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Ember's upcoming Travel Mug 2+ can be tracked in Apple's Find My app
Soon you'll be alerted if your left your Ember Travel Mug behind via Apple Find My.
Blue's latest microphone gives streamers an XLR option
With the rise of livestreaming, easy-to-use audio gear has become a staple among YouTubers, podcasters and more. Blue has been catering to that group for a while now with its line of plug-and-play USB microphones, but at CES 2019 the company has a new XLR option aimed at streamers and professional recording environments. The Blue Ember is a $100 mic that's designed to cut down on background noise thanks to its "tight pickup pattern." Basically, the cardioid pattern of the microphone focuses on what's right in front of it to minimize any room noise.
ICYMI: Perfect temp mug, MIT's wiggly robot and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-621697{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-621697, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-621697{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-621697").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: MIT's Media Lab created the LineFORM out of a wiggly bit of robotics that can morph into different shapes, like a telephone or a data connecting cable. Meanwhile a $130 mug will let you set the perfect temperature for your java. And an Indiegogo campaign for a head-mounted camera that makes users look like waylaid super heros is well short of its funding goal, which is probably good because we would hate to see them out in the world.
The TUAW Daily Update Podcast for July 31, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. Be sure that your podcast software is set up to subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
Ember for Mac gains 'hugely-requested' screen recording feature
Popular web clipper and digital scrapbooking app Ember was updated today with a killer new feature -- the ability to make a video recording of your screen. No longer limited by only static images, Ember now allows you to capture your screen as you demo webpages, click through a presentation or showcase an app. The new scree recording feature in Ember version 1.8 allows you to capture more than just a static screen shot. You can now select a small section of your desktop or the entire screen (command-a in screen recording mode) and record in 60fps video. The recordings are saved in the Ember app and are treated just like any other Ember capture The video also can be synced between your iOS and OS X devices, shared with your friends or exported as a .MOV file that can be stored on your Mac The latest version of Ember with screen recording is available now in the Mac App Store for US$49.99.
Crowdfunded Project News: The best of Kickstarter, Indiegogo and the rest
Every week, TUAW provides readers with an update on what new or significant crowdfunded Apple-related projects are in the news. This update is designed to give readers a heads-up on projects they might find interesting enough to back. Note that we're not covering those "projects" on Indiegogo where people are trying to get someone else to cough up money for a new computer or tablet... If a project reaches at least 80 percent of total funding and provides us with review material, we may choose to write a detailed post about it. Holy guacamole! We're just full of crowdfunded projects this week! Let's get it started, first with a fascinating independent project: Moov wants to be Siri for fitness. Taking pre-orders for a limited quantity of devices at this time for only US$59.95, Moov promises to coach you verbally as you're working out or engaging in your favorite sport. To be honest, I'm not sure I'd be thrilled having Siri telling me to "run faster" or "lengthen your stride." Here's video: And now the hot Kickstarter projects of the week. The Carbon wearable solar charger is a wearable with a difference. Rather than acting as an extension to your smartphone, it only exists to do one thing -- charge your technology. With photovoltaic cells on top of a small battery, Carbon can charge itself up in two to three hours in full sunlight, then give your iPhone about a half-charge in 25 minutes. Carbon uses a standard watch strap so you can change your style to fit your needs. Right now you can back Carbon and get one for as little as $115. It's currently about 16 percent funded with 25 days to go. The Right Arm is already 286 percent funded with ten days to go, but you can still get in on the funding action. The Right Arm is touted as a universal tablet stand and mobile stand-up desk, using a long flexible arm that ends in a metal plate covered with a polyurethane gel that holds onto just about anything. You can still back The Right Arm for $104 or more. Remember my recent review of the Jumper Card, a credit card-like set of charging cables with a battery and flashlight that fits in your wallet? Well, TravelCard wants to do the same thing with a thin aluminum-cased battery/charger/flashlight. One big difference: TravelCard has already achieved initial Made For iPhone (MFi) certification. TravelCard is almost 250 percent funded with almost a month to go. it's available in four different finishes; black, white, silver and metallic blue. I sometimes wonder why some accessory manufacturers end up Kickstarting something that is already being made... That's the question I have for AirBulb, which is amazingly similar to the oddly-named AwoX Striimlight I reviewed in January. I wasn't particularly impressed with the Striimlight and hopefully AirBulb can do better, but do we really need multitasking light bulbs? The Bumprz iPhone bumper is funded. The Kickstarter campaign for this minimalist iPhone case should be over by the time you read this; at the point I wrote this, Bumprz was 117 percent funded. Bumprz look like they'll now be made in black, gold and silver. Congratulations to the Bumprz team for getting these little metallic corner covers funded and into production. Last year I backed the iBlazr, a tiny little 4-LED light that plugs into your iPhone and provides light for photos or video. I wish I had waited. Ember is a battery case with a back covered with LEDs. Ember is going to make anyone who does night photography or videography very happy. At this point, it's about 41 percent funded with 17 days to go. Another photography project on Kickstarter is the Mibo, a full-featured microscope kit for your iPhone. It's just about fully funded with just two days to go -- let's hope that TUAW readers can push this one over the goal line! For educational purposes, Mibo will also come with prepared slides for your close-in viewing pleasure. Somebody finally listened to me! Although I love leather iPad cases, most of them are just too darned thick to make them enjoyable. Heming is a really thin and beautifully-designed iPad case that doesn't add a lot of bulk while still keeping your tablet protected. The great thing is that Heming has already reached its funding goal, but you can still get a limited edition case for as low as $76. And on Indiegogo: Remember Fuse Chicken? They're the design shop that created the incredibly cool Une Bobine iPhone stand a while back. Now they're back with a couple of new products. First, there's togoDock -- it's a magnetic charge cable / dock for iPhone that sticks almost anywhere you can stick a magnet. togoDock is 77 percent of the way towards funding with just less than a month to go. You can push it over the top for as little as $30. Fuse Chicken will also throw in the cool PLUGdock or a Une Bobine at some of the pledge levels. This next project has a long way to go, but it could be just the thing to save a life if it does get funded. The Lifesaver Case for iPhone not only protects your iPhone, but if you're ever threatened, you slide a single switch and it instantly (and silently) streams your GPS location, sends your vital information, records what is happening in sound and video, and makes an automatic E911 call. The campaign just started, but The Lifesaver Case looks like a great idea to me. You can back the project and get one for as little as $59. The planet apparently needs another messaging app, as vText just went live today on Indiegogo. The app will be cross-platform on iOS and Android, and it does provide some compelling features. It's apparently three times faster than traditional messaging platforms, secure (nothing is stored), smart (reminds you of birthdays and limits texting while driving), and simple to use. And last but definitely not least, there's another fascinating "Internet of Things" connected home device that's just starting up. Notifon is billed as the "notifying object" that can be connected to just about anything to notify you of events. Put it on your garage door, it will tell you if the door is opened or closed. It can inform you of water leaks, send a tweet when your business is open or closed, and more. The team is planning on shipping by September of 2014. If you're aware of any other crowdfunded Apple-related projects, be sure to let us know about them through the Tip Us button at the upper right of the TUAW home page for future listing on the site.
Ember for Mac and iOS updated with new annotations, auto-import and more
Realmac has updated its Ember image-collection and syncing tools, adding the much-requested annotations feature to the iOS app and a handful of smaller tweaks and features to its Mac app. Ember is an image-syncing tool that collates photos from your Mac or iOS devices and allows you to sync these photos across devices via iCloud. It's similar to Photostream in iOS 7, but is significantly better than Apple's barebones offering. Besides iCloud syncing, Ember lets you tag and organize images into folders so you can build your own collections. The app also includes some basic editing tools that allow you to make tweaks on the fly. One of the biggest new features that made its way into version 1.1 of the iOS app is annotations, which brings the smart drawing and text tools from the Mac to your iOS device. There are also two new tools that'll allow you to blur and pixelate parts of your images. A new auto-import feature will screen your device for new screenshots in your camera roll and add them to your library automatically. These images are then synced across devices with little to no intervention by the user. Mac version 1.3 now has the new annotation tools blur and pixelate, which were also added to iOS. Other enhancements include the ability to back up your library, the option to hide previously seen subscription images, an improved browser contextual menu that has a selection for downloading images and more. The published changelog for Ember for iOS and OS X includes: Subscribe to your favorite websites (Mac Only) -- Subscriptions allow you to visually browse the web. Images can be saved to your Ember library, and shared with friends and co-workers. Auto-detects iPhone and iPad screenshots -- Library organization has never been easier: Just drag in those PNGs from your favorite iOS device and Ember will automatically sort them into "Phone" and "Tablet" for you! Search by Color -- Use natural language to find specific colors in your Ember library. Type in "Blue" and Ember for iOS will find images whose primary color matches just that. iCloud Sync -- Store your Ember library in iCloud and sync it across all your Macs and iOS devices. Ember for iOS is free from the App Store, with in-app purchases that allow you to enable annotations (US$4.99) or unlock auto-import ($0.99). The updated Ember for the Mac is available for $49.99 from the Mac App Store for new users and is free for existing users.
App's clever feedback system helps happy users tweet, while angry customers can only email
Ember, an app from Realmac Software built to help designers and artists compile, collect and otherwise make sense of their ideas and influences, employs an extremely clever in-app feedback feature that we wouldn't mind seeing become a new norm. Rather than a simple, static feedback page with an email address or perhaps a phone number, the app first asks you how you feel about Ember, be it happy, confused or unhappy. Happy users are encouraged to write a review, share their feelings on Twitter and Facebook and contact the Ember team directly. Meanwhile, confused users are directed to a help guide with the additional option of contacting Ember via email, and the unhappy souls are given just the option of emailing the team. This system clearly benefits Ember by increasing the likelihood that happy folks will leave positive reviews or social mentions, but it also directs the confused and unhappy users to the areas that will do them the most good. After all, telling an angry customer to tweet about it doesn't benefit the developers or the user, but having a frustrated user send their concerns directly to the people who can fix it certainly can. [via @marcedwards]
Ember makes web clipping, digital scrapbooking a breeze
What's not to like about an app that can grab a web page and let you save, organize and mark it up, then share it in more than a half dozen ways? Ember is a powerful but simple application for saving and sharing web pages, images or just about anything you can see online. There's a lot to love in this focused app from Realmac Software. Once upon a time Realmac made an application called LittleSnapper, designed to grab web pages and the like and store them in a digital scrapbook of sorts. The app had some problems, and I never really quit using Skitch for marking up images and pages. Enter Ember, the successor to LittleSnapper, and a digital scrapbooking app that pretty much nails it in every way. Ember isn't iPhoto or Aperture, however. Think of Ember as a place to store photos, bits of the web or perhaps any visual projects you're working on, and realize Ember gives you several simple ways to annotate those images and share them with others. Use cases aren't just for designers, however. Anyone who has to bat ideas containing visual components around with someone else will find Ember useful, that includes wedding planners, architects, stage designers and so on. Grabbing images Ember provides a plethora of ways for you to add images to its library. I've always been a fan of drag and drop, and Ember handles it flawlessly. You can also click the camera icon to take a full screenshot, a timed screenshot (fullscreen only), grab just a portion of the screen or just a window. There's an RSS reader built in, so you can quickly browse image-intensive sites. Ember provides a few examples for inspiration, and in my testing the way Ember pulls graphics from RSS is quite good. Ember provides a browser within the app, which can make it easy to grab a page directly, but I found the extension (available for Safari and Chrome) to be the easiest to use, as with one click a panel opens up and allows me to name, tag, rate and sort a clipping before continuing. There's even a lovely animation as Ember processes the page before storing it in the library for you. The Library Storing and sorting in Ember itself is fantastic. I'm not sure which elves had to die for this magic, but Ember manages to make an educated guess about some of your photos, and automatically puts some into the Web, photo, tablet and phone collections. These are default, and of course you can add your own collections (aka "albums"), but the intelligent filtering was cool. It wasn't perfect, but I could tell there was some thought put into this feature that only becomes apparent when you start using it. Now if I pull over a bunch of screenshots and product pics, I'm less worried that I'll lose interface photos in the mix. To add more functionality to the library's automatic sorting, you can rate and tag your photos, and as mentioned sort them into custom collections. One of my few complaints about Ember is that getting to tags for an image requires clicking the i (for Inspector) button, as they cannot be accessed via right-clicking the image. Ratings can be accessed via right-click, however. You can show/hide your collections, and search and sort via tags, to an extent. Better yet, there are "smart collections" which is like a smart folder in OS X, or mail rules in Mail.app. Using a set of criteria, your Smart Collections can automatically sort by web address, rating, tag, title, date or other criteria. If you work on a number of projects at once, this is a lifesaver. Ember's parsing of metadata in photos (and sites) is a real help here as well, and a lot of your sorting will be done for you if you use these folders. I wasn't seeing much of a way to track design iterations per se, but you can set up Smart Folders to do this in a way. Editing and marking up images Ember is not a photo editing suite. Its tools are limited to cropping, rotating and adding some text or hand-drawn lines in a variety of colors. This brings a clarity to its purpose, as Ember is about intelligently storing images and sharing them with others, including any notes you may have. To that end there are layers, but only for the purpose of these notes. I do wish Ember provided just a few more drawing tools, however. I would immediately replace Skitch with Ember if it had built-in items like an arrow and box tool, not to mention the other callouts available in Evernote's software. For such a polished app, scribbling with my mouse seems inelegant. That said, you can easily hide annotations, and each item you draw on a photo is an individual element. So at any time you can go in and move things around, edit or delete them. Sharing images Ember really shines when it comes to sharing photos with or without notes. Although my GIFs were converted to JPG (sorry, no dancing Batman for you, Messages or Tumblr), gives you 9 ways to share easily. There's AirDrop, Email, Message, Export (as a JPG, PNG, PDF or Ember document), Facebook, Twitter, Cloudapp, Flickr and Tumblr. No Pinterest? No animated GIF support? No companion iOS app? These are all possible futures, I guess, but by and large I didn't miss them. Should you buy? Ember is nearly perfect for me, although I would like to see more built-in note features (arrows, other callouts). Support for animated GIFs would be nice, but aside from fun Tumblr fodder, that's not really a killer feature for me. OK, Ember is $49. While that may sound like a lot in today's $.99-or-GTFO world, it's pretty reasonable for a powerful design tool. If you find yourself constantly ping-ponging files between stakeholders -- be they clients or brides-to-be -- you'll find Ember is incredibly useful for keeping track of and sharing iterations in design.
TUAW first look and giveaway: Courier simplifies Mac media sharing
Sharing your files, photos, movies, and images with others through online services can sometimes be a hassle for Mac users. For some of us, it's possible to get all of the various interconnections between services set up in such a way that one tweet sends a photo to Facebook, Flickr, and a variety of other services. But for a surprising number of Mac users, it just isn't that easy. Realmac Software is in the business of making things easy. They're the folks who make website design easy with RapidWeaver, and they've just come out with a tool to make media sharing as easy as putting a stamp on an envelope. Courier (US$19.95 introductory price) is designed so that anyone, even your Mom, can easily upload photos, movies, and the like to a pile of services. A download of Courier is available for a limited trial, and you can make an in-app purchase of the app if you like it. We're going to be giving away five copies of Courier to TUAW readers, so read up on how the app works and then enter the giveaway. Check out the gallery below for a few screenshots, and then read on for a look at this Mac application. %Gallery-101620%
37signals buys Ember, kindles an official Campfire iPhone app
Campfire, from 37signals, is a web-based group chat tool that uses secure chat rooms to allow groups to collaborate from wherever they are. A little over a year ago, the developers at Overcommitted came out with an iPhone client for Campfire. That app, Ember, cost $9.99, and was an excellent tool for remotely joining a Campfire group and getting work done on the road. Well, the app was so good that 37signals announced today that they've purchased the app from Overcommitted, renamed it to Campfire for iPhone, and they're giving it away for free in the App Store. According to the 37signals blog, the company was so impressed with Ember that they approached Overcommitted about purchasing it, and the developer was happy with the idea. A deal was cut, a few changes were made to the app, the app made it through the Apple vetting process, and as of yesterday, Ember is known as Campfire for iPhone. If your team uses Campfire for collaboration and file sharing, be sure to grab Campfire for iPhone as soon as possible. The app works on devices running iOS 3.1.3 or later, although it is not optimized for iPad. [via Mashable]
iRobot's military Ember bots are tiny treaded hotspots
Remember the LANDroids initiative, which resulted in iRobot scoring a $2.5 million contract to create tiny, miniaturized bots that could crawl through battlefields and your nightmares? The company is showing off the early fruits of that contract, the Ember microbot, which is so small it slipped entirely under our radar. It's not quite as tiny as DARPA seemed to hope, which depicted a bot little bigger than a pack of cards, but shrinking a Packbot down to paperback size is no small task -- even it is a James Clavell paperback. The bot's primary function is to set up a roving military network on the battlefield, but, with an integrated webcam and extension via USB and SDIO, who knows what kind of functionality they'll provide. The goal is to get these down to $100 or less, and for that price we could see plenty of civilians investing in these just to keep an eye on the activities of household pet insurgents. [Via Robot Stock News]
Another fistful of apps: Ember, Headspace, myMovies, Nozbe, Juglir and LiveView
According to my completely unscientific research, about 90% of the TUAW mailbag is comprised of iPhone app announcements. In our continuing effort to not deluge you with iPhone app reviews, I present another "fistful of apps": 6 iPhone app reviews in one post. If you don't have an iPhone, you only have to skip one post. For the rest, this is some serious bang for your blog-reading buck. I don't play games much, aside from the occasional word challenge, so the apps I've chosen to review are definitely of a more utilitarian ilk. I'd classify them as productivity apps, including a Campfire client, a 3D mind mapping app, a movie cataloger, a task-management solution, a multi-status updater and a nifty tool for developing iPhone interfaces. Read on for the nitty gritty.
