The Gadgets Page

Columbia University has developed a fully automatic face swapping system. They describe it here:

I can see this sort of thing being included in iPhoto in the next five years. I especially love the ability to replace one face in a group of people using a few of the photos you’ve taken. I don’t know HOW many times we’ve taken family photos where one (or more) of the kids weren’t quite looking at the camera.

How many times have I thought, “Dangit! If we could use Kristen’s face on this one and Sammie’s face on that one, THEN we’d have the perfect family photo!” With this automatic face swapping techniques, we could easily do that without having to burden my Photoshopping Skillz!

I switched over to a Mac a little over two years ago. I have used iCal for that long and it has always bugged me that the calendar didn’t show my holidays. Since computers are used all over the world, it’s a little egocentric for me to expect the built in calendar program to have U.S. holidays, but I had no idea how to get the holidays into my calendar without putting them in myself.

Fortunately, there IS a way. When you’re in iCal, you choose Calendar and then Subscribe. It will ask for a URL to subscribe to. Finding the appropriate calendar for your country is DIFFICULT, so I looked at our traffic and found the calendars for the top five countries that access The Gadgets Page:

• Apple – US Holiday Calendar
• Apple – United Kingdom Holiday Calendar
• Apple – Canadian Holiday Calendar
• Apple – Australian Holiday Calendar – New South Wales (NSW)
• Apple – German Holiday Calendar

Once you’ve subscribed to a calendar, all your holidays are there for you. If there is a holiday that is continually moved with no rhyme nor reason (like the Daylight Savings fiasco in the U.S.), then you might want to have your calendar check for updates. To do that, highlight the calendar, right click on it and choose Get Info. Once you’re there, choose Auto-Refresh and change the setting appropriately.

I thought that I could live without having the U.S. Holidays on my iCal until last year when I scheduled a geek event on Easter weekend. It wasn’t until it was too late that I realized that we wouldn’t have anyone attend because of the overlooked holiday. If the lack of holidays on iCal had caused you similar troubles, you can now add your country’s holiday to your calendar.

After all of those Twitter entries, just a humorous look at what would happen if Apple decided to buy Twitter:

• The Joy of Tech comic: What If Apple Bought Twitter?

My favorite event:

Microsoft introduces Zzitter, its entry into the social networking scene. By month’s end, over 35 people have signed up to send “zits” to their friends.

I have enjoyed using Twitter over the last two years and I love to see how things have changed since then. For me, it has become more of a note-taking tool and a quick way to say hi to a lot of my friends, both near and far. I have felt less lonely in this isolated world of the Internet because if Twitter and for that, I’ll be eternally grateful.

Tweetie is an iPhone app recommended to me by my friend, Brad McCall. It’s cheaper than most of the other apps and has the most features.

Here is a review of Tweetie:

• Tweetie on iTunes – $2.99

It’s organized a lot like Twittelator Pro and I can even find people who are nearby who use Tweetie. The Nearby feature alone is worth the three bucks. That’s why Tweetie is has quickly become my favorite Twitter app, because sometimes I feel alone and I want to find people in my neighborhood who are using Twitter.

The use of multiple accounts is the easiest with Tweetie. Just a quick click to the left and I can choose a different Twitter account. Instead of using the SubGroups function on Twittelator Pro, I have started putting my friends into various Twitter accounts. All my Utah friends are on CodeAway, all my fitness friends are on the Starling Fitness account, and all my entertaining Twitter friends are on my personal account. Following each group is very easy with Tweetie!

There is also a Tweetie for the Mac application on the computer. You can see an introductory video on their website.

Twitterrific was the first iPhone app that I ever tried. I NEVER use it now. First, it was replaced by Twinkle because I loved being able to see other Twinkle users near me. Then both of them were replaced by Twittelator because it promised me the use of sub-groups. Finally, I’ve settled on Tweetie so I get the Nearby features AND the multiple accounts.

I have always used the free version, which has advertisements on your feed. I don’t care whether there are ads on my screen, so the free version was fine with me. There are a couple other features that the Premium version has that I don’t have. You can see a review of it here:

• Twitterific on iTunes – Free

My biggest problem with Twitterific is the fact that it starts at my last read tweet. If I haven’t loaded it for several days, it will show me the last time I looked at it and I will have to scroll all the way to the top in order to see what’s going on RIGHT NOW. I haven’t been able to find a setting to change that and it is so irritating that I haven’t used Twitterific because of it.

Just like the other Twitter apps, you can read your friends’ tweets, send your own (including photos), and see who is messaging and replying to you. It’s a great app for free with only one drawback that maybe others might consider a feature.

“Twinkle, Twinkle Little App, Posting Tweets Is Now A Snap!” With a slogan like that, how could Twinkle go wrong?

Twinkle is a free Twitter iPhone app that works very well doing what it does. You can send tweets, including a photo taken within the application or previously. You can read your friend’s tweets and messages sent to you.

Here is a brief video showing the features of Twinkle:

• Twinkle on iTunes – Free

The truly killer apps in Twinkle are the Location and Nearby features. If you turn it on, Twinkle will broadcast your location so other Twinkle users nearby can find you. You can use the Nearby feature to read the tweets of people who are near you. You can choose anywhere between 1 mile and 1000 miles (although I suspect the usefulness of this feature is diminished at that great of a distance). I have found lots of Utah Geeks just by looking at Twinkle’s nearby feature and finding people who live in my neighborhood who are just as cool as I am.

Long ago, I heard about DodgeBall, which was a location-based Twitter-like service that you could use with your cellphone. DodgeBall only worked in big cities like New York and San Francisco. They never did come to Salt Lake City before Google axed them. Google never really gave DodgeBall a chance, but now that I have Twinkle, I don’t need DodgeBall.

If you are feeling like you’re the only person on the planet, download Twinkle on your iPhone and see all the people like you nearby. It’s the best cure for loneliness and it’s free.

For the longest time, my favorite Twitter app was Twittelator Pro. I like it because it’s so versatile and I can easily use it with several accounts. I can read my friends’ tweets, of course, but I can also see who has replied to me using the @ feature, even when I’m not following that person.

Twittelator Pro’s most useful feature is Sub-Groups. Under the More section, I can set up a group of the people I am following. For instance, if I want to read the tweets of just my friends in Salt Lake City, I can set up a group for that. If I’m at a conference, like SXSWi, I can set up a subgroup of my Twitter friends who are attending the same conference so I can see what they are up to. This feature alone would be worth the five bucks, if it didn’t crash my iPhone every time I use it. Sadly, it does, so I had to abandon using that feature.

Here is a video review of Twittelator Pro (although it shows screen shots from the free version in addition to the Pro version):

• Twittelator Pro on iTunes – $4.99

Twittelator Pro does have the GPS features that some other Twitter apps have, but it doesn’t have a search feature to find people using Twitter near you (even if you’re not following them). You can broadcast your location with Twittelator Pro, but you can’t use that information to find others around you. It appears that the free version of Twittelator has this feature, but I couldn’t find it in the Pro version.

When I pull out my iPhone to tweet, Twittelator Pro used to be the app that I used the most, but Tweetie has slowly taken its place.

If you’re a writer, you may want a little more time to write your tweets than the normal person. If you are trying to be incredibly witty within 140 characters, that doesn’t usually happen on the spur of the moment, so you might want to save your tweet until it’s perfect and ready to publish. Birdhouse is the perfect way to write and rewrite your precious tweets.

• Birdhouse on iTunes – $3.99

Here is a tongue-in-cheek video describing the usefulness of Birdhouse:

Since I have several Twitter accounts to manage (including one for The Gadgets Page), I have found Birdhouse to be a great way to keep track of them all.

The “best” feature is supposed to be the ability to unpublish a tweet. That IS something you can do with this app (as well as on the Twitter site), but that doesn’t mean that no one will have seen it, copied it, or saved it. It will still show up on RSS feeds. Remember, there is no real way to unpublish anything on the Internet.

Birdhouse is not a typical Twitter app. It’s meant to be used for writing only, not keeping up with friends, etc. There is no way to see your friends’ tweets, upload photos, or easily create links to websites.

If you want something to quickly take notes of things you might want to tweet later, but need time to formulate the perfect 140 character response, Birdhouse is a great little app.

Via: Referral Friday Birdhouse for Twitter – communicatrix.

If reading 140 characters is just too much for you, Flutter might be perfect for you. I love this funny video about the fictional new nano-blogging service, Flutter.

The problem with this video is that it’s just too damn close to reality. Remember the funny video that came out for the fictional iPod Flea?

• Pick Me! » The iPod Flea

Now that Apple has released the newest iPod Shuffle, this video doesn’t seem so funny anymore. It won’t take any time for them to get down to the iPod Flea size.

Of course, by the time Flutter comes into existence, they really WILL be able to release glasses that will scroll “flaps” in front of my eyes. I can’t wait for those!

Via: Flutter Is a New Nano Blogging Service | video, twitter, funny | geeksugar – Technology & Gadgets

The last time I checked the price on Photoshop, it was over 600 bucks. I have been limping along with an old version of Photoshop for so long that it regularly crashes my computer. You would think that an older version of Photoshop might be streamlined and have a faster booting time, but it doesn’t. It takes over twenty-five seconds to get up and running. Why do I use Photoshop anyway?

Oh yeah, because I KNOW how to use it…

Well, if you know how to use Photoshop, you’re ninety-percent of the way there with GIMP. GIMP is an open source photo editing program and stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program. You can download it for FREE here:

• Download GIMP

It only takes fifteen seconds to load and it runs beautifully on my Mac. It has never crashed and since I’ve stopped using that old version of Photoshop, my Mac hasn’t frozen up for weeks. Goodbye spinning beach ball!

The good thing about GIMP is that it can do everything that Photoshop can do. If I find a tutorial online showing me how to do something on Photoshop, I can usually figure out how to do it in GIMP in about the same amount of time. Sometimes I have to search for the different menu item to choose, but the Photoshop tutorials work really well in GIMP.

There were a few weeks when it took me a while to get used to using GIMP instead of Photoshop. There are minor differences that I had to get used to, but after the initial learning time, I was happily editing photos without having to think about using the software, just like I used to do with Photoshop.

If you are limping along with an ancient version of Photoshop that crashes your computer, download GIMP and give it a couple of weeks to get used to. I found that I was willing to learn a new program rather than pay 600 bucks for an upgrade.