TechnologyIQ

An App That Draws Impressively Accurate Floor Plans In Minutes via Arch Daily RoomScan is an app for iOS which draws floor plans in minutes – touching your device to a wall is the only input required. Using the iPhone’s internal sensors, RoomScan recognises a sequence of flat vertical surfaces, measuring the distance in between and creating impressively accurate plans. When you come to a door, you just tap the phone to the door frame and continue. Claiming that measurements are accurate to the nearest 10cm (or 6 inches), this app – the basic features of which are available for free - is not only great fun to play with, but also considerably useful in every day situations. Read More "Noted" items are particularly good finds from my daily reading which I share via all my social media accounts.     Find more Noted items here

Google Revives My Maps So You Can Create and Share Custom Maps via Lifehacker Today, Google unleashed a new, overhauled version of its well-loved (and little known) custom maps tool, called My Maps. It's pretty powerful and cool. With it, you can create a trip itinerary, note hotspots in any location, and otherwise personalize Google Maps. Read More "Noted" items are particularly good finds from my daily reading which I share via all my social media accounts.     Find more Noted items here

Panda Is a News Feed that Keeps You Inspired and Informed via Lifehacker Web/Chrome: Panda combines top-rated stories from sites like Hacker News and Product Hunt with imagery from Dribble and Behance to keep you informed as well as inspired to make awesome things (or at least look at cool images.) You can even replace Chrome's new tab page with it, so every tab keeps you informed and motivated. Read More "Noted" items are particularly good finds from my daily reading which I share via all my social media accounts.     Find more Noted items here  

A Mapping App That Searches Along Your Route To Plan Exciting (Or Efficient) Trips via Fast Company With so many geolocation and mapping apps packed onto our mobile devices, it’s always bothered me that there’s no easy way to find a place I’d like to stop while I’m on my way to someplace else. Say I use Google Maps to give me driving directions from New York City to Boston. Since I want to use my time efficiently, I know I’d like to make the quickest stop possible at my bank along my route, minimizing the distance I am put out of my way. Google Maps or Yelp or any number of apps can suggest branches of my bank that are nearest to my current location, and they can suggest branches that are nearest to any particular town or destination I input, but neither are smart enough to suggest convenient branches for me to stop as mapped along my entire route. Read More "Noted" items are particularly good finds from my daily reading which I share via all my social media accounts.  

Cardboard Dinosaur Costume via Make Tanaka Satoshi created this ferocious and fully articulated dinosaur costume from cardboard. (The original article is in Japanese, but Google Translate does a decent job on it.) Read More "Noted" items are particularly good finds from my daily reading which I share via all my social media accounts.     Find more Noted items here

Apple's iOS 8 comes with a new feature, Widgets , that allows apps to present up-to-date information on the Today section of the iOS Notifications pull down. For me, this improves the usefulness of the Today pane dramatically and I am eagerly awaiting more apps adding functionality to that area. Today I noticed that the latest LinkedIn app update adds an iOS 8 Widget. "Cool," I thought. "I'll add that." This is what I got, thought. Uh, really? No! This is NOT what I expect in a useful iOS8 Widget. I want information, at a glance, not simply a button to run the app. They have missed the entire point of iOS8 Widgets from the very start. In fact, this is exactly the opposite of what an iOS 8 widget should be. Linkedin, how about you show me the actual data I want to see here instead of just a button to your app. Cheesy, and useless, and it shows a certain cluelessness about iOS. Please fix this now. Oh, and any other app developers thinking of doing this?

Google Voice Integration Finally Arrives in Hangouts via Lifehacker Google Voice integration with Hangouts is rolling out to some users right now. Yes, this is real. Though, for the moment, the rollout seems incomplete. As Android Police points out, some users have confirmed Google Voice integration is active in Hangouts. There are still some kinks to iron out (Android Police speculates that some features still need to be rolled out as part of Google's typical "Update Wednesday"), but the promise to send and receive SMS and voicemail seems to be finally coming true. Read More "Noted" items are particularly good finds from my daily reading which I share via all my social media accounts.     Find more Noted items here

Pinterest Chrome extension brings inspiration to freshly-opened tabs via Engadget When you open a new tab in Google's Chrome browser, you're greeted with a search box, rows of recently-visited sites and a tucked-in menu for individual apps. It's really not very inspiring, is it? Pinterest doesn't think so, and thanks to an internal make-a-thon, there's a new Chrome extension that aims to remedy the gray box blues. Read More "Noted" items are particularly good finds from my daily reading which I share via all my social media accounts.     Find more Noted items here

Lenka for iOS creates stunning black and white images via TUAW Lenka (US$2.99) is a simple app to help you create dramatic black and white images. The app was developed by famed photographer Kevin Abosch and it's starkly simple. To begin with, you frame your photo, which is visible in black and white in real time on your iPhone. There are only a couple of options: regular or high contrast. You can change the format from rectangular to square, and then you can start firing away. The only available editing tools allow rotation and cropping. Read More "Noted" items are particularly good finds from my daily reading which I share via all my social media accounts.     Find more Noted items here

WunderStation iPad app: Nirvana for weather geeks via TUAW Weather Underground runs what it calls the PWS (Personal Weather Station) network, a mesh of over 37,000 individually-owned weather stations that send live weather info to the company as often as every 2.5 seconds. If you live near a PWS, you can be guaranteed that you're going to get forecasts from Weather Underground that better represent the actual microclimates in your area thanks to the company's analysis of the PWS data. Well, now there's a way for weather geeks to really dig into that data visually. The free WunderStation iPad app offers an variety of ways to slice and dice local weather information. Read More "Noted" items are particularly good finds from my daily reading which I share via all my social media accounts.     Find more Noted items here

Here is a selection of free wallpapers for your computer desktop or smartphone. Click to load full-sized image, then right-click and select Save Image As… to download them to your own computer. On your smartphone, click the image to see the full-sized image, tap and hold, then select Save to Camera Roll. You can then attach the wallpapers using your phone’s preferences. Desktop   iPad  |  iPhone Previous garden wallpapers: Piazza Armerina Camellia Aspens Kousa Dogwood Daylily Old Oak Tree Magnolia Rhaphiolepis Native Sunflower Koi Pond White Chamomile Flower Palm Tree Water Lily Artichoke Wallpapers Morning Glory Wallpapers Sunflower Wallpapers Hibiscus Closeup Wallpapers Garden Face Wallpapers Passiflora Wallpapers Daisies Wallpapers Cherry Blossoms Wallpapers Paperwhites Wallpapers

Check out Nav Camera if you need precise location info for photos and video via TUAW Nav Camera (US$3.99) is an innovative app that uses navigation, augmented reality and display overlays to tell you where you are, your altitude, the direction you are facing and more. The information appears on your image in real time and it's possible to save it all to your photo library. Read More "Noted" items are particularly good finds from my daily reading which I share via all my social media accounts.     Find more Noted items here

Internet Archive uploads more than 14 million public domain images to Flickr via Boing Boing Kalev Leetaru programatically recovered all the images that were discarded by the OCR program that digitizes the millions of public domain books scanned by the Archive; these were cropped, cleaned up, and uploaded to Flickr with the text that appears before and after them, and links to see their whole scanned page. Read More "Noted" items are particularly good finds from my daily reading which I share via all my social media accounts.     Find more Noted items here