So says Ecamm who showed this little bugger at Macworld. George saw it and says the video and audio are pretty good. And if you plug in a little dongle, you can increase the bluetooth range to 100 feet. Standard 640×480 H.264 video with 48 kHz AAC stereo audio and a promised four hours of talk time. Looks like it’s about the size of a deck of playing cards.
Category Archives: Gadgets & Apps
iLife ’09
Of all the things I enjoy doing on the computer, messing with images (still and video) has to be near the top of the list. You’ve heard me and others talk about how the Mac –or, more accurately, the software running on a Mac– makes working with media easier and more fun.
Today at Macworld, Apple made a number of announcements, as they do every year, including a new version of iLife, the suite of applications for working with photos, movies, music, etc.
The brief video tours of iPhoto and iMovie illustrate why we Mac users get so excited we pee our pants. My copy is on the way.
Gmail users can view PDFs
I hate clicking a link and discover it’s to a PDF file and Acrobat Reader begins its torturous load. Or a PDF comes as an attachment to an email and I just want to quickly peek at the document. That hasn’t been a problem since moving to Mac.
And now Gmail users can view a PDF file without downloading it, thanks to a new “View” link. Clicking “View” quickly opens the PDF inside your browser, complete with the graphics and formatting you expect to see in a PDF.
When I’m asked, “Why do you like Gmail better than Outlook?” I struggle to give them a useful answer. It’s really a hundred little things like the feature above.
IowaScanStream.com
Kudos to the folks behind IowaScanStream.com (“Streaming the Iowa Public Safety Bands to the World”). They didn’t stop with streaming audio (on USTREAM) of radio call traffic from the Des Moines police and fire departments. That’s just the old broadcast model, taken to the web.
They added a Twitter feed, manned by someone with a sense of humor (as much as good taste allows). Here are the tweets from the last couple of hours. I flagged a couple of my favorites.
“Police cautiously en route.”
No idea what the business model is, or if there is one. Or how many people they have manning the scanners. Most of us don’t have time to listen but we can follow the madcap murder and mayhem thanks to IowaScanStream.com.
Flip HD
If you’d like to see/hear a side-by-side comparison, I’ve put both videos on this page. The first thing that jumps out at me is how much better the audio is on the Casio, even though it’s using a built-in mic like the Flip. And I think the quality of the video is a little better but that could be a function of how the two device encode for YouTube.
If you want to see the original, uncompressed video from the Flip, you can download the first 30 seconds (35 MB!). It’s not bad. NYT tech columnist David Pogue likes it, too. According to Pure Digital, (the makers of the Flip?) the little camera has 30% of the camcorder market.