I'm always amazed by all the novel uses of the camera on iOS devices — from taking your pulse to helping those who are colorblind determine colors — and wrote an article about that in a recent issue of the magazine. And I just received a press release for another. CaMeasure lets you use your camera to measure size or distance. It does this in one of two ways. For smaller objects such as furniture, the app asks you to put an object of known size, such as a sheet of paper or a credit card, by the object.
Hanover, Germany - Apps4Cams today is pleased to announce that their first app, CaMeasure, is now available exclusively for iPhone / iPod touch. CaMeasure uses the iPhone camera to make highly accurate size measurements of arbitrary objects at the ease of a few touches.
"Unlike other apps of its kind, CaMeasure unites three key virtues of iPhone Applications." said Dr. Andreas Haja, founder of Apps4Cams. "It is highly useful in everyday life, has a beautiful design with rich animation and is simply fun to use!"
There are some 6,500 camera apps, and a recent column by David Pogue points you to the best. These apps, most of which are free or low cost, can transform the iPhone's mediocre camera into a useful tool. He covers apps that you simply use in place of the iPhone's Camera app and give you much better quality. For example, the many features of Camera+ ($1.99) include image stabilization.
You can get the gory details from the attached press release or watch the video, but suffice to say you will be able to easily transfer photos from your camera to your iPad or iPhone now directly (without a separate AP, see my Eye-Fi Connect X2 review here). Original Eye-Fi owners can upgrade their card's firmware free to get Direct Mode as well... read on for the full scoop on Direct Mode and the newly released Mobile X2 card...
We usually write about products you can buy, but the iPhone4 Photography Kit is a concept that's on the drawing board, waiting for your support at Kickstarter.com. The kit is a slider case in three parts, plus an optional neckstrap. The left and right parts slide together and are sealed by a locking ring. The end result looks like a digital SLR with the ring resembling the camera lens. Actual photos are still taken with the iPhone 4's built-in camera. White and black are planned with potentially five additional colors if the project takes off.
TidBITS has a good overview of the Macworld Expo and the coolest products, a number of them related to iOS. They highlight Movie Stiller, which I missed at the show and which sounds like an essential app if you use your phone for shooting video. If you have a shaky hand (and it's almost impossible to hold a camera still without a tripod), Movie Stiller can take any movie in your iPhone library and apply image stabilization to it.
The range of creative and practical apps that use the camera in unusual ways is astonishing. Who would have thought that you could use it as a heart rate monitor or a business card reader? There's even an app for those who are colorblind, to show them the colors present in any object you photograph.
Apple made a brilliant decision when it let developers create apps that access the camera input and use it in non-traditional ways. In this month's column, I offer a roundup of some of these apps.
Remember the fiasco when Tap Tap Tap added undisclosed functionality to their wildly popular Camera+ app? Apple learned of this and removed the app from the app store. What was this functionality? The ability to override the volume buttons to use them as a shutter button. It's a great idea, because touching the touchscreen can wiggle the camera ever so slightly, messing up the shot.
This year, I received a new Canon PowerShot SD1400 IS camera, which has a better zoom and focus for close-up gadget shots than my current camera. I was also able to test out the Eye-Fi Connect X2 SDHC wireless storage card. My old HP was not compatible with it, but the SD1400 works great. If you are looking for a way to share pix on-line from your existing P&S camera (or even from your iPhone), then read on...
Here are two photo related things I wanted to share that I really enjoy using with the pad. I also get a lot of use out of these. Besides using these for some of my personal images, I use it all the time for choosing and editing my blog photos.
The iPad Camera Connection Kit. $29.00
We already know about this as the product is not new, but I use the SD card reader frequently to pull in my images from our camera. I like that I can also delete the images from the memory card then and there after the import (if I want).
