Month: October 2012

Compass Eye and the iPhone 5 Camera

The iPhone 5 had a nice surprise up its sleeve for Compass Eye.  The camera on the iPhone 5 has a 4 fold increase in low light ability (iso 3200). Unfortunately Apple did not make this available to existing apps out of the box. You have to specifically request the function to be enabled within your app on iOS 6. Yesterday I did just that and tested a new version of Compass Eye on the iPhone 5 against the iPhone4S at dusk – and the results speak for themselves:-

I was trying to take a bearing on the Dovecot (white with pointy roof) – bit like a North Cardinal 🙂

 

This is pretty much what it looked like to the naked eye too.
iPhone 4s

This is pretty close to how the scene looked to the naked eye too (admittedly non-light adapted). Can you see the Dovecot?

Below is the same scene taken on the iPhone 5 , 28s earlier. Bearing acquired!

 

iPhone 5

I continued taking photos with the iPhone 5 until they matched the iPhone 4 photo at 17:13:59. Even 10 minutes later the iPhone 5 was better than the earlier iPhone 4S photo and I could still just about take a fix on the Dovecot. This could be a real advantage.

A new version of Compass Eye (2.0) is now available in the iTunes store that takes full advantage of the  new camera on the iPhone 5 and also has an automatic night vision mode to help maintain your dark adaption.

 

Boat Beacon AIS in the North Sea

We recently received an excellent review of Boat Beacon in the German Yacht magazine including some great screen shots. It generated a lot of interest with German boaters.

 

 

I wrote to the author to ask if we could use his screen shots in the iTunes store. We received a lovely reply:-

“I am the author of the review at yacht.de. I bought and tested the app on a voyage from Emden (western Germany) to river west of Hamburg – and I was very impressed by the app. We sailed the whole night through with a lot of wind and high waves. My father was with me on board, his first time on the north sea – and he got seasick the moment we left sheltered water. So I sailed singlehanded and Boat Beacon was a great help. As the boat has no AIS-System attached to the plotter, it was very helpful to have it on the iphone. Also to be able to find out in which direction the other ships were heading when I saw us on collision course. The friends and family followed our progress at home on the computer. One friend even followed us sailing up the river Oste and sent me the phonenumbers for the bascule bridges the moment we reached them.”