Monthly Archives: July 2010
ClearCam goes legit, will increase image resolution at a price
Filed under: iPhone
ClearCam has been around for a while, and I first took a look at it more than a year ago. It was a clever app that had two modes. One mode took a series of four pictures in rapid succession, and then it saved the best and sharpest one in your photo library; the other mode took six images together and stacked them in order to increase resolution and reduce noise. In practice, it meant that the old 3G 2MP camera became the rough equivalent of a 4MP camera.
The app had been pulled from the App Store for a while — the SDK did not allow access to raw iPhone images (only compressed images), which meant it was impossible to run any enhancement algorithms on the data. The SDK now allows for access to those uncompressed images, iPhone cameras are better, and ClearCam has returned as a regular iPhone app. It runs on the 3GS and the iPhone 4, and it requires iOS 4.
The app is similar to the original version, although now it chooses the best shot out of three instead of four. For the stacking or enhanced mode, it still takes six images and then aligns and processes them.
Prizmo provides optical character recognition on the iPhone
Filed under: iPhone
Prizmo is a popular OCR (optical character recognition) app for the Mac that allows you to scan documents and things like business cards easily and quickly, avoiding the step of typing them in by hand. Now, Creaceed has announced that it’s bringing the app to the iPhone, so you’ll be able to make use of the really powerful OCR software, all on the go using the iPhone’s HD camera as a scanner.
As you can see above, it’s pretty impressive. It’s not just the fact that you can scan for text (I believe there are a few apps, including Evernote, that already allow you to do this), but all of the options that come along with it, including adjusting for brightness and calibrating the scanner.
TUAW’s Daily App: Gravity Hook HD
Semi Secret Software (the same folks behind the amazing Canabalt game for the iPhone) has released its second game for the iOS platform, Gravity Hook HD. I actually heard about this one way back in March, and it was made even before Canabalt was. But this iPhone and iPad release has been updated for HD, and it’s kind of fun. To play, you tap on various hook points in order to send your little guy skyward; you do this while fighting gravity and trying to keep from falling off the bottom of the screen. I can’t say it’s as fun or as simple as Canabalt, but it is colorful and addictive for sure.
Apple ‘looking into’ poor iOS 4 performance on iPhone 3G
Filed under: iPhone
According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is “looking into” reports of iOS 4′s poor performance on the iPhone 3G. Many iPhone 3G users have noted generally slow performance and glitches after installing iOS 4 that have rendered their devices nearly unusable. An Apple spokesperson told the Journal that Apple is aware of the reports and investigating solutions. That Apple is responding to the issue at all is certainly encouraging, but their response has been anything but timely — it’s come only after a month of irate posts on Apple’s support forums, parody videos on YouTube, and widespread reporting on the issue (including here at TUAW).
Some blogs, including us, have noted that iOS 4.1 beta provides better performance on the iPhone 3G. I initially experienced better performance under the beta, but only for a couple days after doing a DFU restore to the beta. Around 48 hours after installing the beta, all the old bugs crept back in: slow keyboard performance, glacial application launch times, app crashes, and random system-wide freezes when using Safari. None of the suggested fixes (some of which border on voodoo) have managed to get iOS 4 working properly on my iPhone 3G. I’ve tried everything short of wiping the phone clean and setting it up as a new phone, mostly because I don’t want to lose my application data, which includes 20+ hours of game progress in Final Fantasy and over a year of food and exercise data in Lose It. (Ed: Ouch!) (Update: a couple people have pointed out that Lose It! can restore data to an iPhone independently of iTunes, an awesome feature I had completely forgotten about. Sadly, that’s a feature not present in any of the 45 games I have on my iPhone.)
For now, our advice for those lucky few who haven’t yet upgraded an iPhone 3G to iOS 4 remains the same: don’t do it. For the rest of you iPhone 3G owners, if you’re an unlucky member of the “iOS 4 turned my iPhone 3G into an iPhone POS” group, things are looking up for you at last thanks to Apple’s official response.
TUAW’s Daily App: Squareball
Filed under: iPhone
Squareball is a weird one; it’s probably best described as a platforming game, except that you move the platforms rather than the jumper. The main character is a little white ball (or square in this case — the game has a retro blocky pixel aesthetic) that constantly floats from top to bottom on the screen, and you can slide (or tilt, according to whatever option you choose) the actual stage around the ball, moving it through various nooks and crannies while trying to “collect” colored blocks.
The concept is tough to explain, but once you see it in action, you’ll understand right away. The goal is to move the stage at the right time in order to keep the ball bouncing around where you want it. It’s actually really fun, despite the simplicity, and over the 20 various stages, there are some pretty clever puzzles. The game also has OpenFeint integration, and the 8-bit music is pretty catchy as well.