Stories by Mark Gibbs

In Pictures: 12 crazy good iOS photography apps

An Apple iPhone ad that aired in April claimed, "Every day, more photos are taken with the iPhone than any other camera", and I can believe it. Not only are there are a boatload of iPhones in the wild, there are a huge number of apps that enhance and improve on Apple's default camera app making photography more accessible, more creative, and more social. This is a collection of some of the best and most interesting apps available.

Three tools for getting organized: Looking for 'The One'

Getting organized isn't something you do once and then forget about. Oh no. Organization needs constant polishing and review and, in short, is a total pain in the butt. I've always wished I were one of those hyper-organized people who has a place for everything and everything always has its place, but alas, that apparently isn't in my genetic makeup.

How you invade your own privacy

A new study from consulting firm Infosys shows consumers globally are far more relaxed about sharing their private data than we knew and far more relaxed than they should be

Neatly naming network nodes

On one of my favorite lists, we just had an amusing discussion about naming computers. It seems that unless someone is running a server farm or hosting facility, where logical organization is de rigeur and computers are numbered according to some strict plan, then anyone with any poetry in their soul feels they must find "good" names with some kind of consistency for their hardware.

Zooka, a neat iPad Bluetooth speaker, and a review of tools to wire-framing user interfaces

This week, a collection of goodies. First up for all of you iPad aficionados, a neat wireless Bluetooth speaker called Zooka from Carbon Audio that fits onto the edge of your tablet and boosts your audio volume by about five times (turned up full, that's a sound pressure of 80dB at 1 meter). There's also a built-in microphone so you can take calls if you've paired the Zooka with your iPhone.

Gearhead's 2013 Summer Reading List

As I note in Backspin, as of the 24th of this month, I've been writing for Network World for 20 years and 6 days. And my first Gearhead column published a mere 17 years, 4 months and 5 days ago (see page 52). I'm going to leave the peering into the rearview mirror to see how we got here to Backspin and, instead, do as I always do: Talk about cool, geeky stuff you need. Today, I have your summer reading assignments.

No more Adobe Dreamweaver, so how about Xara Web Designer?

If you're doing serious Web content engineering you might well choose an all-singing, all-dancing product such as Adobe's Dreamweaver. The latest version of Dreamweaver in Adobe's Creative Suite 6 (released just over a year ago) was really impressive with new features such as an improved user interface, support for jQuery UI widgets, better cascading style sheet Version 3 support and support for PhoneGap. All in all, a very cool and comprehensive Web development platform.

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