Trapster combines technologies such as GPS and wireless location, voice transcription, geocoding, reverse geocoding, and SMS, with a central database server. It communicates in real time, using the Internet. Since the traps are often moved from one position to another it is vital to get real time information about their location. You can set notifications up on your Garmin or other navigation device if you don’t want to check your phone while driving.

The iPhone application is very detailed and customizable. The displaying of speed traps can be set so you only see a given type on the map. You can even connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts to interact with other Trapster users and to send updates.

After downloading Trapster from the App Store you need to create an account. It will ask you to allow location services to scan your surroundings for speed traps. As you see there are no traps at my current location. But on the highway there are two fixed cameras that I didn’t know of. Trapster uses google maps and the information from users for placing traffic cameras on it.

I was skeptical if there are enough users to keep the database updated but Trapster just reached 200k Blackberry users. You can record your trips and share them or keep them to yourself. If you notice a speed trap of any kind you can easily add it to the database by selecting the type and pin pointing on the map. The setup menu gives real depth to Trapster. You can customize every aspect of the application: notifications, alerts, sounds, etc. The main menu has a bunch of settings and a help section so you won’t get lost.

I have a dock in my car for my iPhone so I have no problems checking it regularly. I’m planning to set Trapster up with my navigation system thought because the iPhone’s battery is drained easily.

Connecting to Facebook account is fast and embedded into the application while for setting up Twitter you need to go to Safari.

Everyone of us know that speeding is dangerous, but not everyone want to keep to the speed limit, especially on highways. While Trapster is not an app to advocate speeding, it enables you to drive (and speed) without worrying about getting caught by speed traps. Radar or laser detectors are no good against modern police equipment. These devices often alert too late and you have no time to slow down before reaching the speed trap. Trapster has updated information and alerts you miles before you would get to the trap. You can also see the traps on the map, which could potentially save you lot of money (paying fines).

Trapster currently works in iPhone, Blackberry and various mobile phone that supports Java J2ME. A Windows mobile version is also coming soon.

Trapster: Alerts For Speed Traps On Your Handset originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

The GUI is very simple and you don’t have a lot of options to play with, in fact all you can do is customize the toolbar on the top. The color of the lines can also be customized.

Drop one or two images to the panes and start indicating the similar areas of the pictures by dragging lines. You can add points by clicking on the picture and remove them with backspace. Dragging these lines to different areas of the pictures will result in funny and odd transitions. Personally I find it rather hard to control the transition of the pictures. If I change the position or the angle of the lines I don’t know what is going to happen. You can zoom in to see your picture in detail but that’s not really necessary since you need to see how the transition will look like.

The preview window is very small to see your transition in detail so the best way to test is rendering the movie. The render screen brings up all the options you need: size of the video, frame per seconds (speed) and length (total frames), rendering quality and the codec for encoding. You can reverse the video and get a preview of all the changes you make instantly before saving it. The panes also distort the pictures which is a little disturbing sometimes, this is why a good preview function would come handy.

As you can see it’s quite easy to create great visual effects with this tool for video. Another function of MorphX is that you can save snapshots of your pictures morphed at any frame. However the quality of the snapshots is not good enough for professional use. I also miss the possibility to add more then two images. I don’t see a reason why not have this feature since it would be fun to morph 3-4-5 or even more pictures together. Video morphing would also be a great addition to MorphX. I see a lot of power here that is no’t exploited yet. I can’t figure out a way to increase the quality of the picture or the video. After rendering the video looks very low in resolution although I used high quality images and the highest settings.

Overall MorphX from Norrkross is a great free tool for making good-looking image transitions in minutes. I miss some features which would probably be easy to include and which would put this nifty software to a professional level. The fact that you are limited to morph two images at a time makes MorphX very limited. Picture and video quality is only good enough for SD YouTube movies. Despite the missing stuff MorphX is something every Mac user should have or at least once try.

MorphX: Create Animated Image Transitions With Ease originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)