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How to Use An iPhone and a DIY IR Trigger to Control Your DSLR

Camera junkies rejoice! The iPhone Guru has a neat little DIY post on how to create a homemade IR trigger capable of firing your DSLR camera from a couple dollars worth of parts. He also shows you how to use DSLR.bot (an iPhone app) to trigger your camera, record GPS locations, and shoot time lapse sequences.

Matthew makes note that the reason he’s doing this and not buying a branded IR or cabled remote is this:

DSLR.bot app has some pretty compelling features that allow you to do GPS tagging with a Map Log and synchronized timing that you can then merge with your image data to create Geo-located images shot with your DSLR among some other nice features like HDR bracketing, time lapse shooting and an Intervalometer. It will do far more than even Canon’s $120 timer remote will do and the whole thing will cost you less than $20.

Video and more pictures after the break… Read more

Google Launches Google TV Remote for iPhone

Google TV Remote for iOS Preview

Google TV Remote for iOS Preview

For the few of you who may own a Google TV enabled device (or a TV such as the Sony Internet TV), your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad can now power your futuristic format thanks to the new Google TV Remote app. It’s chock full of glorious soft buttons that could take the Logitech Harmony to task, and includes Voice Search so you can quickly search for content using your iPhone’s microphone. Multiple Google TV Remotes can work over the same network as well, meaning anyone who has an iOS (or Android) enabled device can browse the television right from their lap. The app is free to download from the App Store, and we’ve included a quick video of the Android version below: the experiences are very similar (the iPhone can’t push webpages to their Google TV, however).

[via The Official Google TV Blog]

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AT&T Slashes Price Of Original iPad 3G by $100→

AT&T Slashes Price Of Original iPad 3G by $100

The press release isn’t available yet in AT&T’s news room, but Jim Dalrymple at The Loop reports:

AT&T on Friday slashed the price of the original iPad 3G by $100 throughout its U.S. retail stores.

The iPad 3G now costs $429, $529 and $629 for the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models, respectively.

The change is only for AT&T retail stores for now as the Apple online store still reports the old (already slashed) prices for the iPad 1. This sounds like a clever move for AT&T to get rid of stock now that the iPad 2 is available, and very hard to find this week. Perhaps some users will settle with an original iPad 3G at the lower price point.

Earlier this week, we reported several original iPad owners on AT&T experienced issues when trying to migrate their data plan to the iPad 2.

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#MacStoriesDeals - Friday

If you didn’t catch all the deals we had yesterday, here’s a link back to the page. Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

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I Want This Tetris-like Stand For iOS Devices On My Desk

This product will likely never see the light of day on retail stores’ shelves, but it’d be so perfect on my home desk next to my iMac. The Polyply is a multi-device stand designed by Andrew Kim, and it’s made out of acrylic plastic and birch plywood. Realized as a two-week project by Kim to see how such an accessory would fit on an Apple’s fan desk, all parts were cut on a laser cutter. The Polyply could easily keep in place an iPad, an iPhone, and iPod and a stylus. It’s got room to plug in your Apple 30-pin dock connector and it even lowers for a better typing angle.

The design is simple and clean and, in spite of the times, it’d be just right for my desk that is daily cluttered by iPad, iPhone and, yes, an iPod Classic.

Like I said though, this was just an experiment. But I’d be ready to open my wallet if it was a Kickstarter project. [via Cult Of Mac]

Rumor: New MobileMe Launching Next Month

Two weeks ago we reported a rumor from a German blog that claimed Apple was in the process of organizing a media even in April to demo the upcoming major new version of iOS, and the new MobileMe. The new cloud service from Apple, according to several reports surfaced in the past months, is rumored to become free and include a “locker” functionality for media storage like photos, music and videos. Code strings spotted in the early developer betas of iOS 4.3 pointed to a new feature in the works called “MediaStream” that would allow users to broadcast photos and videos through the cloud.

Today iLounge reports the new MobileMe is launching next month, in April, and it will indeed be free. According to the website the new version will be radically different from the existing one, and Apple will keep providing support for subscribers that recently bought a MobileMe subscription for at least a year to ease the transition.

In addition, the source was told that Apple will be supporting the existing version of MobileMe for the next year, suggesting that the new version will be quite different from the existing service; the extra year of support would likely cover those who recently paid for a full year of MobileMe, prior to Apple removing any method through which a user could pay for the service.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs allegedly said in an email to a customer that MobileMe would get a lot better in 2011. Last month, Apple discontinued retail boxes of MobileMe making the services only available for purchase online, with a 60-day free trial. Also last month it was reported that Apple was on schedule to launch its new iTunes and MobileMe services powered by the data center in Maiden, North Carolina this Spring.

Monitoring Space On My Backup Drives with Daisy Disk

I’m serious about backups. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you might have read I recently subscribed to Backblaze for my offsite backups: Backblaze is a service that, starting at $5 per month, can save the contents of your Mac on the service’s remote and secure servers. You can restore at any given time, and access all the service’s functionalities and settings from the preference panel that you can install on your Mac. Combined with Dropbox, Backblaze has become my ideal solution for offsite backups that don’t reside on my local setup, and thus are less likely to be subject to damages and other kinds of problems –  say my home office got robbed, Dropbox and Backblaze wouldn’t be affected by the issue.

But I don’t just rely on online services for my backup needs. For as much as storing files online is convenient and fast enough these days, I’m a strong believer that local, incremental backups on external drives need to be performed at a regular daily schedule. For this reason, I bought an AirPort Extreme station months ago to put to better use the external drives I own: Time Machine backups to an AirPort disk on my local network all the time, other media is automatically copied through Hazel to another disk shared via WiFi. With these shared disks, the extra advantage is that everyone in my house who’s connected to my same network can access media (and backup through Time Machine) whenever they want. On top of that, I’ve got two USB / FireWire 800 drives that I use for SuperDuper – which keeps a bootable copy of my Mac and runs its automated backup session every night. Read more

NFC Technology In iPhones Could Also Enable Remote Computing

According to a source of Cult of Mac, Apple is planning to use Near Field Communication (NFC) not just as a method for retail payment services but also to turn an iPhone into a pseudo-ID tag for remote login. According to Cult of Mac:

…when a NFC-equipped iPhone is paired with a guest machine, part of the user’s profile includes the apps they’ve purchased through the Mac App Store. The icons for their apps appear on the remote Mac, but aren’t downloaded, our source said.

Once the guest machine is logged into; users would be able to open any of their apps, which would download on demand, although presumably only those from the Mac App Store. Documents too could be accessed and synced using MobileMe from anywhere using this remote login system and once a user leaves, the Mac would wipe any documents and applications.

As MacRumors points out, it is similar to the once promised feature of ‘Home on iPod’ that would have allowed OS X Panther users to sync their Home directory on to an iPod for easy document storage regardless of where you were. Cult of Mac claims that this new feature is currently being developed in OS X Lion but their source stresses that it isn’t guaranteed to become public.

[Via Cult of Mac]

Market Share Research Reveals That The Swiss Love Their Macs

The Pingdom blog did a little statistical research using Statcounter to figure out which countries had the highest percentage of Macs and found that Switzerland topped that list with 17.61% market share. Meanwhile Luxembourg, USA, and Iceland were also countries with high Mac market share, all above 15%.

The UK was notably missing from the top 10 whilst as a region, Asia only had an average of 1.61% of market share – a very low figure, but one Apple is likely trying to increase with a recent push into that market with its retail stores. As for the region with the lowest Mac market share, Asia comes close but it is in fact South America, which has only 1.08% market share of Macs.

[Via TUAW]