filters
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Internet content filters are human too, funnily enough
Algorithms can only take you so far when you want to minimize obscene content on your social networking site. As the amount of user-uploaded content has exploded in recent times, so has the need for web content screeners, whose job it is to peruse the millions of images we throw up to online hubs like Facebook and MySpace every day, and filter out the illicit and undesirable muck. Is it censorship or just keeping the internet from being overrun with distasteful content? Probably a little bit of both, but apparently what we haven't appreciated until now is just how taxing a job this is. One outsourcing company already offers counseling as a standard part of its benefits package, and an industry group set up by Congress has advised that all should be providing therapy to their image moderators. You heard that right, people, mods need love too! Hit the source for more.
First look and reader giveaway: Lo-Mob, for that retro photo look
In case you haven't noticed, I'm a huge fan of iPhone photography apps. I've written about Best Camera, played with ColorSplash, and taken panoramic photos with Pano. When I noticed the $1.99US Lo-Mob [iTunes Link] while doing my weekly pass through the photo apps, I decided to buy it and give it a try. Part of my fascination with iPhone photo apps is that the flexibility of the software combines with the camera that is always at your fingertips, and you can do things with your photos with a few taps that would have taken hours in a darkroom. Lo-Mob provides 33 different effects that give your iPhone pics the look of taking photos with old film, instant film, 35 mm film in a medium-format camera, and more. With many of the effects, changes with saturation, focus, and tint are mixed with artifacts (dust on the frame, for example), vignetting, and frames. As soon as you either take a new photo or select an existing one in Lo-Mob, the app takes about 10 - 12 seconds to pre-process all of the images. The result is that when you go to choose your effect, you see exactly how it's going to look in a small thumbnail image located next to information about the effect. After you've selected your effect, you see a full size image that can then be saved in the original photo resolution and then shared with others through email, Facebook, or Twitter. Now for some fun! We have three Lo-Mob promo codes to give away to three lucky TUAW readers. Here's the scoop: Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older. To enter leave a comment telling us what you would take a photo of and then "retro-ize" with Lo-Mob. The comment must be left before Wednesday, December 16, 2009, 11:59PM Eastern Standard Time. You may enter only once. Three winners will be selected in a random drawing. Prizes: Promo Code for one copy of Lo-Mob (Value: US$1.99) Click Here for complete Official Rules. Check out the gallery below for an idea of some of the cool effects you can slap on those iPhone photos. %Gallery-80255%
First Look: Best Camera App for iPhone
The first thing I normally do when someone names their application "The Best..." is roll my eyes and delete the PR email. However, when I saw a press release about the Best Camera app for iPhone, I decided to take a look and I'm glad I did.Best Camera [iTunes link] is a collaboration between professional photographer Chase Jarvis and iPhone dev firm Übermind. The app gets its name from Jarvis's book "The Best Camera is The One That's With You," a collection of photos taken all over the world by Jarvis with his iPhone. The US$2.99 app features 14 useful filters and effects that can be stacked; in other words, you can take a photo with the iPhone camera, then apply several filters and/or effects before sharing your handiwork. The filters and effects are on a side-scrolling "dock" at the bottom of the screen, and you apply them by simply tapping on the icons. Sharing includes saving the photo on your iPhone camera roll, sending it out via email, or blasting it to your Facebook or Twitter account. There's also one more place to share your photo. While filters and effects are nothing new, Jarvis has created a community at thebestcamera.com where photos that have been submitted are displayed on a constantly changing photo wall. These photos are also viewable in the app itself, and by tapping a photo in either location, you can view information about the photographer. On the website, the information also includes a list of the filers or effects that were used on the original photo so you can re-create photos that you find fascinating.Check out the gallery below for some screenshots of the Best Camera app in action. %Gallery-73749%
Time is Money: Using the unmodified Auction House
Kebina Trudough here, offering you the best gold making secrets they don't want you to know about! I was like you once, poor and homely, before I discovered my patented system. Now you too can fill your pockets with the good stuff without ever breaking a sweat! Why spend all your time toiling when you could be vacationing in the Hot Springs? I'm not offering these tips for 100 gold, or 90 gold, or even 50 gold! No, not even 20 gold! My system is yours for FREE! Satisfaction guaranteed or I'll give you a full refund (handling charges may apply).The Auction House is something that you've probably been using since you were a wee little thing, still counting coppers. Despite this experience, there may still be a few things about the system that you might not know, and these tricks will help you buy smart and sell with confidence. Purchasing itemsi. Price per itemWhen asked what the focus of my public school math classes were, the first thing that comes to mind is grocery store navigation. Seriously. I'm pretty sure that we spent an ample amount of time, spread out over the years, working on making change, understanding tax, and learning that price per unit (such as $1 per pound) is sometimes convoluted in order to trick us into parting with more cash. When looking at the basic, unmodified Auction House, you can quickly determine which stacks of cloth are selling each piece for the cheapest. This is easy to do when looking at several stacks of 20, but often, there are several partial stacks for sale as well, and sometimes you can actually get a bargain by snatching those up. Other times, they're priced at a huge mark-up!Mouse-over the icon for the item, and the tooltip that appears will tell you the Bid Price Per Unit and the Buyout Price Per Unit. In seconds, you'll be able to tell what to bid on, what to buy out, and what to avoid.
Air purifiers under fire for ozone emission
Normally we're supposed to be concerned about depleting ozone levels to the point where we inhabit one big sauna, but according to an investigative piece by the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), household air purifiers which produce the gas as a byproduct may also pose a significant threat. Studies cited by the Journal suggest that both ozone generation as well as filtration models can emit dangerous levels of the reactive gas, which can be harmful either when inhaled directly or when combined with other common chemicals. While the CSPC is currently studying hard emissions caps to place on these products, California has already taken a first step by limiting purifier ozone output to 50 parts-per-billion starting in 2010. Meanwhile, executives from mall mainstay The Sharper Image are scrambling to discover another gimmicky product they can hang their hats on.
87% of e-mail traffic is spam
InformationWeek reports that spam accounted for nearly 87% of e-mail traffic this year, nearly a third more than last year. And that spam wasn't all about getting you to buy V1agra and C1al1s. Quite a bit of it was phishing bait, intended to get you to hand over your personal information and passwords. If you you're unsure whether an e-mail is phishing you, choose View -> Message -> Raw Source in Mail and check out the actual URLs the e-mail is linking to. And don't forget to train your junk filter rather than just deleting unwanted items. As our filtering technology becomes more sophisticated, so does the spam. From the InformationWeek article, "Among the more effective new techniques was the use of image-based spam, which is much harder for security software to detect than text-based spam. The former accounted for 70% of the bandwidth taken up by spam this year..." David posted a great rule-based solution this summer for image spam that may help make a dent in your inbox.
iColours for Apple notebooks
If the white glow of the Apple logo in your notebook isn't touching your heart the same way anymore, iColours might be just the touch-up you need to rekindle your love of all Apple things that glow (of which there aren't many). These 'high quality' filters come in a wide range of colors, and as you can see from our screenshot - they're customizable. They have a decent gallery of custom designs, and they offer installation instructions for iBooks, PowerBooks and even MBs and MBPs [Update: turns out MacBook/Pro instructions are still brewing. Take a look before you place an order if you're an MB/MBP owner.]Base price for a solid color is $3.99, including worldwide shipping. While custom designs are available, they ask that you contact them before ordering. Needless to say, installing these most likely blows any warranty you might have out of the water, but that hasn't stopped you before, right?Thanks Jason P
Image Tricks 2.0
I'm beginning to think that today is some kind of image editing holiday, as Image Tricks, the freeware image editor that leverages Mac OS X Tiger's Core Image features, has been updated to version 2. New features include 'generators' - the ability to "randomly and manually generate images with mathematical algorithms," a fit-to-size option, PDF export, file size adjustment when exporting to JPEG, and other minor fixes and improvements.Image Tricks has also been divided into Free and Pro versions. For a mere $9.95 the Pro version will give you six more generators than the free version, and BeLight software has stated they have more generators they can add from their todo list if enough customers show interest.Check out BeLight Software's Image Tricks product page for more details on its abilities, and the downloads page for a copy of the upgradable Free version.
ImagePlay, an open source, layered image editor
I stumbled across another interesting (and free) image manipulator in Apple's downloads section by the name of ImagePlay. It's actually an open source editor with versions available from Sourceforge for OS X, OS 9 and even Windows, but because of that open-sourceness it doesn't appear to be utilizing all the abilities of CoreImage like ImageTricks does (correct me if I'm wrong). However, ImagePlay does offer a few key features, such as layers, various effects and filters, as well as the incredibly handy ability to offer an estimated file size when exporting various image formats such as JPEG, PNG, BMP (uh, why?), Photoshop, TIFF and even QuickTime.While it obviously isn't Photoshop, I'm sure ImagePlay can still find its place in plenty of people's Application folders. This handy little image editor is available at either Apple's Downloads section or from its home at Sourceforge for the amazingly low price of $0.
