The Websolace

You’ve probably seen me with a status of “View my Webcam” on Yahoo! Messenger too often these past weeks.

That’s because I have a new toy.

..and it’s called WebcamMax! (check it out and get yourself a trial at http://www.webcammax.com/)

It makes me feel less insecure about the petty things like facial appearance. I believe I look a ton better using it.

Looking… cute.

You know this wouldn’t be just any technology review if there wasn’t at least a bit of technical stuff in it. The concept is easy! WebcamMax installs it’s own video source driver, think of it like adding another hardware webcam in your computer with your existing webcam feeding to it. Basically, it’s a middleman between your webcam and the actual output (Yahoo! Messenger, WLM or another video capture program*); best described as post processing for your webcam! Outlined it’s Webcam (the actual source) -> WebcamMax (for effects processing) -> Output (probable internet fame).

Bored.

Personally, this product shines because I’ve always enjoyed having my picture taken in one of those cute pink Japanese photobooths where you get to play around with the picture and take home stickers. Yep, pretty manly stuff for a manly man like me. Now with WebcamMax… I can take my manly habits to the next level.. with movement… AND ON THE INTERNET! Everybody loves a good e-go. It’s really just the fun effects that makes you feel a lot, lot, younger than you really are.

Other awesome things? SCREEN CAPTURE. I cannot stress this enough. The screen capture part is FRIKKEN COOL. You can set it to capture your whole screen so your buddies can see you play Farcry on your new badass computer. Practically speaking, I’ve found it REAL USEFUL when I’m trying to help someone with their computer problem, it’s a good way to avoid having to remotely connect to his computer, or worse.. being physically summoned.

One neat effect I like is this one which displays the time. Timestamping on the actual video output can be real useful in many different situations. Other than that, it just sparks my inner geekiness.

More features? Yes. Aside from webcam post processing, screen capturing… YOU CAN ACTUALLY FEED IT A MOVIE SOURCE. I frikken kid you not. Best of all, since processing is done client side, if your computer can play it… you won’t run into codec problems streaming it. Additionally you can use a picture or a blank background of whatever color you wish! The latter is useful for … doodling….. Yep DOODLING! You can ‘doodle’ on whatever source you’re using, be it a webcam, screen capture.. you get the point.

I’m sorry for this badly outlined review, there’s literally TOO MUCH features to share about WebcamMax. One thing I’m finding hard to gauge is what’s more useful to me and so far… all of ‘em. These pictures I posted weren’t gotten off a screencapture and cropped off using another program, it does that for you and video recording.. with sound too. Now thats something I should have said sooner, but again, there’s too much cool stuff to mention!!

If I haven’t mentioned.. it also works on more than a dozen IM clients, some I haven’t even used since I’m only on Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger. In fact, it should work on any program (whether or not it’s an IM client) as long as it can support video feed off a video source. Awesome, really.

My rating? A 10 out of 10. It’s vast library of fun effects to revolutionize the way you… ‘camwhore’ will come in handy someday. Well, if you’re butt ugly the Brad Pitt mask should. Don’t ever take it off. Seriously though, if you’ve ever found yourself in a similar situation where in this product has helped me (like for helpng people troubleshoot their computer), consider buying this product. Get your trial copy first at http://www.webcammax.com/.

Happy camming!

Now here’s an interesting one.

I accientally threw my N95 out of a moving car and surprisingly it’s still working, but due to my being OCD, I cannot bare to use it without looking at the scratches every now and then………… so I had to resort to use the only working phone in the house –the iPhone!

You may know me as a big hater of the iPhone and yes nothing much has changed. I still don’t understand why people like the iPhone.

Unlike my other post I really have used an iPhone now (more than a week now I believe) and guess what… MAKES NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL.

Let’s get down to the basics shall we?

With the iPhone you get these preinstalled applications:

• Phone - for access to calls and contacts, with the new firmware there’s also a separate application called Contacts
• SMS
• Safari - it’s web browser
• Mail - for e-mail
• Calendar
• Photos/Camera
• Calculator
• Clock
• Notes
• Youtube/Stocks/Maps/Weather/iTunes/AppStore - web powered applications
• .. and of course, it’s an iPod too!

I FAIL to see the desirability of it’s features for it’s price and overmarketed hype. It DOESN’T have anything any phone made in 2007 or to be specific, 2006 doesn’t already have. Multi-touch? Cool but seriously a failed implementation.

To give you an indepth review of this device let’s go through some of the applications listed above:

Phone - Horribly designed user interface, especially when using the iPhone with one hand you’ll find yourself in an uncomfortable position to hold it as you’re going to rely on your thumb to go through your Favorites, Recents, Contacts, Keypad and Voicemail, depending on the size of your hand, may tilt the iPhone in a way that it’s liable to drop. On another note, Favorites was a nice idea to implement on a phone lacking speed dialing.

Additionally I did have problems in this part. Synchronizing with Outlook was a breeze, too bad it had to go wrong in some areas. It doesn’t sync all your contacts as they appear in Outlook. For example, on my best friend’s contact profile I have both her US and local number stored. They’re neaty defined as both Mobile Phones, in my best understanding, in the iPhone you can have a contact with two or more mobile phones. So yeah, if you were like me you probably wouldn’t worry about anything not synchronizing well, well.. you would be wrong too! It appears as though whatever was responsble for synching my contacts (iTunes) MAGICALLY picked only one of the two numbers. So here I am in the Philippines not noticing all this time that I’m actually texting her US number who now belongs to some pissed off guy receiving gibberish text messages from another country. FAIL.

SMS - Someone finally got it right! Whoever created SMS probably had one way messaging in mind, sorta like how paging works. Hence why most mobile phones handle SMSes by having multiple threads of messages, even if it’s from the same person. The iPhone handles SMSes like instant messaging, best of all it has timestamps and will properly place any delayed messages in their proper chronological order to avoid further confusion when your mobile network is clogging up. What sucks? Well is that it doesn’t handle archiving like our IM clients do. I personally like having a copy of conversations for future blackma….reference. In fact I have about 400,000 or more probably worth of text messages backed up from my N95.

Over the past few days I’ve come to realize that I have to stop bashing the iPhone because I can’t text with one hand or that I may never find my way around it without looking because of the lack of buttons. I’ve made my peace with touch screen devices……. I’m STILL ANNOYED AT THE IPHONE THOUGH. WHY CAN’T I TURN OFF THE SPELL CHECKER? Why? WHY? It’s EVIL. For really long messages I find myself with more than fifty unnecessary taps at my Taglish message compositions. MAN I’D LOVE TO GET RID OF THIS PHONE JUST BECAUSE OF THAT. How ignorant is Apple? They’re releasing this phone to other countries which are not necessarily English speaking too!

Safari - Someone.. got it right again. Safari has to be where the iPhone shines, in fact, you can happily avoid the iPhone and just get the iTouch just for the browser. It’s fast and the multi-touch interface really shines here the best. It feels fluid to use and FAMILIAR. Good job Apple, good job.

Photos/Camera - Browsing through photos is mediocre; zooming in photos is fun though. The camera….. well.. we all know megapixels don’t matter. If you didn’t … to quickly explain and debunk the whole megapixel myth.. well, megapixels is simply a measurement of how big (literally) the image is going to be. Like VGA for example translates to a resolution of 640×480 or 0.3 megapixels. Where did I get that 0.3? Well 0.3 actually means 300,000 pixels… by multiplying 640 and 480! Image quality is found somewhere else and on many factors. The iPhone.. does *again*… mediocre at this. Actually, it fails. If the iPhone came out about two years early it would have been great, but in this day and age where it’s competitors are giving digital cameras a run for their money …. phone cameras shouldn’t BE just phone cameras.

Youtube/Stocks/Maps/Weather/iTunes/AppStore - Youtube is nice, I love being able to watch videos over a wireless network without a computer, the search functionality works like a charm. As for the other applications they really don’t cater much to me at all. Stocks is a nice attempt to lure businessmen on using this phone though, but… still fails!

iPod - Works like a charm. Sadly the phone itself somewhat fails at it’s implementation. One huge problem I have with it is that I can’t change songs while the iPhone is in my pocket. I know you can probably get an external remote for it but I’m just saying, you can’t… this is another feature best left for the tactile response of something awesome called buttons. Oh yeah, album view or whatever it’s called.. gets boring after a while. No pracitcal use other than brag rights on how clean your music library is.

Overall.. what do I have to say about the iPhone?

Sucks, stay away from it. The only good thing about this phone is an game not bundled with it.. and it’s called aMaze!. By the way, when you get one, ditch AppStore and jailbreak it. It’s easy. Ask me how!

Oh by the way, I went to Nokia Care and it’s going to take about a month for the parts to come from Singapore. SO yeah.. about three more weeks with this thing.