Apple of My Eye is a short film, directed by Michael Koerbel, that was shot entirely on an iPhone 4 and edited with the iMovie App in 48 hours.

Included with the embed is some “making of” footage that includes an explanation of the model train cam and editing the film on the iPhone.

While the image quality is far from perfect, it’s still impressive.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

WordPress.com has announced a new feature,  Post by Voice, that lets you audio blog by phone.

Here’s what WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg has to say about it:

You can now go to your My Blogs tab, enable Post by Voice, and get a special number and code to call your blog. After you’re done, the audio file from your phone call will be posted to your blog for all to listen to and enjoy. (And added to your RSS feed for podcast support.)

So now you can post to your WordPress via the web, email, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, desktop clients, and now any telephone in the world. Of course when you post it can be pushed to Facebook, Twitter, and more using the Publicize feature. What more could you want?

Right now this is completely free, but we’ll charge you money to take down posts. Just kidding!

We’re making it free and allowing recording lengths up to sixty minutes, but that limit may go down without a paid upgrade in the future. Mostly we’re just curious to see how people use this.

Phone audio blogging is not new, but WordPress.com’s move brings this to a huge audience.

Audio quality is poor – but there’s a place for quick and easy audio podcast updates.

By now you, you probably already know that the iPhone 4 can shoot great video.

But is it good enough for commercial work?

FLF Films thought so – and they shot their latest commercial, for Minelab, on an iPhone 4. Filming included putting the iPhone on a Steadicam and even flying it through the air on an RC helicopter.

While the quality is clearly not equal to state-of-the-art video cameras, it’s good enough to open up  a lot of options for mobile video work.

Check out the footage and let me know what you think!

Macworld’s Heather Kelly has done a side-by-side comparison of the camera and video camera quality of current generation smartsphones, and the new iPhone 4 came out on top.

Photo quality:

The iPhone 4 had, by a healthy margin, the best exposure and color scores of the entire bunch, beating out even the point-and-shoot cameras. It did run into trouble in the sharpness and distortion categories, performing much lower than the pocket cameras and similarly to the Droid.

Video quality:

t was the iPhone 4’s video capabilities that really stole the show in our lab tests. Of the eight devices we rated for video, only the Flip Video M2120 scored higher. The Flip, which also records 720p, 30fps video, had just slightly better video quality than the iPhone 4, even in low-light. The Flip did have far superior audio quality when compared with the iPhone 4, which had the same audio score as the Droid X.

The bottom line? The iPhone 4’s camera isn’t good as a dedicated camera of video camera. For a camera on a smartphone, though, it’s currently “as good as they get.”

The improvements in the iPhone 4’s image quality make it a much better solution for mobile blogging and vlogging than earlier iPhones and a strong competitor to other smartphones.

You can compare video examples from the iPhone 4, Droid X and other smartphones at aperobot’s channel on YouTube

The quality of iPhone 4 video can be great – but it can also be nauseating because it tends to be so jerky.

Tiffen has an interesting solution – the Steadicam Smoothee. It’s basically an affordable (under $200) iPhone Steadicam.  It’s available for Motorola Droid and Flip Mini, too.

The Sound Of Young America‘s Jesse Thorn explains how to create a podcast with public-radio quality, with relatively inexpensive gear, out of your bedroom:

• I use Shure SM7 microphones. These are famous for being the mics that Michael Jackson used to record his vocals for Thriller, but they’re really a great all-purpose microphone. They’re also tough and cheap – at least compared to other studio vocal microphones. They cost about three hundred bucks, and the next step up is several thousand. They work great for my purposes because their pickup pattern really emphasizes the guest and de-emphasizes the guy outside my window with the leaf blower. Very forgiving.
• My mixer is a Mackie Onyx 1620, with the optional built-in firewire audio interface. The SM7s need a lot of gain (signal boost) and Mackie has a reputation for having the cleanest microphone pre-amps.
• For phone interviews I have a Telos One. We actually don’t do phone interviews anymore, but I do do “tape syncs,” which are the poor man’s way to link up two studios – no ISDN here, so I just put a remote guest in a studio, call them up, record on both ends, and match them up later.
• My CD player is the cheapest rack-mounted CD player I could find.
• Same story with my headphones and headphone amp. I listen back on B- headphones, because I figure that’s how most people will listen anyway.
• The radio on my desk (which is also my monitor) is a Tivoli Audio Model Three, which is a wonderful machine that I recommend highly – especially if you get it for $14.99 on clearance at Target, which I did.
• I record on a PC in Adobe Audition 3. I started with Audition’s predecessor, Cool Edit, which was $19.99, and Audition is like three hundred bucks, but that’s the cost of being “professional.”
• I do my backup recording with a Zoom H4 flash recorder, and store my many huge files on a Drobo with four terabyte drives in it.
• My shows are hosted with the very good folks at Libsyn.

The bulk of the cost for Thorn’s home podcasting setup was his Shure SM7 mic, his Mackie mixer & audio interface, and Adobe Audition.

While Thorn has a mixture of low-budget and professional gear, he says that the key to getting good audio quality is not the gear, but how you use it.

” Too many people try and record with one mic shared between multiple people, or with an onboard or headset mic. That won’t fly. My friends at Never Not Funny recorded their whole first season with mics that their producer Matt bought 3-for-$10, and it sounded fine.”

via BB, Maximum Fun

The Register reports that Firefox 4 is going flash free:

Mozilla vice president of products Jay Sullivan says that unlike Google, the open source outfit has no intention of bundling Firefox with Adobe Flash – or with a plug-in that runs native code inside the browser.

Mozilla believes that the future of online applications lies with web standards, including HTML5.

“Our idea of the web where you can use these technologies that are scriptable, that interact with the rest of the page, that can be mashed up and linked into and linked out of,” explains Sullivan. “These native apps are just little black boxes in a webpage. That’s not something we’re pursuing. We really believe in HTML, and this is where we want to focus.”

Currently, Firefox attempts to minimize crashes by running plug-ins in processes separate from the browser proper. But long-term, Mozilla plans to work around Flash.

“We’re trying to balance the reality of the web today,” explains Sullivan. “Flash is there. Our users are going to use it, and it’s going to crash. We want to protect them from that. But over time, we really believe that HTML5 is the future.”

The iPhone 4 is out, it’s selling like hotcakes and, if you’re like me, you’re wondering how good the iPhone 4’s HD video capture is.  Is it going to be good enough to take the place of a dedicated camera for making videos for your video blog, video podcast or YouTube channel?

Fortunately, people are loading iPhone 4 HD video up to YouTube in droves, so there are now lots of examples available, shot under a variety of conditions.

Check out these iPhone 4 HD video examples and let me know what you think!

Roland has begun shipping the R-05 WAV/MP3 Recorder that PodcastingNews first wrote about in March. The handheld compact digital recorder makes uncompressed stereo recordings directly to SD cards with up to 24-bit/96kHz resolution.

The R-05 records directly with the built-in stereo microphone, or can accomodate an externally connected microphone. A windscreen and tripod mount are included with the recorder.

The R-05 also boasts enhanced recording and onboard editing features, and extended battery life (over 16 hours per charge). It can also simultaneously record WAV and MP3 files of the same performance, and transfer files with computers via USB 2.0.

The R-05 is now shipping with a suggested retail price of $299.00.

Matt Mullenweg today announced the release of WordPress 3.0, the latest version of the popular blogging application, dubbed Thelonious:

Arm your vuvuzelas: WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download (or upgrade within your dashboard). Major new features in this release include a sexy* new default theme [emphasis added by E.L.] called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.) Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation. As a user, you will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates so you can upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click, and blah blah blah just watch the video.  (In HD, if you can, so you can catch the Easter eggs.)

Mullenweg also comments on where WordPress will focus its energies next:

We’re going to take a release cycle off to focus on all of the things around WordPress….[S]o much of our effort has been focused on the core software it hasn’t left much time for anything else. Over the next three months we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience…. The goal of the teams isn’t going to be to make things perfect all at once, just better than they are today. We think this investment of time will give us a much stronger infrastructure to grow WordPress.org for the many tens of millions of users that will join us during the 3.X release cycle.

Read the full post here.

*Your ed. opines: blog themes may be useful and attractive, but they are not “sexy.”