s is 42, and Dave and Jay are 56.[via Vulture]
5. Just what the world needs: It’s the Kate Middleton and Prince William love story in comic book form, and it’s due out just in time for their wedding in April. [via Jezebel]
Bonus link: 22 Most Depressing Movie Couples
Pop artist David Hockney’s use of the iPhone and iPad to make drawings of flowers and sunrises that he shares with his pals has been widely publicized over the past two years, but our friends at ARTINFO.com recently reported that Hockney’s whimsical works can now be seen in a Paris exhibition, titled Fleurs Fraîches (Fresh Flowers). “The British artist achieves stunning effects of texture and light on the iPad,” writes AI’s Grégory Picard about the show. “The iPhone images, while less detailed and more stylized, also present intriguing explorations of color and line.”
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