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With Rama, iPhone becomes tour guide to the past

Erica Ogg — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:00:04 +0000

Tour of the history of the Brooklyn Bridge

Smartphone-toting history geeks like myself have probably noticed that apps for uploading geo-tagged historical photos to a map is a popular idea right now. History Pin, the Google-backed non-profit, and What Was There both launched recently with similar ideas: Use the ubiquity of mobile devices to teach people about how the world around them looked in the past. Think of Rama as that, but with a curated historical narrative, and a revenue-making model.

As cool as some of us might find seeing pictures on our smartphone of, say, what San Francisco City Hall looked like right after the 1906 earthquake when we’re standing right in front of the gleaming building in the city’s Civic Center, Michael Carroll decided it was much more useful to also explain all the related historical events and context of why, for instance, some buildings were damaged more than others, and why a massive fire broke out.

So he went and built an app (that’s free in the iOS App Store) that has historical background info and photos on an interactive mobile map. They’re divided into tours (starting at 99 cents) that can be submitted by anyone, but fact-checked and edited by Rama.

“About 70 percent of our tours are written by people that submitted stuff,” Carroll says. What he sees as the differentiating factor of his app versus other crowdsourced historical apps is, “We review the core ideas [of a tour] to see if it’s something that’s an interesting historical story. It can’t just be the history of this [random] street. It has to have a narrative to focus to it that makes it intriguing.”

He also tries to keep the tours’ appeal broad, like “Artistic Paris of the 1900s,” which is a guide to hotspots and meaningful locations visited by the American expat community of the early 20th century — think Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, etc. — around Paris, complete with geotagged photos and the stories behind them. There are also guides for major cities like New York City, Jerusalem, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Rome, Athens, Cairo, London and more. They usually revolve around a theme: Revolutionary Cairo, Plague of London, 1930s Bangkok, Abe Lincoln’s Washington, D.C., Revolutionary Philadelphia, and so on.

After Apple takes its share of the in-app purchases of tours through Rama, Brooklyn-based parent company Bamboo Crimson splits the revenues from the tours sold with their creators. Carroll has no plans to offer ads right now. It’s a pretty spare operation the company’s got going: Carroll is one of two founders behind Crimson Bamboo, and he and co-founder Ivy Wu bootstrapped the company. They outsource at least some of their development overseas and do the curating of tours themselves.

The app is iPhone-only for now, but they plan to offer an Android version sometime next year. Also soon to come is the ability to do offline tours when Wi-Fi or 3G is not available. I happen to love this idea because it’s cheap and is a great way of using widely available devices to teach people about the past. Plus, travelers can skip the tour bus/duckboat.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Marcin Wichary

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Adding GPS info to iPhoto with myTracks

Geoffrey Goetz — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 18:32:40 +0000

Keeping track of where you’ve taken photos is not as easy as you might think. Your iPhone automatically geotags images, but most digital cameras aren’t GPS-enabled. Apple’s own iPhoto has a manual process that doesn’t make it very easy to add the data after the fact. With the help of Dirk Stichling’s myTracks for iPhone, iPad and Mac, the task of geo-tagging photos becomes much, much easier.

Collecting GPS information

Two important pieces of info are required for adding GPS data to your photos. The first is the latitude and longitude where the photo was taken. The second, equally critical piece of information, is the date and time the camera was at that location. This is the key to automatically matching up the GPS data with photos.

When it comes to figuring out where a shot was taken, there are three main sources that myTracks can use:

1. GPS data logger. One way to collect this information is to invest in a GPS data logger. There are several Mac-friendly GPS data loggers on the market to choose from. These standalone units will keep track of where you and your camera have been without draining your other device batteries. myTracks can then import the location information directly from the logger itself, or indirectly through GPX or KML files. Under the hood, myTracks uses the open-source library LoadMyTracks to support a wide range of GPS devices. If you find that your device is not supported, you may need to use a utility like HoudahGPS to convert the data to a format that myTracks supports.

2. iPhone sync. If you have an iPhone, then you already have a basic GPS logger. In fact, I’ve found the tracking capabilities of the iOS version of myTracks to be great, and it offers a built-in sync feature that will allow you to transfer location information directly from your iPhone to the Mac version of myTracks. If you prefer using a different GPS tracking app, then you’ll need to export the data and import it into myTracks using either the GPX or KML file format.

3. Track from photos. The simplest way to collect the location information you need is to take a series of reference photos along the way with the default camera app that came with your iPhone. Provided you are adding location information to your photos on your iPhone, myTracks can create a track from your iPhone’s library. From the Tools menu in myTracks, select “Create track from photos…” and select the photos you want to create a track from.

Adding GPS Information to your photos

Now that you have your track loaded into myTracks, the first thing you will want to do is ensure that your camera’s clock is in sync with your GPS data, as well as any of the other cameras you may use. Once you’ve made any time adjustments to your photos, you’re ready to add the GPS info. MyTracks supports adding GPS location information to photos in iPhoto, Aperture and Adobe Lightroom as well as any folder of images on your Mac. The following steps are for iPhoto ’11, since that’s the program most will likely use:

After importing tracks into myTracks, select the track that has the GPS information you want to sync.
Open iPhoto and select the photos you want to add the GPS information to.
Drag the photos from iPhoto onto myTracks.
Make any final adjustments in myTracks’s Pool of Photos to align the GPS track info with the photo time stamp.
Click Start in myTracks Pool of Photos and select the GeoTag option.
In iPhoto, select the photos you tagged, and from the Photo menu, “Rescan for Location.”

Reviewing and sharing your mapped photos

Once you have added the GPS information, using it to help illustrate your life’s adventures is much easier. You can sync your track and photos to the iPad version of myTracks, or post the images to one of the many online photo sharing sites that support geotagged photos, including Flickr.

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Weekly App Store Picks: September 26, 2009

Olly Farshi — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 16:00:19 +0000

As another week draws to a close, the App Store expands even further with a torrent of new toys and tools. As ever, I’ve hand-picked four recent iPhone releases for you to take a look at.

This week I’ve given our picks a creative vibe, selecting four different apps that let you engage with your artistic and cultural side. My top pick for the week is Xewton Music Studio, plus I’ve been looking at Snapture, GraffitiGeo and McSweeney’s.

Xewton Music Studio ($19.99)

Armed with an iPhone, there’s never been so much choice for making music on the move. Despite all the choice, the recording app I keep coming back to is FourTrack. It’s a fully-featured 4 track recorder, complete with bouncing, panning, metronome and Wi-Fi sharing.

When it comes to full on audio sequencing and sketching out bigger ideas, I head for Intua’s BeatMaker. The app costs twenty bucks, but for producers it’s definitely worth it: this is about as close to Ableton Live as you’ll get on your iPhone.

Now it looks like I might be adding Xewton Music Studio to my iPhone audio app lineup. Rather than put the focus on electronica, like Beatmaker, Music Studio is essentially a sequencer designed with traditional composers and songwriters in mind.

Xewton Music Studio includes 21 instruments, a 128-track sequencer, piano-roll note editor, real-time effects and lots more. Although the app may well take some time to learn, it’s powerful enough to potentially become a useful composition tool for many musicians.

Snapture ($1.99)

With Flickr, QuadCamera and PhotoForge handling all of the photo processing on my iPhone, I wasn’t sure if there was room for another camera app. Arriving at the App Store by way of Cydia, Snapture is a very tempting and feature-packed photo processing tool. Tempting as it is for my 3GS, this recommendation is for 3G users only.

The app rolls in a raft of useful functions, such as High Speed Multishot and Level Aid. Plus, once you’ve taken your photos, you can stay within the app to browse and manage your library.

It’s worth noting that the app currently doesn’t make use of the 3GS iPhone’s tap-to-focus functionality. While Snapture works well enough on Apple’s latest device, I would urge 3GS owners to hold out until the app integrates this much requested feature.

GraffitiGeo (Free)

Last Summer I signed a two-year contract with Sonera and received a white iPhone 3G. After arriving home and spending far too long trying to decide if I should film the unboxing (I didn’t), I tore away the packing, activated my iPhone and headed for the App Store.

One of the first apps that I downloaded was Graffitio, an old-school bulletin board that included geo-location support. After tagging various locations and adding a few messages, I got a little bored. The app’s long lists of tiny text felt too plain for my iPhone.

Released this Summer, GraffitiGeo takes the location tagging concept even further. The app feels like a fun version of Dopplr — as a tool, GraffitiGeo is useful for finding food, events and places of interest. And it’s surprisingly compelling as a toy too, as you’re able to form gangs and earn achievements. Definitely one to check out for iPhone owners in big cities.

McSweeney’s (99 cents)

McSweeney’s has always been a reliable destination for deliciously absurd, charming, silly, classy and fun literary offerings. While there are longer pieces to delve into, my favorite is a very short piece by Mike Ward called, E-mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying To Give Out Over The Phone.

Regular readers of McSweeney’s monochromatic online offering will be used to getting their fix for free. Although the iPhone app isn’t free, it includes access to a weekly fix of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

The most promising aspect of McSweeney’s iPhone app is that it includes a six month subscription to the Small Chair. Every single week for the next six months you’ll receive scrummy multimedia blips — songs, videos, stories and such — from clever creative folk like Spike Jonze, Chris Ware and Jonathan Ames.

That’s all the picks for this week. I’ll be back in seven days with a fresh selection of App Store recommendations.

In the meantime, what apps have you been using this week?

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Exclusive Eye-Fi Geo Card Comes to Apple Stores

Darrell Etherington — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:04:39 +0000

I’ve always been tempted to try out an Eye-Fi SD flash memory card, which allows you to wirelessly upload photos directly from your camera to a nearby Mac or PC on the same network. Perhaps a bit anachronistically, since they seem to be far and away the leading digital memory format, but I don’t actually have a camera that uses SD. What with the price of point-and-shoots these days, I may soon rectify that situation, and Apple’s just given me another incentive.

As of today, Apple Stores (online and retail) will be the exclusive distributor of the brand new Eye-Fi Geo 2GB SD card. As its name implies, it will allow you to geotag your photos in addition to transferring them wirelessly to your computer. The new geotagging feature will allow you to use the Places feature in iPhoto ’09 by including metadata with every picture taken on the card about where it was shot.

Out of the box, the iPhone supports geotagging, but it isn’t yet a feature often included in most consumer digital cameras. The limited availability of the Eye-Fi Geo suggests that the reason why is that Apple is the only consumer photo library application to foreground geotagging capabilities. If you’d rather not pay a premium for the fancy new card, which costs $60 and only offers 2GB of storage, you can always manually enter location information into iPhoto after you’ve uploaded your photos.

In addition to geotagging, the Eye-Fi Geo offers the option to upload directly to MobileMe galleries or to various other social-networking sites, but for an additional $10 fee, which presumably activates a built-in software feature. I’ve yet to really use the geotagging features of iPhoto, but this card, and the added convenience of wireless uploading, has me mighty tempted to give it a try. Anyone picking one up and eager to share their impressions?

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iPhoto ’09: Face Detection, Place Detection, and Amazing Slideshows

Weldon Dodd — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:17:11 +0000

When highlighting the new updates to iLife ’09 today, Phil Schiller probably spent the most time highlighting the new features in iPhoto. There’s lots to like in this ’09 update and the crowd was definitely “wowing” at some of the cool stuff that was demonstrated.

First up are two brand-new features to help you organize your photos. Apple has had a really positive response to the Events feature in iPhoto ’08 and now Faces and Places will allow you to further organize your pictures by who appears in the picture and where it was taken.

Faces

There are two aspects to Faces in iPhoto ’09. The first is face detection which allows iPhoto to automatically discover all the faces that appear in the photo. This allows iPhoto to present the people to you for identification, but also shows up in other features like slideshows where the photos are automatically centered and cropped so that the faces in the frame will be visible and prominent. The tech worked beautifully in the demo we saw at the Keynote.

The second part of Faces is face recognition. iPhoto ’09 will learn to identify people in your photos as you tag the faces in photos. This feature is hard to evaluate without trying on your own photos, but the demo is impressive. Schiller was quick to point out that no facial recognition system is perfect, but Apple feels that they have the best software technology available on the desktop. It was impressive to see how seamlessly it all integrated.

Once you start tracking faces, those people show up on your corkboard organizer with snapshots for each person (centered and cropped to focus on the face detected in the picture, of course).

This feature is going to be great for organizing all my pictures of the kids, but I suspect that iPhoto may get confused by pictures of the same person at different ages, say from age 3 to age 14. We’ll see how it works out in practice.

Places

iPhoto ’09 also lets you organize your pictures by where you took the photo by using geotags from a GPS-enabled camera, or an iPhone 3G. You can also add geotags to photos that do not already have them. This feature is also incredibly well-integrated into the iPhoto app. To add a geotag, you can select a spot on the map or just type in the name of a location. iPhoto will automatically georeference the location to nearby landmarks and the city and country.

You can then use a map or an iTunes-style browser to drill-down and filter photos on locations in your library. Places is integrated into photo books as well. As an example, iPhoto will automatically generate maps with pins for the location of the photos on that page in your book.

Facebook & Flickr Sharing

iPhoto also adds new sharing capabilities that integrate directly with two popular photo sites — Flickr for your good photos and Facebook for all the crappy snapshots of your friends. The Facebook integration is particularly cool. iPhoto uses the face recognition technology to automatically tag your photos with the Facebook profile of your friends. You need to enter their full name and email address so that iPhoto can link them with a Facbook profile. The cool thing is that this feature works both ways. If someone tags a picture on Facebook that you have uploaded from iPhoto, that tag will automatically get synced back down to iPhoto. You can then choose to track that person in Faces and iPhoto will use face recognition to automatically tag pictures in the future.

The Flickr integration is cool as well, and a definite blow to the well-liked FlickrExport from ConnectedFlow.

The Rest

iPhoto also adds some enhanced editing features that look like they were taken from Aperture. The color saturation sliders are particularly helpful in Aperture for bringing out highlights and making the sky look like something that actually resembles blue if you forgot your polarizing filter. I’d love to get some of that power in iPhoto.

There are also new themed slideshows that look absolutely fantastic. Shatter is going to blow your mind when you get chance to see it in action on the keynote video (up later today on apple.com). They use face detection to automatically center and crop your images so that you don’t end up with people out of the frame or other problems.

A Must Buy

I left the keynote address this morning with my wallet screaming to buy iLife ’09. Honestly, if iPhoto were the only app in the suite, I would probably still want iLife just for that. The face detection and recognition features give me some hope of organizing all my photos so that I can quickly find actual people in my library and geotagging with Places is an OCD dream. Facebook and Flickr pushes it over the top for me as I use those two sites extensively.

Check out the info on apple.com and share your impressions below.

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