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Smartphones in this touchscreen form are not among us for a very long time. Even though before the year of 2007 the origin of app based mobile phones existed within variety of BlackBerry brand models and prototypes in Nokia and NTT DoCoMo labs, only after capacitive touchscreen matured enough to be industrialized and embedded into popular handheld devices, the smartphone revolution started to be really interesting and competitive. Today, after only a decade the smartphone market is one of the most valuable on the planet and apps stores reached the limit of 2 million per platform. There are literally zillion of apps out there and browsing the apps libraries became the real effort. Anyhow, today and after dozen of years after first touchscreen smartphones (LG Prada and iPhone) hit the stores, Viktor and I decided to film/write about dozen of apps that are little bit unusual and extraordinary compared to those that are used on daily basis by most of us. To start with, let's fi

Wearable technology can’t be dismissed as a fad anymore. Its steady rise in popularity proves these devices are here to stay. Thus, they’ve naturally had an impact on Android and iOS mobile app development . The significance of wearable technology’s influence will only grow as prices drop and more consumers embrace these products. Approximately 141 million smartwatches have already been sold this year alone. It’s highly likely that number will be even higher next year. The most popular wearable devices currently belong to three basic groups. They include: Smartwatches: Products such as the Apple Watch essentially introduced many consumers to the idea of wearables. These devices are unlike traditional ones in that they are capable of doing more than simply displaying the time. A smartwatch can typically send email alerts, help users navigate unfamiliar areas, facilitate calls, and more. Fitness Trackers: Wrist-worn fitness trackers may look somewhat like smartwatches. However, th

Most of the popular digital and DSLR cameras are perfectly equipped for macro photos. Taking a great photo by zooming to the scene not farther than 20-30 centimeters is a little effort and requires only clicking the shutter button and leaving all the technicalities to the camera's automated software. Even the cheap lenses can do that without a problem. While ago I collected some of those photos and wrote a little about macro photography and how to record all the close objects not very distant from our nose. But, can we do closer than that? Can we take a photo of an object like top of the pencil, as close as couple of millimeters away from the lens, for example, like the one in this photo: Dot-sized larvae of cricket or grasshopper invading our balcony flowerpot Well, not with a consumer camera, not without specialized optics. However, "augmenting" our smartphones to do the magic is just a little effort. And yes, I took above photo with only my smartphone, addi

History of motion pictures dates back to the second part of the 19th century with photographers like Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge who among others were the first to take several images per second in one effort - all in scientific purpose back then - to study locomotion of birds, animals and humans. For example, Muybridge was the first who took series of photographs of a galloping horse in order to prove that in one single instant of time all four horse legs are not touching the ground. More or less in the same time on another continent, Marey created a shotgun shaped camera capable with one trigger pull to capture 12 images in a row within one single second and store them all on the single 90mm film. He used his gun to study various motion of animals, fish and insects within his so called 'animated zoo', including dropped cats from different heights and filming them always landing on their feet. ELMO Super 106, 8mm movie camera It was not long after initia

Languages always change when we change. Evolutionary speaking and over long period of time. Especially when we mix with others or change environment and move to different places. English is perfect example - perhaps it is the only language spoken with that many variations created from country to country, all over the world, from New Zealand throughout India toward Canada and even in those places on Earth where it is not language number one. Believe it or not, there are thousands of spoken languages throughout our planet today and with people migration over eons, mixing multiple languages into new ones are well recorded in our history. New languages created in that fashion are well known as creoles, most of them connected to the recent colonialism when two cultures or more collided for a longer period in time. Perhaps the most known of them all (and spoken by most of their population) are Haitian, Jamaican and Hawaiian creoles - mixture of French (Haiti) and English (Jamaica and Hawai

Is Internet dangerous? Well, yes we know all the hazards of spending all the work hours behind monitor screens, browsing the web at home, doing social networking, playing online games, watching YouTube, staring at smartphone little displays or for whatever reasons we sit above our keyboards most of the time every day. That's indeed what we first think of all the negative aspects of mighty global network, but today I am not referring to all the potential medical issues inherited from too long sitting on the chair or everyday looking into LCD screen. I also don't mean the obvious social and/or physiological outcomes from letting the virtual world to take over the real one for more and more people every day. No, I mean the real danger. Did Internet overcome the pure network system and became a tool for mass destruction or a background tool for criminal activities? Can someone use the internet to hurt somebody or to perform a murder? Either directly or indirectly? Can some organisa

In the past shooting close-up images was in the area of true professionals. It required expensive equipment and large SLR photo cameras with special lenses capable of taking photos in true 1:1 ratio. In simple words it means that the object you are photographing appears in the same size in camera's sensor as in real life. Well, contrary to what we might think today with all those cheap compact and digital SLR photo cameras to take truly astonishing photo of amazing micro world it still requires not so cheap lenses and matching specially designed flashes. Nikon P500 in 'action' However, new digital photo world in its 'blooming' era in previous decade brought something else to the scene. Something equally important and with quality far beyond we used to in previous 'analog' world. Actually, two new things are introduced in the business - computerization of the camera and large worldwide competition between leading manufacturers. First one brought simp