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TUAW Best of 2011: Vote for your favorite iPad photo app
The nominations are in, and the poll is ready to go! The TUAW Best of 2011 awards are all about you -- the readers -- and what you think is the cream of the crop of Apple or third-party products and software. To vote, select one entry from the top nominations made by readers. We'll be announcing the winner in just a few days. Vote early and often! TUAW is asking for your votes for the best iPad photo of 2011. We didn't get too many nominations in this category: first, many more readers use their iPhones for photography than they do their iPads, and second, TUAW readers might be getting a bit tired of Best of 2011 posts. Worry not! We're getting close to the end of the TUAW Best of 2011 series with just a few more categories to go. However, we didn't really get enough nominees for iPad video apps to make it a valid category for voting, so photography apps are all you get to vote for. The nominees are: Master Your DSLR Camera (US$9.99), an iPad-based tutorial to move you beyond using your DSLR as an expensive point-and-shoot. Snapseed ($4.99), an excellent iPad-based photo post-processing app. The app also works on the iPhone, but the UI on the iPad app benefits from the extra space. flickr hd ($4.99, on sale for $0.99) is a wonderful way to browse your flickr photos on the iPad. Halftone ($0.99), makes a halftoned comic or postcard out of any of your photos. The app now lets you send physical postcards via Sincerely.com, and just keeps getting better. You have a couple of days to vote, and the winners will be announced on January 2, 2012. Let the voting begin! %Poll-72399%
CNC machine carves dot drawing portraits for your living room walls
Fancy seeing your mug enlarged to halftone-processed heights? You're in luck, because Finnish modder Metalfusion has a homebrew solution for those Wall Street Journal-style hedcut delusions. Using a specially designed image conversion program, the DIY hobbyist tranforms .jpg, .gif or .png files into DXF-formatted dot patterns of varying density. The resulting images are then fed directly into a CNC machine where a drill is left to make the wood-carved magic happen. Need some visual confirmation of this awesome feat, then head past the break for a video demo of this old-timey optical illusion.
Halftone iPhone app gives your photos that old-time newspaper look
Halftone (currently US$0.99), a new iOS photo app from Juicy Bits Software, wants to be the app that turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a photographic time machine. Juicy Bits is the company that created the cool 3D Camera Studio for iPad ($3.99) and 3D Camera ($1.99) apps that provide a way to create 3D anaglyph, stereogram and "wigglegram" images. A Short History of Halftones Back in the ancient, pre-digital days, there used to be a way of consuming news, entertainment and sports content called "reading the newspaper." Whenever there was a major news event -- the Kennedy assassination, the Apollo moon landings, and so forth -- many people would grab the newspapers to stash them away for posterity. Looking at old newspapers now, it's amazing how crude the photos look. The halftones used to print pictures, coupled with the sepia tone that the papers have taken on through aging, have a distinctive look that is associated with an era that began to disappear in the late 1970s and early 80s when digital imagesetters made their entrance. Click "Read More" to read the review of Halftone. %Gallery-117464%
