iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

"Back in 2010, a team from Stanford University's computer graphics lab got their hands on a Nokia N900. It had a pretty good camera by smartphone standards at the time, but the researchers thought they could make it better with a little bit of code.

The Stanford team, led by professor Mark Levoy, was working on the cutting edge of a nascent field known as computational photography. The theory was that software algorithms could do more than dutifully process photos, but actually make photos better in the process.

"The output of these techniques is an ordinary photograph, but one that could not have been taken by a traditional camera," is how the group described its efforts at the time.

Fast forward to today, and many of the techniques that Levoy and his team worked on — yielding features like HDR and better photos in low light — are now commonplace. And in Cupertino, Calif,. on Tuesday, Apple's iPhone event was another reminder of just how far smartphone technology has come.

What we think of as a camera is largely a collection of software algorithms that expands with each passing year."

"Ever since Apple redesigned the iOS lock screen to remove swipe-to-unlock and require users to press the Home button instead, some iPhone users have discovered that accessing the Camera from the lock screen might be a challenge. The potentially difficult scenario is this; if you press the Home button to show the locked display which you would then swipe to access the iPhone Camera from, pressing the Home button also unlocks the iPhone and skips the lock screen with the camera access. I recently ran into someone who was convinced this set of actions meant their iPhone lock screen camera wasn’t working or no longer existed, so the behavior can lead to some degree of confusion as well.

Fortunately there’s a better way to access the iPhone camera from the lock screen in iOS 10 and newer, and it doesn’t involve using the Home button at all."