Tools for the News

Olloclip

This is a fun accessory for the iPhone and is not very expensive ($69.99). It's a set of three lenses (Fisheye, Wide-Angle and Macro) in a plastic clip that goes over the iPhone camera.

I found the wide-angle lens option particularly useful for reporting. It gives the iPhone camera extra field of view and a kind of "professional look" to the photo you won't get with the iPhone camera alone. Wide-angle photos are in the blood of the newspapers, don't you think?

The other two lenses (Fisheye and macro) are not that journalistic. Macro is, well, macro. You can take photos of an object within a range of 12 to 15 mm from the lens, that's really close. The Fisheye gives you the  ultra wide angle your are looking for, but at least with the iPhone 4S I have it doesn't caputure the whole image and the borders are cut.

More info here 

The three lenses work great for video recording. That's a plus!

For those interested in more capabilities, I frankly recommend this post (and this blog) by Glen Mulcahy.

Evernote + Moleskine

I bought this out of curiosity and it did amaze me enough to write a post about it.

Moleskine makes nice and expensive notebooks and I would be a good client if they were cheaper, but they are not.

In this case, I bought it to see if it really performs as said, and it does.

This new notebook (Price: from 25 to 30 dollars) called Evernote Ruled Smart Notebook basically gives Evernote app a reference to find elements in the page and convert them to virtual terms. First you have to take a picture of the page you want to scan with the photo app within Evernote.

So what it does, as you can see in the main photo of this post, is detecting words as they were hand written as if they would have been typed in a computer. In my example, I wrote that message and then saved it into Evernote in my iPhone. After some minutes I opened the app again and searched for "blog". Evernote found the word in the picture, impressive. You can use stickers (included) to help Evernote read the photos. They work like tags.

All in all, I think it is a good idea, but not for heavy notebook users. I don't see myself taking notes with this in a press conference and then making photos of every single page, and then look for words that may be so illegible that only me using my imagination could understand.

For personal stuff, I think is great.

More info here:

Evernote

Evernote + Moleskine

Audio Note

It's a great tool. It allows you to take notes while recording audio and it syncs all together. Then you go back to the text, choose a word and... voilà! you get to listen whatever it was said without wasting your time.

It has flaws, of course. The most important one in my opinion is you need a external mic to get close to the source of the audio and avoid recording the noise you make when typing.

How do you connect your tablet/smartphone to a professional mic? The cable you seen in the photo does the trick. I bought it online in Amazon for less than 30 dollars.

The mic I use is good enough for me: Audio-Technica Pro 61 ($199).

Since the last update, Audio Note offers cloud services, that means you can record something with you iPhone and it will be in your iPad right away.

Audio Note has more features and you can get the free version for Mac, iOS, Windows and Android, though it is worth it to pay 4.99 dollars for the whole thing.

The free version limits to 10 minutes of audio recording per note, and 2 hours total, so you kill the app in a bunch of press conferences or interviews. 

Vomodo

The first time (and only time) I saw this mobile video broadcast device in action was in the red carpet at the opening night of the Palm Springs International Film Festival, back in 2011. It did impress me a lot, one guy with a backpack broadcasting live to the web. I uploaded the photo I took then (not a really good one, I know).

As I said, I haven’t seen it again. It looks like the company is not very active. Its Facebook/Twitter pages haven’t been updated since April 2012.

No idea about the price but you can go to www.vomodo.com for more info. There are some videos and also the specs, in case you are interested.

Lytro

I haven’t tried it yet but it seems useful. It would be better if it could work as an accessory for the smartphone, but it is a standalone camera and downloading the photos is needed.

Watch video here