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Smart Phone Apps for Builders: Flashlight
comments (2) February 16th, 2011 in Blogs
Aaron Lubeck, Blogger
iTunes: Flashlight uses the LED light on iPhone 4 and fills your screen with bright white light to illuminate your world when you find yourself in a dark spot or concert. Includes fully customizable special effects including: Strobe Light, Trippy, S.O.S., Yin-Yang, Halloween, Candy Hearts, Holiday Lights and more!
WHY I’M INTERESTED
I need light. I work in dark spaces such as crawl spaces, storage unit closets, and basements, and do not always have a flashlight with me.
WHAT IT DOES
This app just makes a bright white screen. You can change the color and create different patterns, but you’re a builder - not a college freshman - so you’ll probably skip the wanna-be lava- lamp functions.
The lumens are quite low, and only enough help just a tad in a dark storeroom, but are not anything close to a work light.
HOW WELL IT DOES IT
This app’s success is linked to the iPhone’s lumens capability (500 cd/m2 max brightness) , which is not designed to be a flashlight. I did think it was pretty amazing when it came out, but it seems to have a product trajectory of a 1980s video game (I remember thinking ‘Wow, Techmobowl! They’ll never get the graphics more realistic than this!) It did help me a few times a week in dark spaces, but it doesn’t hold a candle to a real flashlight or HTC’s LED light. The iPhone 4 added a LED flash, which was designed as a acute flash for photos, but people have already figured out ways to use it as a flashlight. HTC has a similar LED flash that works surprisingly well. I was blown away the first time I saw it. I expect that LED flashes and flashlights will become ubiquitous on higher end smart phones in the very near future, if they aren’t already. Either LED flash is vastly superior to the iPhone Flashlight application reviewed here.
PROS: Convenient light when you need it and do not have a flashlight
CONS: Not much light at all, will often leave you saying, ‘damnit, I wish I had a flashlight!’.
CONCLUSION: Useful now and again, and worth having for older iPhone users, but it’s not going to replace any tools or save you much time. Creative destruction is fast and furious in the world of smart phones, and this app will soon be obsolete. You get what you pay for: It’s free.
SCORE: 25/100 for iPhone 3Gs and earlier versions. 0/100 for iPhone 4 and later.
--Look for Aaron's upcoming article, Smart Phones for Smart Builders, in the next issue of Fine Homebuilding and right here at Finehomebuilding.com
posted in: Blogs, business, smart phone
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The Digital Job Site
Get the inside scoop on how builders, remodelers, and architects use the free 3-D modeling software Google SketchUp to design projects and present them to clients.
You'll find practical advice on how to use this powerful drawing tool, and get some insight into how some experienced builders and designers have workied it into their set of everyday tools. If you are new to SketchUp, you might want to get warmed up with a few of Google's free tutorials.
Comments (2)
Just google "Fenix flashlights".
Posted: 3:02 pm on February 21st
Posted: 12:24 pm on February 21st
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