Just as its name implies, this one takes a photo from a video.  Any video of any length and any quality.  The shots, obviously, will come out as good as the video was recorded in terms of resolution and clarity, but it is a great app for a variety of uses.

For instance, as the commercial (embedded below) implies, if you go to take a photo with your phone or camera and then realize you accidentally had it on video record instead?  No problem, just put the video into StillShot and take any captures you want from the video, frame-by-frame, and convert them to photos.  Easy.

Another use I’ve found for it is to take stills from short videos recorded for promo purposes in order to get a photo for a blog post or publicity writeup.  For instance, I often take video of interviews informally so that I can do a writeup or news report on it later.  It’s the easiest way to interview without taking notes.  Say during that video, I got a great still of the subject?  Instant promo shot for use on the writeup or promotion of the story.

There are a lot of other great uses here too.  Take videos of the family and then capture great moments for the photo album as well, for one.

A great app and another winner from Macadamia Apps.

Digitimes has reported that Pegatron, a major manufacturer for Apple, has received orders for the 6^th generation iPhone as well as what would amount to a lager iPad.

The report in Digitimes claims that the company has expanded its workforce and equipment in preparation for what would be a massive operation to produce both new iPhones and iPads given the previous levels of demand that Apple has experienced whenever they have released a new model.

Rumours of a seven inch iPad have been in circulation for some time now but it seems the time for its release could be fast approaching with the device, what many people are calling the ‘iPad mini’, on its way. Previously, Steve Jobs had dismissed the idea of producing a 7 inch iPad saying “Seven inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone, and too small to compete with an iPad,” as far back as October 2010 but it seems as Apple may have had a rethink on the issue and are preparing to launch one.

It is expected that the new generation iPhone will be available in the last quarter of the year with many people expecting the launch date to be sometime in September. Meanwhile, the third generation iPad is also expected to hit stores later this year with many people expecting it to be released in the third quarter.

Ressearch, conducted by World Wide Worx in conjunction with howzit MSN, has shown that there are now 2.5 million people in South Africa who are accessing the internet on a regular basis without access to a PC.

The last year has seen a dramatic 25 per cent growth in internet users amongst South Africans, taking the number of people online from 6.5 million people at the end of 2010 to 8.5 million at the end of 2011.  Speaking about the research, Arthur Goldstruck, managing director for Wolrd Wide Worx, a research company, said Penetration is now approaching 20%, and for the first time we can see the mass market embracing digital tools on their phones.”

World Wide Worx partners in the research, howzit MSN, commented on the implications of this data, with Justin Zehmke, executive producer of the company, saying “This has huge implications for media and social networks. It means that, in the coming years, all services offered online will also have to be offered on cellphones.”

There has also been aknockon effect in the price of data tariffs within the country as well as the number of smartphone owners increases.  The price of data tariffs has been decreasing in a move which will only see more and more people using their smartphones to access the internet.

Those books, once thought lost, were discovered, researched, and are now on display in an exhibition at Buckingham Palace.  After 400 years of hiding, they are now publicly available.

Seeing them on the iPad in an interactive app from TouchPress is awesome.  With expert explanations of the sources and information referenced from da Vinci’s journals to moving, high-resolution copies of the originals on your screen, you’ll see not only da Vinci’s amazing art and science melded together, but also see his journey from a student of the external body’s form to understanding its internal workings.

The story in this iPad app is told by Martin Clayton, the Curator at Windsor Castle.  This is some of the coolest stuff you’ll see on your iPad.  Ever.  So it’s definitely worth the purchase!  TouchPress has taken da Vinci’s drawings and done amazing things with them for this app.  One of my favorites is where they take drawings Leonardo made of a single body part (like the hand) and repeatedly re-drew it as if each layer were being peeled back to show the next.  In the app, these are shown individually and then combined to create a sort of layered animation.

Very cool.  Check this app out at TouchPress.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Mr. Ollila said that the company would be launching a range of hybrid smart mobile devices but would not give a timeframe as to when these devices could be expected.  Nokia’s chairman, who will be stepping down after 27 years at the head of the company, admitted that the firm had been slow to react when the smartphone revolution had begun but that he is confident the range of new products would help Nokia gain ground.  He added, “Tablets are an important one, so that is being looked into, and there will be different hybrids, different form factors [handset designs] in the future”.

Hannu Rauhala, an analyst, said, “Nokia’s fate in tablets is directly linked to Microsoft, which also has to succeed in this space.”

Nokia has fallen far behind Google Inc. and Apple Inc. in the smartphone business and is pinning their hopes of being able to reinvigorate the company on Lumia, which is a new range of smartphones that use software produced by Microsoft.  While Mr. Ollila has once been the subject of praise for taking Nokia from being a toilet paper and rubber boots manufacturer to the world’s number one mobile phone company, he has recently come in for criticism due to the company’s failure to capitalise on what is the fastest growing section of the mobile market.

The report detailed how in the first quarter of 2012 both Apple and Samsung had a combined 53.3 per cent of the market, a figure that sees them move past a 50 per cent share for the first time.  This is, in part because smartphones now represent 37 per cent of sales within the mobile phone market.

A senior research analyst for IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker Programme, Kevin Restivo, said of the results, “The halcyon days of rapid growth in the smartphone market have been good to Samsung.  Samsung has used its established relationships with carriers in a mix of economically diverse markets to gain share organically and at the expense of former high fliers such as Nokia.”

With Chinese companies such as ZTE seeing increased sale in the first quarter of this year, companies such as Nokia and HTC are expected to be placed under even greater pressure. With Huawei increasing their production of a low-cost Android-based device, that pressure shows no sign of letting up any time soon.  While both Samsung and Apple are expected to maintain successfully their sales in China, it is believed that Nokia and HTC could both be in trouble.

Here’s how it works: lets say you take photos on your digital camera and then plug the SD card into your computer’s built-in SD port.  Normally, you’d have to open that card as a folder and manually move the files from there to somewhere on your hard drive.  Under the old Dropbox, if you use it to share with friends and family (it’s a great tool for that, by the way), you’d have to manually put the files into a shared Dropbox folder.

Now, when you plug the SD card into your computer (or your camera itself), the Dropbox app will detect that there are photos there and ask if you want to synch.  The first time it asks, it will walk you through the setup, but after that, it just asks if you want to transfer the photos (assuming they aren’t already in your Dropbox somewhere).

OF course, when anything new is added or changed in your Dropbox, that gets synched across your devices using Dropbox and, if the folder is shared, updated to those involved in the sharing as well.

See how cool this is?  No more burning CDs or making folders on a network or manually adding photos to Dropbox itself so you can access them from your iPhone, notebook, or so that your spouse’s computer can see them or whatever.  Now it just happens.  Without complicated software or network settings.

That’s awesome.

It is certainly more common for us to engage in conversations with businesses on Twitter and Facebook, interacting with them in ways we never would have considered before.  There are many different ways of connecting with other people online as well, ways that colour our decisions on what to buy and what not to buy.

Consider Amazon for example.  Its penchant for providing reviews of every item sold on the site may have affected the sales of those items that are not made very well.  However, it has helped the sales of those items that are favourably reviewed by the people who have already bought them.

You would never dream of standing in a bricks and mortar shop, asking everyone you met whether you should buy a particular product or not.  Nevertheless, this is exactly what we are doing more and more when we consider buying something online.  Social commerce and everything it offers us is going to continue growing and developing in the months and years to come.  It will be interesting to see just how far it goes in influencing our decisions and ideas as we continue to make our purchases online instead of offline.

As Samsung seeks to extend its customer base and move people away from Apple to rival handsets, they will be sampling the chips to major handset makers such as Nokia, Motorola, and HTC.

The Exynos 4 Quad is based on the British chip designer ARM Holding’s technology known as Cortex 9. It enables devices to perform more tasks in a shorter period of time, which allow users to both stream a video via their device on one core while other cores work to update applications in the background as the device connects to the web and scans for viruses at the same time.

Planning to launch a heavy marketing campaign ahead of the London Olympics in the summer, Samsung will be unveiling the Galaxy S III in London.   The firm, who are based in South Korea, is currently the world’s leading manufacturer of mobile application processors and is currently enjoying a boom in sales of its smartphones and tablets due to the effectiveness of the processors.

With this upgrade, it is expected that Samsung could challenge for an even bigger share of the market that is currently dominated by Apple and their ‘i’ devices.

This one focuses on planning the perfect wedding for couples and then carrying out the reception for the bride and groom.  Your job is to plan the menu, set up the decorations and theme, hire a DJ and then serve the guests as the reception unfolds.

The iTunes version comes with a free level, the Autumn Affair venue, and the usual very playable touch screen play that the Dash series has.

Guests will arrive and choose from the menu, requesting dishes and drinks that you have to prepare.  They’ll also want to cut a rug and mingle, so you’ll need to send them to the dance floor or to the newlyweds to deliver their presents.

This game is a ton of fun as it just doesn’t stop.  The challenges keep coming at you and, setting it apart from other Dash games, there are several types of challenge in one game, so it doesn’t get repetitive.

Definitely a fun one and well worth the download.  You’ll find it on iTunes at this link.