Barnes & Noble Releases Nook iPhone App

Barnes & Noble has offered an eBook reader for iOS touch for a while. But the company’s eBook strategy was starting to look a bit schizophrenic, with a Nook device available online and in-stores, Nook software for Google Android, but Barnes & Noble eReader-branded software for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Today Barnes & Noble … Read more

Android Video Player for DivX, MKV, more

When it rains it pours. For the first two years of Google Android’s life there weren’t really any all purpose video players for the platform. The built in video player is bundled with Android’s picture viewer and only supports a handful of video formats. But recently RockPlayer launched an excellent video player with support for … Read more

CableCARD Support Coming to SageTV or MythTV?

HTPC enthusiasts, listen up. TheDigitalMediaZone broke some pretty exciting news Sunday afternoon. The first of this is important to SageTV, MythTV and many other HTPC software users because it partially opens up CableCARD to non-Microsoft MediaCenter software. I’ve been hearing talk of this for a while from different people, so it’s not a total surprise … Read more

Adobe Updates Photoshop for the iPad

There may be a thousand photo editing apps today, but I still have a nostalgic fondness for Adobe’s Photoshop. So when I heard the Photoshop mobile app had been updated for the iPad, I had to give it a whirl.

Now dubbed Photoshop Express, the new iPad app is both simple and, unfortunately, simplistic. It’s hard not to love the iPad as a photo editing platform because the display is beautifully large and there’s room to really work with your images. However, the Photoshop app doesn’t give you a whole lot to play with. There are no sophisticated tools like layers, Dodge and Burn, or the Clone Stamp. Instead, Photoshop Express sticks with the basics like color tinting, borders, contrast adjustment, and image cropping. It’s also missing a red-eye-removal tool,which, as far as I’m concerned, should be in every photo editing software.

Read more

Eye-Fi Center Makes Photo Sharing Easy

I am a big fan of the Eye-Fi card, and have had my 2GB SD version (i.e. photos, no video) for two and a half years. However, I rarely if ever used the old Eye-Fi Manager software, and over the last few months I’ve been without Eye-Fi wireless transfers altogether thanks to a PC migration, and general laziness on my part. Then last week I got a notice from the company that they’re discontinuing the old Eye-Fi Manager, and replacing it with new Eye-Fi Center software. The shift finally prompted me to set up Eye-Fi on the new computer and give the updated management portal a try.

The Eye-Fi Center has a clean, simple interface showing thumbnails of recently uploaded photos at the top, a list of connected devices along with a calendar to the left, a photo tray for sharing pics at the bottom, and a big preview screen taking up most of the display. There’s also a settings menu available with tabs for network selection, photo storage options, notifications, geotagging, and photo transfer preferences.

Stuff I Like:

Read more

Windows Phone 7: No HTML5 or Flash at Launch

Windows Phone 7 may be Microsoft’s vision of the future of smartphone operating systems… but it’s certainly looking more and more like a device that’s stuck in 2007. We already knew Windows Phone 7 would ship without copy and paste functionality and with limited multitasking support. Now it looks like the WP7 web browser won’t … Read more

Android RockPlayer Now Suppotrs DivX & MKV

RockPlayer is the holy grail of video players for Google Android. It’s an app that can handle virtually any video format you can throw at it — provided the video isn’t wrapped up in DRM copy protection. I took RockPlayer for a test drive while it was still in beta, but now the developer has released … Read more

Now You Can Read Along with Me on Your Phone

When I was a kid, I had a large and awesome collection of storybook records. You know – those short illustrated stories that came with a 45-RPM record and the charming sound effect of a chime that let you know when to turn the pages in your book. (Yes, I realize I’m dating myself.) Surprisingly, … Read more