Simulate Long Exposures With Magic Shutter

As the iPhone becomes just about everyone’s photographic tool of choice, developers keep inventing new ways to utilize our pocket devices in the same ways we would our DSLRs. Magic Shutter continues the trend of simply beautiful iPhone apps by simulating long exposures. Ever wanted to dabble with light photography or take one of those common but still cool blurry freeway pics? Magic Shutter allows you to blur images to achieve neat effects (suddenly that 10mph vehicle looks very fast) thanks to Flash mode and Light-painting mode. You already have an idea of the latter, but Flash mode takes a still object and records video post or pre-tail, ensuring you’ll get nifty effects for roller-coaster shots or your next NASCAR outtakes. Magic Shutter is $3 from the iTunes App Store, and makes a perfect gift for the photography buff in your family.

[Magic Shutter via Wired]

BusyToDo Syncs Tasks Through iCal & MobileMe

If you happen to live buried in a desktop calendar like BusyCal, assumedly it’s become your central hub for tracking the waterfall of meetings and seemingly endless to-do’s that direct your daily actions. Being mobile, we hate being tethered to our desktops or using clunky software on our phones when tasks could be simplified: BusyToDo from BusyMac free’s iCal’s To Do list and keeps your personal agenda synced across the cloud with MobileMe. Push notifications may remind you via any alarms you’ve set, and BusyToDo will update in the background as you move to other applications on your iPhone. Whether it’s checking off URLs, adding new items for next week’s agenda, or simply looking for the perfect mobile companion for BusyCal, BusyToDo is a brand new release that’s launched for $5 on the iTunes App Store.

[BusyToDo via Macworld]

NPR Calls Ping One of “The Worst Ideas Of 2010”

In spite of Apple’s numerous attempts to inject new features and 3rd party online integrations in it, Ping is struggling to take off. Not only does the service seem useless and too tied to iTunes to many, several publications are also calling it one of the biggest flops of 2010.

You can now add NPR to the list of Ping non-fans, as they have named Apple’s social network for music one of the “worst ideas of 2010”. Ouch.

The most popular services — the Facebooks, Twitters and MySpaces of the world — allow users to share links, thoughts, ideas, photos and music to connect with each other. Ping, run through iTunes, was supposed to be an evolution in musical connection. But iTunes, being a self-contained fortress requiring endless software upgrades and with more than a few frustrating quirks, isn’t conducive to the type of sharing Web-based networks enjoy across a variety of devices. I can access all three of the aforementioned sites from my Android phone, and I have a variety of apps that allow me to seamlessly integrate these applications into my life. To use Ping, I would have to be tethered to my iMac.

NPR also notes that Ping is a “weakened” version of Twitter only meant to drive sales to the iTunes Store. Looking at artists’ profiles and the messages they share on Ping, it’s not difficult to understand NPR’s position. Perhaps their hammer went down a little too hard on Apple’s new service, though? Sure Ping is not a massive hit, but it has room to grow.

As it stands right now, Apple wants its users to believe in Ping. The problem is, people sometimes don’t want to wait for things to get better. Here’s to hoping Ping will get insanely better in 2011.

Occipital Showcases Gyroscope Support In MobileSafari

360 Panorama is a neat iPhone app by Occipital which, thanks to some cool augmented reality features such as a real-time on screen grid view, allows you to take panoramic photos on your iPhone. We reviewed the app here, and you can go grab it here.

Today the Occipital developers are launching a brand new version of their panoramic browser for pictures shared online. The new browser, when used on MobileSafari for iPhone running on iOS 4.2, takes advantage of Apple’s gyroscope to let you move panoramas around by just holding your device upright. Once you load a link like this one, Occipital’s browser will detect the device running iOS 4.2 and will ask you to hold your iPhone upright if you want to use gyroscope. Otherwise, you’ll just be able to swipe to view the entire panorama.

Gyroscope support enables you to move the iPhone around to view the entire content of a webpage, and it works really well. When iOS 4.2 came out in November, developers noted that MobileSafari received new features such as improved HTML5 support and “accelerometer integration”. The benefits of augmented reality apps using the gyroscope instead of a compass were also showcased in July.

AirPlay Hacks: XBMC on Linux, AVI Live Conversion

Missed Erica Sadun’s latest AirPlay hack yesterday? It’s a new Mac app called AirFlick that allows to send video and URLs (say, from Youtube.com) from OS X to the Apple TV without needing to load a file from iTunes. It’s a standalone app that can send video files through AirPlay to an Apple TV 2nd gen running on your local network. Together with AirPlayer (which allows you to send videos and photos via AirPlay to a Mac), it’s another great hack from Erica Sadun.

It turns out, anyway, that AirFlick can do a lot more than “simply” allowing you to send video from OS X to the Apple TV. First, TUAW reader BC managed to stream with AirPlay .avi files using Air Video Server’s live conversion system, by copying the URL of AVS’ m3u8 playlist and paste it in AirFlick. It requires some serious Terminal skills, but it’s possible. Read more

First AirPlay Speaker From JBL Surfaces Online

When Apple announced AirPlay, it also confirmed that several AirPlay-enabled third party speakers would come out for consumers to use in conjunction with iPhones and iPads without the need of setting up a wireless system based on AirPort Express. Since then, though, those speakers haven’t found their way to the market. Yet. Read more

Confirmed: Instagram Reaches 1 Million Users

We speculated several times in the past about social photo sharing service Instagram (which doesn’t have a website, it only comes as an iPhone app) to have reached and passed the 1 million users milestone, now it’s official. Instagram has gained more than a million users since its original release in early October.

As co-founder of Instagram Kevin Systrom told The New York Times:

Instagram, a social photo-sharing company that opened its shutters to iPhone owners just two months ago, announced Tuesday that it passed a major milestone of 1 million registered users.

“We’ve just been amazed at the growth of the service,” Mr. Systrom said in a phone interview. “My partner and I had a bet the first day about how many downloads we would get and I was off by an order magnitude.”

According to Mr. Systrom, Instagram users are “collectively uploading approximately three photos a second and tens of millions of photos have been shared on the service.”

The past two months have been a great run for Instagram, which launched its iPhone app with only a few selected users who had the privilege to try the app on board. Since then, usage of the service skyrocketed with the developers being busy keeping the servers up and running. The app reached another important milestone when Twitter announced support for Instagram photos in its inline media viewer on Twitter.com. The app also received a few updates to fix bugs and introduce more filters and Posterous integration.

Almost three months after launch and with “just an iPhone app” out in the wild, we think great things will come for Instagram in 2011. One million users is a solid foundation to start with.

Apple Expects Apple TV Sales To Reach 1 Million This Week

Apple just sent out a press release announcing that the company expect Apple TV sales to top one million units later this week. It also announced that iTunes users are now “renting and purchasing over 400,000 TV episodes and over 150,000 movies per day”.

The best part? The Apple TV is not a hobby anymore, but is described by Apple PR as “the perfect iOS accessory”, thanks to AirPlay. That’s quite an evolution.

Press release below. Read more