Daily Archives: December 30, 2009

Gorillacam Brings Timers, Burst, and More Extra Features to Your iPhone’s Camera [Downloads]

Posted on December 30, 2009
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iPhone only: The iPhone’s built-in camera is capable, but its features (or lack thereof) aren’t exactly electrifying. Gorillacam adds all the tools you wish the default Camera app had and then some, including timed shots, time-lapse, burst mode, and more.

If you've ever watched the perfect shot pass you by because you're stuck waiting for the last photo you took to save to the Camera Roll, then you'll love Gorillacam's Auto-Save—it works in the background to save pictures while you keep taking more. If you want to take your pics at set intervals anywhere from one second to two minutes apart, then fire up the Time-Lapse feature. Alternatively, you could use 3-Shot Burst to take three rapid-fire pics in succession.

Gorillacam’s got enough features right there to make this free app well worth the download, but Gorillacam does even more. A countdown timer lets you take self-portraits, and Grid Overlay helps you line up and compose shots like a pro. Add to that a shot-leveler and a toggle that turns the whole screen into a shutter button and you’ve got yourself a must-have app to enhance your iPhone’s camera.

Gorillacam comes from the same company that brought you this awesome mobile phone tripod and the classic Gorillapod, and the app really goes to the heart of several missing features in the iPhone’s camera app. What dream feature would make your phone’s camera perfect? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Gorillacam [Joby]






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Shrink Pic Resizes Images Automagically for Faster Uploads [Downloads]

Posted on December 30, 2009
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Windows only: Image resizing tools are a dime a dozen, but free utility Shrink Pic is actually an extremely clever original: Instead of requiring manual processing, it runs in the background and automatically resizes images whenever you attach or upload them.

A perfect tool for frequent Facebook uploaders, for example, Shrink Pic works with a number of applications (most browsers, Outlook, Thunderbird, Skype, and MSN Messenger, to name just a few) to monitor when you upload, attach, or send pictures via IM. When you do, it automatically resizes the images in the background based on user-defined settings, then uploads the smaller image (so you don’t have to wait several minutes for an upload to complete just to have it severely compressed at its destination anyway). It can even resize multiple photos in the same upload. The speed at which it resizes and the quality of the compression are nothing to sneeze at, either.

Shrink Pic saves the resized images in a temporary directory, so your originals are never touched—just copied. You can use any kind of compression level you want, as well as choose from 5 different photo types to check for. If you want to disable it, all you need to do is uncheck an option in your system tray—and re-enabling it is just as easy. You can even install a portable version to a USB drive, so you never have to resize images again—not even at other computers.

Shrink Pic is a free download, Windows only.






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Google City Tours Adds Walking Directions, Custom Maps [Travel]

Posted on December 30, 2009
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Six months after launching City Tours in Labs, Google’s Maps team has tweaked the interface and made it more friendly to how people actually vacation: head to a city, pick places to go, and get precise directions to them.

At launch, City Tours did a decent job of knowing neat places to go inside a city, and even knew (sometimes) when they were open and what they cost. All it did for the traveler, though, was tell you how far apart those destinations were. Now City Tours includes detailed walking directions in your itinerary. And if you’re a My Maps nerd who’s picked out spots to visit on your own, you can import it and lay those map points over the cities that Google has picked out, so you get a mix of suggestions and pre-picked favorites.

There’s more to the latest upgrade, detailed at the blog post below. Have you used City Tours for a real, honest-to-goodness vacation? Tell us what works, and what you needed to DIY, in the comments.






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Use Google Suggest to Find Software Alternatives [Search Techniques]

Posted on December 30, 2009
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You’ve got a file that needs opening, or a piece of software that, frankly, sucks. Want to find a better, or maybe free, alternative? One reader has found Google’s auto-completing “Suggest” feature a great recommendation engine.

We’ll let reader Alex tell the tale himself:

Mainly, this tip is for when you’re looking for a list of products that all fall into a single category. All you have to do is type a single example of the product, followed by ” vs”, and you’ll get a pretty exhaustive list of alternatives.

For instance, let’s say you’re looking for new text editors. The one you’re familiar with is notepad++. Go to the Google home page and type: “notepad++ vs” and wait a moment. The auto-complete will pop up with a list:

Textpad
Notepad2
UltraEdit
PSPad
Programmer’s Notepad

… There—you now have a list of further research topics. For a slightly bigger list you can pick one of your results and repeat the process – In this case, type "jedit vs". I recently used this in a quest to find a self-hosted equivalent of github that would host some of my code. "github vs" gave me a much larger number of products to research than any single web page had been able to provide me.

As Alex further notes, this system is sometimes better than even the Wikipedia pages that are just giant lists of software compared by features, since those pages are often subject to bias on the part of the selective crew of Wikipedia editors.

Know another search project that the Google Suggest box is perfect for? Tell us in the comments.






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Notepad GNU Boosts Basic Text Editing on Windows [Downloads]

Posted on December 30, 2009
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Windows: What’s the most popular and powerful editor on Windows among text aficionados? Notepad++, by a hefty margin. Want something a smidge less menu-rich and, well, different? Notepad GNU is a very clever, open source alternative.

Notepad GNU has a lot to recommend on its own, including optional background transparency, loads of HTML and other code-minded plug-ins, a menu that can quickly send a file to a browser or other app (even Notepad++), and all the text tweaking tools you need without the Office integration nonsense you don't. It doesn't offer everything that Notepad++ does, but that's kind of the point—it's a different layout and setup, and one newcomers might find pretty useful.

The one drawback, for English speaking users at least, is the hit-and-miss translation of some of Notepad GNU's more obscure features. You'll be able to grope your way around in the linguistic dark, most likely, but if you speak Russian and like the app, by all means—offer to help with the translation.

Notepad GNU is a free download for Windows systems only. It comes packaged in a RAR container, oddly enough—you can easily unpack it for free using 7-Zip.






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