How does the iPhone 4S’s new cameras 1080p video recording stack up to a pro-level $2300 Canon 5d MKII digital camera? Surprisingly well, as is demonstrated by this video from Robino Films. Both cameras shot footage at the same time and side-by-side, with the scenes in perfect sync so that video can be paused and examined more closely.
The settings for both cameras are as follows:
iPhone 4S
- AE.AF locked. That’s all you have!
Canon 5D MKII
- Canon 50mm 1.4
- ISO 160 ~ 640 (varied per shot to match the iPhone)
- F 7~22 (varied per shot to match the iPhone)
- Shutter 1/60th
- Auto WB
- Standard Picture Style
- 1080p 30
Enter the following command, replacing “http://url.com” no the end with the web address you want to give the user agent to:
curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8) AppleWebKit/535.6.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.2 Safari/535.6.2" http://url.com
You won’t see anything returned from the command line, but if you look in your web logs, you’ll see an appearance of a 10.8 user agent.
This is based on a past tip on changing user agents for web development purposes. If you don’t like the command line, you can also do limited user agent changes in Safari’s Developer menu or by using third party plugins for Chrome and Firefox.
Spoofing the OS X 10.8 User Agent through Safari
An easier command line-free way of doing this is through Safari’s Develop menu, pull down to User Agent and choose “Other” then paste in this:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8) AppleWebKit/535.6.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.2 Safari/535.6.2
Thanks to @polislix for the reminder and WP for the screenshot
Not surprisingly, Mac OS X 10.8 development is well under way, and some Apple employees are using the OS on a regular enough basis for them to show up in analytics logs across the Apple web. Our own OS X 10.8 usage graph is shown above, which shows a clear uptick in everyday use of the development OS over the past few months. Narrowing down for IP and location, the majority of visits are coming from Apple in Cupertino, California, with the remainder popping up around the San Francisco Bay Area.
We first noticed a blip for the next version of Mac OS X back in July before the launch of OS X Lion. Since then, visits have picked up to a steady level, suggesting that internal builds of OS X 10.8 are stable enough for developers and engineers to be using on a daily basis. More evidence is shown in the logs of MacRumors, who first published their findings yesterday:
Practically nothing is known about Mac OS X 10.8, but speculation assumes that more features from iOS will make their way into the next version of Mac OS, in addition to having more deeply integrated iCloud support.
If you’ve downloaded Adobe Acrobat on the Mac you’ve probably discovered that it takes over Preview as the default PDF viewer in OS X, which is annoying because Acrobat is slow to load and a fairly bloated application. There’s little need to use Acrobat Reader as the way to view PDF files, so here’s how to change it back to Preview.
Change the Default PDF Viewer in Mac OS X
From the Mac OS X desktop, find a PDF file and hit Command+i to “Get Info” on the file
Click on the arrow next to “Open with:” to expand and access the default application list
Click the pull-down menu and choose “Preview” from the list, or if it’s not visible, navigate to it by choosing “Other”
With Preview.app selected, click on the “Change All” button
This will restore the leaner and very capable Preview app as the default PDF viewer in OS X and prevent the lengthy launch of Acrobat anytime a PDF is opened. This tip will be of less use if you need the full functioned Acrobat version, but for the average person just looking to quickly open pdf docs this can be a significant time saver.
If you have a newer MacBook Air you should pay attention. Some of the MacBook Airs are shipping with Samsung displays, and some are shipping with LG displays, both are quality displays, but the LG’s default color profile is lighter and a bit flat. Most users probably won’t notice this, but if you sit a MacBook Air with a Samsung display next to one with the LG display, you can see the difference. This is easily remedied by using a custom color profile that has better gamma. This post will walk you through how to check which manufacturers panel you have, and also show you how to add a custom color profile that makes the LG display just as gorgeous as the Samsung.
Read the output, you are looking for an “LP” prefix to numbers reported back:
LP133WP1-TJA3
Color LCD
If the prefix is not “LP” then you have a Samsung display and there’s no need to use the color profile or to follow the rest of the instructions, if it does start with LP (like the example shown), then proceed
Add a Custom Color Profile for the MacBook Air’s LG Display
A user on MacRumors forums put together a custom color profile that really sharpens the display of the LG displays in some 2011 MacBook Air machines. Again, if you don’t have an LG display then you shouldn’t use this profile. Adding this color profile is reversible and you can always go back to the default if you don’t like it.
Apple has started to air three new iPhone 4S TV commercials. The first, titled “Siri, Snow Today”, is similar to the last Siri iPhone 4S commercial and features people asking Siri a variety of questions and getting responses.
The next commercial is titled “iCloud” and shows an iPhone 4S automatically syncing and uploading documents, changes, music, and pictures to an iPad, MacBook Air, and iMac through the iCloud service: Read more »
Mona Simpson, an author and the biological sister of Steve Jobs, wrote a wonderful eulogy to Steve that was delivered on October 16th at a private memorial service.
I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.
The eulogy is moving and a must read, in it, Steve’s final words are revealed for the first time. No spoilers, just read the article on the New York Times:
Siri, the intelligent virtual assistant that is currently exclusive to iPhone 4S, has been effectively ported to iPhone 4 and iPod touch. More importantly, it actually works this time around and there are two videos demonstrating the two devices taking voice commands and Siri reporting back.
In a discussion between the iOS developer Troughton-Smith, who completed the port, and 9to5mac, who first published it, is a warning that files from an iPhone 4S are required, in addition to a jailbreak:
… It does require files from an iPhone 4S which aren’t ours to distribute, and it also requires a validation token from the iPhone 4S that has to be pulled live from a jailbroken iPhone 4S, and it’s about a 20-step process right now.
This suggests the mod will be limited to individuals who own an iPhone 4S in addition to other compatible hardware, making them responsible for copying their own Siri files over. Regardless, that is likely against Apple’s EULA with iOS and Siri, but the importance of the port functioning is the proof that Siri does work on older iOS hardware, although some devices run into complications. On the iPhone 4, Siri appears to be working fine and with the same fluidity as that seen on the iPhone 4S, but apparently the iPod touch’s microphone isn’t as sharp as the iPhone models, forcing the user to speak slower and louder for Siri to pick up voice commands. The latter example could also impact the iPad 2, which has seen the port too, and this could be why Apple did not release Siri to other hardware with iOS 5.
Here are the videos showing Siri working on an iPhone 4 alongside an iPhone 4S:
And a video of Siri working on the iPod touch 4th gen: Read more »
Bored with Launchpads background? You can make some changes to it in Mac OS X Lion by changing the background images default blur effect to three other options: unblurred (shown above), black and white blur, or black and white unblurred (both shown below):
Open Launchpad
Hit Command+B to cycle through the background image effects
Hitting Command+B once should just remove the blur from the background image, which makes Launchpad more closely resemble the iOS springboard. You can use the keystroke a few more times to switch into black and white or to go back to the default blur.
Here’s another nice background picture, by request, it’s the blue sky star field wallpaper that was shown in a recent screenshot of Mission Control. This one isn’t part of a pack, but it does include the base PSD file so you can make your own variations of the blue night sky if you are up for it.
