Mas musgo

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WhatsApp, Beluga and Viber

There are a couple of iPhone apps that I started using recently. One is WhatsApp which is a cross-platform mobile messaging app which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS.

A cool thing is that it is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Nokia.

In addition to basic messaging iPhone, Android and BlackBerry WhatsApp Messenger users can send each other unlimited images, video and audio media messages and even a map with your current location.

The nice thing they just add with 2.6.x version is Group Chats. It took me a while to find how they worked. Go to Chats and pull down. A menu appears on top with broadcast message and group chat. Groups could contain 5 people at this point, but it is great.

Check here:

For this you could also use Beluga which is basically for group texting plus a cool map to see where all your friends from a group are. The cool thing about Beluga is that you can create groups easily: a group for the ski outing, then see where everybody is and chat and send photos for free. WhatsApp groups has not the map with everybody but the rest you can do too, and more! share voice messages, videos, …

The third app I wanted to talk about is Viber. Viber is an iPhone application so far, but coming soon on Android and Blackberry. It lets you make free phone calls to other iPhone users that have Viber installed.

When you use Viber, your phone calls to any other Viber user are free, and the sound quality is much better than a regular call. You can call any Viber user, anywhere in the world, for free.

You could argue that for this you have skype or other messenger, but I was surprised to see how many people of my contact list (it scans it) had it. Also it just runs on the back, it uses push so you don’t drain battery.

Texture

Chains

Yvoire

Sunrise in Geneva

Fiat door handle

The eye

Sofa

Ñ

Shot with iPhone 4 and the app use to create this effect is called TiltShift

Posted from Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.

Google Translate App for the iPhone

The official Google Translate for iPhone app is now available in the App Store.

The iPhone app [iTunes link] allows you to translate from and to 15 languages and to translate words and phrases into more than 50 languages.

You can also listen to your translations spoken aloud in 23 different languages. One can also zoom in on text to read it more easily, as well.

Red

sun rising

Using autostitch

iPhoto duplicates

Since I have my iPhone 4 I have noticed that iPhoto sometimes imports things twice from my iPhone, so I end up with some duplicates.

I don’t know if this is due to the fact that I have tons of photos in the iPhone and in the iPhoto, or that this is the 4th iPhone synchronizing with iPhoto or that we are synchronizing 2 iPhones…

What I know is that I have duplicates and I could not find an easy way to get rid of them…

I use iPhoto on my macbook to sync my iPhones photos. The iPhone camera has become my main camera.

My nikon d300 I sync with a PC (multimedia) running windows 7 and picasa (more than 250Gb of photos).

iPhoto duplicates: Solution

I found and bought this program: Duplicate Annihilator.

Basically what it does is to identify the duplicate photos and add a comment saying that it is a duplicate. They you can search them and bin them. Pretty straight forward. It has many options but the default worked fine for me.

The problem is that the thumbnails can be duplicated too, and even if they have another program for that, if you start iPhoto holding Command Key+Option, then you have the option of rebuilding thumbnails.

The features of the Duplicate Annihilator are:

• Easily find and annihilate duplicates created internally by iPhoto or during import.
• Compare images using different algorithms to detect and understand differences.
• Detect duplicates using effective algorithms using electronic checksums like MD5 and CRC32.
• Detect duplicates by using file specific meta data such as filename, dimensions, filesize, Exif creation date or date of creation.
• Delete duplicates upon detection or mark them with a keyword to make them easily found using iPhoto features like search or smart folders.
• Makes your iPhoto slimmer and faster.
• Only uses standard Apple features and API’s. No hacking nor tampering with iPhoto system files.
• Free updates.