Apple’s iPhone is an incredibly popular smartphone—in fact, the odds are decent that you’re reading this story on one right now. But beyond using it as a telephone or a portable Internet device, it’s also a extremely well-loved camera. According to Flickr, around one-third of all images uploaded to its site in 2015 came from an iPhone. And of the 20 top cameras used with the service in last year, eight of them were a version of the Apple handheld.
While it’s easy to use with a selfie mode and point-and-click capabilities, the iPhone’s camera also can be complex, yielding rich color and great detail. To get the best shots, you need to know how to use it right. See this video.
WhatsApp Web is an easy way to use WhatsApp when you’re away from your phone. It works on any operating system and browser with a one-time configuration, which requires a slight tweak if you’re using an iPad or iPod Touch.
On your iPad or iPod, open Safari and visit web.whatsapp.com. This will redirect you to whatsapp.com. Now keep the reload icon next to the address bar pressed till you see an overlay like the one below, and then click on Request Desktop Site.
When the page reloads, you’ll see the WhatsApp Web page with a QR code. To scan the code, go to Settings > WhatsApp Web in WhatsApp on your iPhone. OnAndroid, you’ll have to go to Menu > WhatsApp Web instead. If your phone stays inactive and doesn’t scan the code automatically, you might want to scroll down the QR code page slightly.
Once the code gets scanned, you’re all set to use WhatsApp Web on your iPad/ iPod. You can try this method on other browsers as well by requesting the desktop version of the WhatsApp Web page. But your experience with it might vary a bit based on the browser that you’re using.
In any case there a couple of drawbacks to using WhatsApp Web on iOS. For starters, you won’t get notifications for incoming messages. Secondly, you might miss out on some features like voice messages.
The good news is that if you’re an iPad user, you also have a few other decent WhatsApp Web alternatives that are actually built for touchscreen devices.Messenger+ for WhatsApp is one of the most popular ones among them.
Everybody’s got a smartphone. But not many people have a smart home, where common household goods are augmented with small computers, and connected to the Internet.
It’s still very much a niche interest; the concern of power users and geeks, rather than ordinary folks. But that could soon change. And it could all be because of the humble smartphone you have in your pocket. Here’s why.
Smartphones Are Just Sensors
Earlier this year, I travelled to London in order to attend the TechCrunch Disrupt conference at the Old Billingsgate Market. Over the course of two days, hundreds of startups and entrepreneurs crammed into a sweaty and claustrophobic function room, each with their own unique ideas and products to demontrate.
One company that caught my attention was the Cairo-based IntegrEight, who produce the 1Sheeld.
The 1Sheeld (which we reviewed earlier this year) is remarkable. It’s an Arduinoshield that connects to a compatible Android or iOS-based smartphone over aBluetooth 4.0 Low Energy connection. This allows the Arduino to take readings from each of the phone’s sensors as if it were attached as a physical hardware shield, and use them in programs.
James Bruce was pretty blown away with it, as you can tell in his video review.
For example, you could build a home security system that activates when your phone’s microphone detects noise over a certain decibel. Or, you could build a system that changes the orientation of an object, based upon the orientation of a phone. You could even build a system that uses the camera of a phone, and activates a Philips Hue lightbulb if the brightness level of the room is too low, or dims them if it’s too bright.
This is possible because phones are essentially sensors.
Even the cheapest cell phone comes with a raft of precise sensors that would cost hundreds of dollars if bought individually as Arduino shields.
Last year, I bought a ZTE Open from Ebay. It cost about $100, and only a few thousand were built. They were to show the potential of the then-formative Firefox OS platform outside of simulated environments, and on austere hardware.
One hundred bucks won’t get you much of a phone. But even the most bargain-basement devices, like the ZTE Open, come with an accelerometer and gyrometer, a camera, and a microphone. That’s often all you need to create an immersive, responsive smart-home device that can automatically respond to external events.
It makes sense that the smart home devices of the future will use these. Either through a third-party layer (like the one built by IntegrEight) or natively.
Remote Controlled Homes
More and more smart-home devices are connected to the global Internet. That’s a mixed blessing.
On one hand, it presents an immense security and privacy risk. A single flaw in the code has the potential to allow an attacker to compromise household securitysystems, mess with the heating, and even turn on the lights at any hour of the night. A hacker can mess with your mind, not unlike Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight.
But there’s a positive side. In combination with a smartphone, we can now control the minutia of our habitats at any hour of the day, from anywhere in the world. We can make our homes bright and warm, before we even set foot in the door, and we can keep watch for intruders from thousands of miles away. Who isn’t excited by that?
Beautiful Experiences for Everyone
The Achilles Heel of many smart-home devices is found in the user experience. Many use complicated dashboards or web-based control panels that, for the most part, leave a bitterly disappointing experience that’s frustrates and confuses.
The main reason for that is the inherent difficulty in designing delightful user interfaces. Especially on the desktop and on the browser. Making tech easy, intuitive and beautiful is fundamentally challenging. Interface design on mobile devices is a wildly different beast, though.
Designers have a lot of help. They can use existing (and proven) templates to create intuitive and flowing interfaces. Their hands are steadied by the immense amount of support offered by Google and Apple through their style guides, and they can use front-end frameworks and toolkits like Android Bootstrap.
But more importantly, mobile designers know they’ve got a limited amount of screen-estate to use. They know how to make each pixel count. The end result is that mobile Smart Home apps will inevitably be good, out of necessity.
Smart Homes as Extensions of Smart Phones
One of the biggest, and most criminally underappreciated feature additions to iOS 8 was HomeKit.
HomeKit is a framework that allows developers to build iPhone and iPad applications that communicate with Smart Home devices. So, using this Application Programming Interface (API), developers can natively integrate existing Internet of Things devices, with the second largest smartphone platform in the world. Users can even control their Smart Home gear with Siri.
Manufacturers have been slow to embrace HomeKit, but that’s quickly changing. Recently, Philips Hue Lightbulbs were updated to support HomeKit.
As more and more compatible kit is released, and the profile of things like HomeKit increases, you can expect more people to embrace it. Eventually, it’ll become a feature that influences purchasing decisions, and sways people between iPhone and Android.
You can bet Google are paying attention, too. They already own Nest – one of the biggest manufacturers of smart home tech, best known for their smoke alarms and thermostats – and they’re acutely aware of the constantly changing affections of smartphone users. As more and more people choose to automate their homes, you can bet they’ll respond.
It feels inevitable. People are increasingly going to automate their homes. To control that, they’ll depend on their smartphones and mobile apps. That’s partly due to the ubiquity of smartphones – literally everyone is toting an Android or iOS based device these days. But it’s also because smartphones offer a beautiful and intuitive window into controlling smart home technology.
But what do you think? Will smartphones revolutionize the smart home industry? Tell me about it in the comments below.
It's not uncommon nowadays for someone to own both an iOS and Android device at the same time. Carrying more than one charging cables around is just effort, luckily we finally have a 2-in-1 charging cable that actually works.
LMcable is not only extremely useful, it's nicely designed as well. It comes beautifully wrapped in leather and is available in four different colour schemes. It also comes with a handy brass buckle belt so that you can keep it neatly coiled when not in use.
LMcable is currently on Kickstarter where it has far exceeded its funding goal. Pledges currently start from AU$21 for a single LMcable, so be quick if you want to pick one up.
A popular smartwatch customization platform for Android, Facer, has today made its way to iOS and Apple Watch. While there are already dozens of utilities on the App Store that allow users to better personalize their Apple Watch’s home screen, Facer stands out because of its sizable collection of free watchfaces, range of exclusive content, which also includes premium brands and its web-based watchface design tool.
You may already be familiar with Facer, thanks to its earlier support for Android smartwatches where it has been regularlylisted as one of the top applications for watchface creation. That app has grown its community to hundreds of thousands of users, the company says. (Google Play data confirms this, showing the app has between 100,000 to 500,000 downloads.)
A month ago, the Android application received an update, which brought a lot more content to the platform beyond what was previously available, adding thousands more free watchfaces as well as officially licensed faces from brands like Garfield, Betty Boop and Popeye. Those faces and more are now available for Apple Watch, too.
In addition, the Apple Watch application supports the ability to view the latest images from your Instagram or Tumblr feeds as your watchface. Other themes and channels are also available, including those from partners like Unsplash, Superfamous, Gratisography, Vecteezy, NASA and others.
Or, if you prefer something more educational, the app offers flashcard-style faces that with every flick of your wrist can help you learn the constellations, new languages or about the planets in our solar system.
What’s also interesting about the Facer platform versus a number of the watchface creation utilities available currently is that it offers a way to create and share your personalized watchfaces from the web. With a design tool at facer.io/creator, you can drag and drop onto an HD canvas text, shapes and images from its online library. However, you can do more customizations for Android watch faces, the company’s website notes, as Apple limits editing to wallpaper only.
The company, founded by at team with backgrounds in mobile (including Jamdat Mobile and EA), last year raised $3 million from NEA, Lightspeed Ventures and Lowercase Capital, among others.
In addition to Facer, its lineup of apps includes a bite-sized slots game for Apple Watch as well as The Martian Game, built for the Oscar-nominated movie.
