PhotoSynth - I Love This App!

One of the shortfalls of the iPhone and iPad cameras is their fixed wide angle aspect. I've frequently been frustrated by the camera's inability to capture landscapes, or really anything much beyond casual snapshots. With all those megapixels in my pocket - more than three times as many as in my dedicated camera (and less than 1/8 the size and weight) - I've often wished I could take a picture 1/3 as good.

Photosynth changes the game. Even though it is made by Microsoft, it is one of my all time favorite photography apps. (That alone should tell you how good it must be.) I find myself going to it over and over again. Photosynth allows you to take wide angle and panoramic photos with your iDevice, just by slowly moving around as it automatically shoots overlapping images which it then weaves together into a (mostly) seamless picture. You can take a big wide shot and crop it and save it to your photo roll (click on the image to the left), or you can go the whole 360° route and then view your panorama in the App or on the associated web site, which can have some pretty dramatic results! Click on the box to the right and be sure to expand the resulting image to full screen to really take in just what this offers!

I've found the app to be pretty easy to use, consistently yielding pleasing results. My experience is that it works best when nothing in your shot is moving. Ask people to hold still as you pan near and over them or you will have ghosts and blurs, but sometimes that can be part of the fun. The app, and the non-required use of the web site are both free.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

I don't know about you, but for me, Time Machine runs too often and takes up too much of my Mac's CPU (slows down my work), bandwidth (slows down my network connection) and too much disk space (too many backups too often). This is particularly annoying when I am working online, on photo or video editing, or sometimes just listening to music and surfing.

What is to be done?

Simple answer, download and install TimeMachineScheduler. It's a free Preference Pane that will allow you to set the interval between backups to

anywhere from 1 to 12 hours, and to not back up at all between certain hours. It runs on Intel Macs, OS 10

.5+. You could do this by messing with hidden Apple preference files and a text editor, which is how I used to do it, but why bother when something as simple and elegant as TimeMachineScheduler is available.

direct download

Pageonce - I Love This App!

Pageonce - for the iPhone and the iPad, makes keeping track of your credit cards, regular bills, and bank accounts fun. Or, at least as much fun as it can be. Once you enter your usernames and passwords into its relatively simple interface, Pageonce keeps track of your balances, payment due dates, and any unusual activity in all of your accounts.

But, the real beauty is that Pageonce sends me alerts a week, and then again a day before my payments are due. It let's me know when a new bill is ready for review. And, it let's me know if there are any problems like an unusually large transaction. You really need to get this app and set it up to fully understand the value it adds. Because it aggregates all this info for you, there's no more logging in to 5 sites or running the bank app, the discover app, the Visa app, phone company app, the whatever app just to know how things stand.

I've been using it for over a year now and while it's not Angry Birds, I have to say, "I Love This App!" Originally worth it at $9.99, this app is available in the App Store at the remarkable price of FREE!