Ferrari Scuderia Spider 16Ms, recently unveiled in all their Batmobile-meets-James Bond glory, will have an optional iPod built in to the dashboard.
The 16GB touch, black with the prancing horse logo, will come loaded with Ferrari images and sounds — the famous engine purr, maybe?

This is the kind of kit Ferrari owners will love, since the detachable iPod allows them to take the brand with them in places (like the gym, shopping) where it wouldn’t be obvious otherwise that they were Ferrari owners. (I once worked briefly on the Ferrari owners’ site. As a person who let their driver’s license lapse and uses a bicycle to get to work, it was a challenge). And the iPod can keep you company when the car is kept safely in the garage for more practical transport or serve as a memento when you sell it.

The base price for the limited-edition car is $277,000, no word on the extra cost for the iPod upgrade.

Via iPod Nation

Gawker is a free application which your iSight uses to create time-lapse movies. As with all time-lapse movies, it uses a collection of photos taken within an interval (every 10 seconds, for example) and combines them to form a video.

Gawker’s party piece is: it does it all for you! Upon running Gawker, it searches for your iSight; and using Bonjour, it will also locate other shared iSights on your network! Yup, it allows remote webcam viewing (I’ll come back to that later).

Using Gawker is pretty easy once you figure out what it can do. Within its main application window, it lists the iSights which you can connect to. Shared remote webcams located via Bonjour will also be listed here. Clicking on them will bring up a preview window showing you what is going on through the iSight.

Here’s where the fun begins. If you click on ‘More’, you will find some interesting options. You may set a particular time for Gawker to start and stop recording, so that it won’t need to run the entire day - only at the specified times. You may also choose to share your iSight with someone else running Gawker, set the broadcast interval and a password in order to connect to you (optional). After you’re done setting up, hit ‘Record’ and let the magic work.

Like I said, Gawker’s party piece is it automatically creates a time-lapse movie. It doesn’t just take a picture within the preset interval - leaving you with a folder full of images, having to click through them individually. After Gawker is done recording, all you’re left with is a video file. Quick and hassle-free! Gawker is also powerful enough to record streams from up to four separate webcams and combine them in the final time-lapse video.

Possible usages for Gawker:

Another useful application is EyeSight. It also allows you to take time-lapse pictures between an interval from seconds to days. You can choose the output format of the images (from PNG, JPG, TIFF & BMP) and its size (640 x 480 and below).

Besides that, EyeSight provides you with the option of uploading your pictures to an FTP server, so that you gain access to them from anywhere instantaneously.

Gawker and EyeSight are both available for free to run on Mac OS X.

What else do you do with your Webcam? Have you found other uses for them? Let us know in the comments.

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time medical student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future.

New subscriber? Get your freebies at MakeUseOf Downloads. Enjoy!

Related posts

• Free Alternatives to 10 Popular Commercial Mac Applications (Part2) (9)
• Use Pixer for Easier Image Batch-resize Tasks [Mac Only] (1)
• Tweak Mac Leopard’s Hidden Settings With xMod (0)
• Transmission, The Lightweight BitTorrent Client (4)
• Three Alternative Mac OS X Browsers Worth A Try (4)

There is no end to the creative wonders made possible with Apple gear, it seems. Combining a variety of techniques including tilt-shift and time-lapse photography, Sydney-based photographer Keith Loutit uses his iMac to produce short films like those presented here, which turn ordinary places into scenes worth a second look.

Loutit also employs Apple software in his workflow, using Automator for file management and preparation; QuickTime pro for assembling stills onto video format; Aperture for archiving of frames as higher quality stills; and Final Cut Studio - mostly final cut pro, for color, compressor and motion for editing, toning and export.

Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Asked how he gets the stunning effects, Loutit is unwilling to give away the store, but allows that “I use two lenses, one Medium format, both converted to tilt further than most manufacturer lenses will tilt on a 35mm body.”

You might think this was a story of a bitter man with an agenda against Apple. There, you'd be wrong.

Apple was dealing with a lawsuit from Burst.com in which they claimed to have originally come up with the idea for the iPod. Apple asked Kramer to testify on their behalf, talking about how he filed his patent years before Burst did. Instead of fighting further, Burst and Apple settled out of court. Kramer was paid a consultancy fee for traveling to California and making his deposition.

"The questioning by the Burst legal counsel there was tough, ten hours of it. But I was happy to do it," Kramer told the Daily Mail. "To be honest, I was just so pleased that finally something that I had done which has been a huge success and changed the music industry was being acknowledged."

Presumably on friendly terms, Kramer is negotiating now for compensation from Apple with regards to his original idea.

[Via Valleywag.]

Most microscopes come with software to do this, to be honest, but the big flaw with a lot of that software is that it’s either Windows-only, requiring Mac-using scientists to run some kind of virtualization or get a cheap Windows box to run it, or it simply doesn’t do all the things you need it to.

Enter Macnification, from Orbicule. With a whole host of features that I’ve been wishing for in current scope apps, and others I hadn’t even hoped were possible, Macnification is about to be a complete revolution in the way I work.

The most amazing part of Macnification is its support for stacks. In microscopy parlance, a stack is a group of images arranged vertically to either show different focal depths or time phases. A stacked image lets the viewer see the object in as close to 3D as flat photography is going to get. Macnification really highlights this, treating the stacks as if they were physical objects.

Z-slices through a stack are cake, with a realtime preview of what the section is going to look like that lets you rotate and angle the slice line to get the ideal cut. Extended focal imaging, or EFI, is also a breeze - a matter of two clicks - and fast, compressing a stack into a single image that features the sharpest parts of each component image.

All this image editing is also non-destructive, a huge plus in today’s increasingly-suspicious scientific imaging scene, with more and more journals requiring originals for analysis or forbidding image editing outright.

Another nifty bit is the ease of creation of time-lapse movies. I have a series of photos of the calcium flare across some neurons, and I’d been looking for a decent way to make this a time-lapse movie for presentations. Macnification did it in about fifteen seconds with only a couple of clicks. Brilliant - and everyone’s been asking how I did it. (Now I get to smile enigmatically again and point to my Mac.)

I do wish that this would run on anything besides 10.5, though - I’ve got some older computers in the lab that just are never going to cut it for Leopard. While I know it’s a sacrifice for all of the fancy features that require Leopard’s strengths, it’s still a drag.

Macnification is available in a free trial and for purchase starting at around $400 USD.

• In February, EA (ERTS) offered $2 billion for Take-Two, a huge premium to its then-market value.
• Take-Two rejected the offer because it didn't take into account what a huge hit GTAIV would be, and that once the game came out in the spring, investors would come to their senses and bid up TTWO shares.
• GTA IV came out in the spring and was a huge hit. No one bid up TTWO shares.
• Last week EA formally let its offer for Take-Two lapse, then said it'd be happy to talk to Take-Two -- though it would probably want to pay less than its original offer. Take-Two said it'd be happy to chat, as well -- though it would need to see more than EA's original offer.
• No other bidders have been publicly identified for TTWO. And now the government has signed off on any potential antitrust issues. So there's no reason these two shouldn't be able to work out a deal -- especially now that they don't have to tell the rest of us about it.

Filing text follows:

On August 25, 2008, Electronic Arts Inc. ('EA') and Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. ('Take-Two') entered into the confidentiality agreement contemplated by the letter of August 17, 2008 from Strauss Zelnick, Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors of Take-Two to John Riccitiello, Chief Executive Officer of EA, and the letter of August 18 from Mr. Riccitiello to Mr. Zelnick. The terms of the confidentiality agreement prohibit each of EA and Take-Two from, among other things, publicly disclosing the status or terms of any discussions or negotiations between EA and Take-Two unless EA or Take-Two notifies the other that it is terminating discussions. As a result, EA does not intend to make any further announcements regarding the status of any discussions or negotiations with Take-Two unless and until discussions between EA and Take-Two have been terminated or such parties have entered into a transaction. As previously disclosed, EA now requires due diligence to support any proposal to acquire Take-Two and there can be no assurance that any proposal, negotiations or transaction will result.

See Also: EA and Take-Two Let Bid Expire, Keep Talking
When Will EA Walk Away From Take-Two? Soon
EA Puts Take-Two In $2 Billion Bear Hug