The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has been a respected resource for film and television for nearly two decades, and this free, universal app lets you tap into the titular database to learn about nearly any film or TV show in existence.IMDb’s attractiv…
ABC Player streams full episodes of ABC shows through Wi-Fi, including Lost, Modern Family, FlashForward, and a bunch more, straight to your iPad. And it’s free!
The home page’s nice clean design.
The well-designed app has a toolbar along the bottom, with buttons for Featured, Schedule, All Shows, Me, and Info. Featured shows the home page, with most popular, most recent, and staff picked episodes. All the layouts are intended for portrait orientation — the only time you use ABC Player in landscape mode is when you’re actually watching videos.
As you can see, most of the evening shows do get posted for streaming.
The Schedule tab is a nice touch, showing ABC’s schedule for the day or the week. Episodes that have already aired and are available for streaming have Watch Now links next to their titles in the schedule grid. You won’t have to wait long for the episodes to be available for streaming, either — we watched current episodes of LOST the day after they aired on TV.
The All Shows tab has thumbnail images of each show available. The evening shows are well represented, and you can also watch daytime shows including All My Children, General Hospital, One Life to Live, and The View.
The All Shows tab has, um, all the shows. Simple, right?
The Me tab has your viewing history in case you want to pick up where you left off. A visual indicator on the thumbnails shows how far into a show you’ve gotten, but doesn’t always start playing from that point. It does most of the time, though.
And a built-in feedback form on the Info tab lets you report issues, which is a really nice touch.
Streaming worked really well — obviously it requires Wi-Fi (we’ll see what happens when the 3G iPad is released later this month). But we got great results on both our office’s high-speed Wi-Fi network, and our regular old cable-internet-powered Wi-Fi at home. You’ll see fewer commercials than on the TV, but you can’t fast-forward through them. Occasional crashes are annoying, but we never had to wait long for loading or buffering, so we’re big fans of this app.
Widescreen shows have black bars on the top and bottom since the iPad is 4:3. Don’t look so skeptical, Sawyer, this app is solid.
DSLRs are nice, but sometimes–okay, a lot of the time–we just can’t be bothered to schlep around a giant camera. Enter the compact camera. At 4.2 ounces and 3.8 x 2.1 x 0.8 inches, the Pentax Optio P80 is a solid choice for nights on the town or other casual situations where it’s more important to capture the moment than the most technically perfect frame.
The P80 is a 12.1 megapixel point-and-shoot with an aluminum body in black, mint, or pearl. It’s a sleek little device that easily slips into a pocket, ready for use at any time–we clocked the start-up time at 1.5 seconds, so it’s perfect for grabbing a spontaneous shot. It also features a 28mm wide-angle lens that’s ideal for traveling and for taking pictures of groups, while the bright 2.7-inch LCD makes it easy to view shots and navigate system menus. The buttons on the back are large enough to manipulate easily, but small enough that they don’t take over the back of the camera.
Face-recognition mode works well, prioritizing focus on the people you’re trying to capture–even in low-light situations, faces were always in focus. When multiple people enter the frame, the P80 easily distinguishes between faces and background objects–up to 32 mugs at a time.
The P80 shoots HD video and has a ton of scene modes to help beginning shutterbugs.
The 26 scene modes provide plenty of settings for shooting everything from text to food to fireworks and digital panoramas. A vertical snap mode allows you to use the center button of the D-pad on the back, instead of the traditional shutter button, to take a photo, which comes in handy when you’ve tilted the camera into portrait orientation.
Image quality clocks in as decent. We weren’t blown away, but considering the camera’s size and other features, we’d feel comfortable bringing it along on family trips or recommending it to casual shooters. The 4X optical zoom allows for a little more flexibility when composing shots, but anything larger would necessitate a bigger form factor, and Pentax chose wisely.
The P80 also features digital filters and in-camera editing, which allow you to tweak images before they ever hit your Mac. It’s not for heavy-duty edits, but it’s useful for quick adjustments on the go. The image-recovery feature is also great, allowing you to find that photo of Mom you accidentally deleted. And in low light, the P80 can shoot all the way up to ISO 6400. You’ll be able to capture subjects in dark settings, but the resulting images are much noisier. Unfortunately, the P80 doesn’t offer image stabilization, which would allow for longer exposures at lower ISOs for better low-light performance.
Movie mode worked as well as one would expect from a point-and-shoot. Without image stabilization, though, the camera was too light to keep it from shaking when shooting handheld footage. Fortunately, the P80 camera chooses the ISO that it needs to get a clear image in video mode, making it a breeze to operate. We also dug the 16:9 aspect ratio and the ability to shoot at 720p in such a compact package. But most importantly for a pocket camera, the battery’s got your back. Pentax claims 200 shots or 200 minutes of video per battery charge. We saw about 190 shots with a little video shooting mixed in, which is respectable.
If last week’s iPhone hint was a little complicated, this week’s is an exercise in simplicity. Here’s how to keep a picture in Photos locked in either landscape or portrait orientation.
