iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

As has been mentioned some weeks ago, it's pretty easy to record GPS information and, later, incorporate it into photos taken on a non-GPS-enabled camera.

Unfortunately, the current camera lineup doesn't really please people that would like to geotag their shots. Neither the, because of the high price-value ratio or high image quality (IQ), most popular point-and-shoot (P&S) or DSLR (including mirrorless [aka EVIL] or some lower-end [Sony] SLT) cameras have built-in GPS modules.

Some examples of the current, most popular cameras lacking any GPS support:

P&S-style "luxury" fixed-lens camera

Tomorrow is "Dress up like Steve Jobs day." The idea for this Facebook event came from iPhone Life staff, who announced it last week. You are invited to dress up like Steve to honor his extraodinary contribution to the world. And you can post your photo on the Facebook event page. We'll be publishing the best photos.

Flash support has always (according to some people, painfully) been missing from the iOS platform. In the article below, I explain how you can watch any kind of Flash videos (via SkyFire) and how you can use full(!) Flash (and even Silverlight!) applications on your iPad (via AlwaysOnPC). All this without having to jailbreak!

Pure Flash videos

Summertime is vacation time. And if you use campgrounds when you're vacationing, you'll want to check out Woodall’s RV & Camping Copilot (free). It lists more than 12,000 private and public campgrounds and RV parks in the United States and Canada, plus Mexico. It offers campground information, including amenities, services, types of campsites, on-site recreation, as well as identifying many camping discounts offered at parks. Private campgrounds also include Woodall's 5W/5W Rating System.

In my ongoing series on novel uses of the iPhone and iPad camera, here's yet another: an app that lets you take a picture of a leaf and then gives you information about what type of tree it as. Leafsnap (free) returns the likely species name, as well high-resolution photographs of and information about the tree's leaves, flowers, fruit, seeds, and bark. The app was funded by a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation and was developed by the Smithsonian Institution, University of Maryland, and Columbia University.

I'm always amazed by all the novel uses of the camera on iOS devices — from taking your pulse to helping those who are colorblind determine colors — and wrote an article about that in a recent issue of the magazine. And I just received a press release for another. CaMeasure lets you use your camera to measure size or distance. It does this in one of two ways. For smaller objects such as furniture, the app asks you to put an object of known size, such as a sheet of paper or a credit card, by the object.

Mission Workshop is a company in San Francisco that designs and makes messenger bags and backpacks (and apparel too). All of their products are proudly made in America. They sent me over a Rambler backpack to try out and this thing is a beast (a good beast). I have a Swiss gear backpack that I have used for years.