Best iPhone trick: close-up photos
Was talking to my girl a couple weeks ago about how cool it would be for the iPhone to be able to scan bar codes. Out of the box, it can’t because the camera lens is fixed-focus to about 3ft. The next day, my very clever lady found this on the interwebs:
Griffin lists it for $35, but I found it on Amazon for $20. Works so well with the free Snappr for shopping (try their mobile site!) and Evernote for everything else; one of Evernote’s nifty features is to be able to recognize text in an image, so the Clarifi is great for business cards, or any copy you want to remember without typing.
By the way, it’s a fine hard case, too.
For the snark record, the Clarifi was released mid-October, but it wasn’t til about two weeks after I ordered mine that I started reading about it everywhere. Man, Griffin, way to fill a really big need!
Got the new MacBook
13″. Back-lit keyboard. Now with 4GB RAM. 0.1 lbs. lighter than my 12″ PowerBook.
Oh, it’s so good. I’m more impressed than I have been with any previous model, at the time. Although, now I’m thinking back [cue bubbly dream-sequence transition]…
- 5300cs – 750Mb HD, 256MB RAM – The passive-matrix 256-color screen made it adequate but not special. Certainly a workhorse, but a pre-Jobs/Ive design.
- PowerBook G3 “Pismo” with FireWire – 500MHz, 512MB RAM (I think), 6GB HD – Stellar, with heft that was attractive at the time. DVD drive was so nifty. Airport card. I had the Zip drive that I could swap with the optical drive, which was a nice trick.
- Titanium PowerBook – 800MHz, 1GB RAM, 60GB HD – Ahhh, 10 times more storage, a G4 processor and a huge, bright screen. And so well built. The metal-encrusted TiBook was a major move forward in laptop design.
- 12″ PowerBook – 1.33GHz, 1.25GB RAM, 80GB HD – The fetish Mac. Wished I coulda gone to 2GB. Wished for back-lit keyboard. Wished for brighter screen. Wished for sudden motion sensor. Wished for bigger hard drive. Was able to hack the two-finger scroll. But for all of that, the 12″ is a fantastic unit.
- 15″ MacBook Pro – 2.2GHz, 4GB RAM, 160GB HD – Had to buy it. The 12″ had run its course and wouldn’t run Leopard well. Needed Intel. A rocketship with a bright, beautiful (and matte) display, although I hate to say I’m biased against it because a) it’s heavy and b) its logic board was screwed up from day 1. Having received the 13″, I can finally turn the MBP into AppleCare for the second time. I’m looking forward to getting it back for designing, viewing, and gaming. Also worth noting here that this was the last rev of Apple’s original aluminum laptop design, which had stayed incredibly consistent from January 2003 to October 2008, when the glass-trackpad-and-screen MacBooks were introduced. That’s a long, successful run for a design in this industry.
- 13″ MacBook – 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, 250GB HD – Hewn from a single piece of aluminum, which is hot. LED screen that I can actually make too bright for indoors. User-accessible hard drive (want 7200RPM, but I love this 250GB!), which compensates somewhat for lack of FireWire. One single glass multi-touch trackpad, which my (slight) paunch seems to brush against and prevent good cursor tracking. And two option keys, which means no more key-remapping hacks. I’m officially a fan.
The only non-laptop Mac I’ve ever bought is my Intel Core Duo Mac mini, currently functioning as my media server (with a Drobo) and OS X Server break-and-fix learning box.
DigitalColor Meter
Filing this under: Yet Another Little Utility That Comes with My Mac That I Had Forgotten About…
I’ve needed something like DigitalColor Meter recently to find the hex number for a color to do some quick web-page design, and was surprised that whatever app I was working in made it less than easy to get that measurement.
Here’s a tip page on it.
This is a test of Jott…
This is a test of Jott to my WordPress blog. listen
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