iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

New Podcast: Apple Spring Buyer’s Guide 2023, Yellow iPhone 14 & Apps for Learning Guitar

(Sponsored Post) By Austin Durr on Thu, 03/16/2023

You may know iPhone Life for the magazine and website that help anyone master their Apple devices. But did you know about the monthly podcasts that you can enjoy on the go? The iPhone Life Podcast covers apps, gear, and how-tos. The hosts are CEO and Publisher David Averbach and Editor in Chief Donna Cleveland. Needless to say, they are pros on all things Apple. Tune in to benefit from all their valuable tips; subscribe to the podcast today!

Summertime is vacation time. And if you use campgrounds when you're vacationing, you'll want to check out Woodall’s RV & Camping Copilot (free). It lists more than 12,000 private and public campgrounds and RV parks in the United States and Canada, plus Mexico. It offers campground information, including amenities, services, types of campsites, on-site recreation, as well as identifying many camping discounts offered at parks. Private campgrounds also include Woodall's 5W/5W Rating System.

In my humble opinion the term “adventure game” has become too broad these days.  I see some sites even try to classify an FPS as an adventure game.  To me it is games like the King’s Quest series from Sierra or Zork from Infocom that defines the adventure game genre.  Games that require you to really explore your surroundings, solve many puzzles, and quite often interact with dozens of non-player characters in more than just a “pardon me while I shoot you” capacity.  Cryptic Keep certainly strives for the feel of the classics, though the distinct lack of NPCs and very little story save snippets at the beginning and the end make it feel more like Myst than a true adventure game.  Still, I appreciate that developers are trying to reinvigorate the genre, and it was fun while it lasted.

(Beware: highly technical article! If you aren't a programmer and/or don't want to see how my backup / restore algorithm works, step right to the last two chapters, starting with "Important note for 3G S users"!)

I've made a lot of pretty advanced resolution tests today to find out the effective (real) resolution of my iPhone 4 and 3G S hacks and enhancements.

For this, I've used the well-known ISO 12233 resolution chart available HERE for printing / ordering. Please read THIS (additional info in THIS / THIS / THIS article) in order to be able to correctly understand how the frame grabs should be evaluated.
Having dug deep into the configuration files and the video “hacking” of the iPhone 3G S (see my yesterday's post HERE [beware, it's quite technical and mostly meant for advanced users / programmers]; I'll also very soon post a full all-in-one 3G S article for beginners), I've found the „1080p” settings I've used there applicable to the iPhone 4 too – in addition to the default (here: true HD with full frame rate, near field-of-view and bad low-light performance) and the full sensor (high-resolution video with great low-light performance and, on the iPhone 4, greatly widened field-of-view but severely reduced frame rate).

I've just uploaded version 1.4 of my free(!), open-source(!) iPhone 3G S video recorder enhancer tool to Cydia. As usual, add the repository „http://www.winmobiletech.com/cy” or „http://winmobiletech.com/cy” to your Cydia client and download the new version from my repository. When the development is finally finished, I'll make the two programs be available in traditional Cydia repositories so that you don't need to access it from my private repository.

Main changes in this version:

(Note that this article, as with most of my stuff, shows you not only how the camera can be reconfigured, but also shows you - how you can play back a YouTube video frame-by-frame; - how you can create and upload packages to your Cydia [an alternative to Apple's AppStore] repository and, last but definitely not least, gives you a full source-level explanation of the entire app that I've written to quickly switch between the different iPhone4 camera configurations. No one has released anything similar for the iPhone 4 or the iPhone 3GS [for which I'll also release a very similar utility in a few days] before!)

In my ongoing series on novel uses of the iPhone and iPad camera, here's yet another: an app that lets you take a picture of a leaf and then gives you information about what type of tree it as. Leafsnap (free) returns the likely species name, as well high-resolution photographs of and information about the tree's leaves, flowers, fruit, seeds, and bark. The app was funded by a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation and was developed by the Smithsonian Institution, University of Maryland, and Columbia University.

Otarine.  Latrine.  Ratline.  Taurine.  Reliant.  What do all of these words have in common (besides being seven letters long)?  Well, if you are a fan of the latest craze of crossword puzzle games, then these are all words you are going to want to commit to memory.  Most of you are probably familiar with the classic board game, Scrabble.   Up to four players can participate in a game, which starts with an assortment of lettered tiles being distributed to each player.   The tiles are each assigned a number value, which denotes the number of points you will receive for using it to form a word.  Earn point

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.

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