Those elaborate upright emoticons that are so popular with the young folks might be a little baffling to some people. There is now an app that creates the fancy smilies for you based on facial recognition. Twikao is a combination of the words “tweet” and “kao,” which means “face” in Japanese.

You simply take a photograph of yourself with your phone’s camera and the app creates an emoticon based on the expression you are making in the picture. You can then tweet just the emoticon and a short message, or you can choose to attach the original photo as well.

The app is surprisingly accurate, mimicking the user’s expressions very closely. Above, a woman demonstrates just some of the thousands of expressions possible with Twikao. The free app is available now in the iTunes store.

The post Instant Smiley App Turns Your Expression into an Emoticon first appeared on Gajitz.

Ever since everyone started carrying phones around and texting their friends 20 hours a day, there’s been a steep rise in sidewalk collisions (probably). It’s not easy to see that light post coming up in front of you when there’s a screen permanently installed a few inches in front of your face. That is, until you install the Type n Walk app that lets you see where you’re going while you’re texting.

The clever app uses your iPhone’s camera to give you a kind of x-ray vision while you’re walking along with your nose stuck to your screen. It makes your texting window transparent too, letting you see both the conversation and your surroundings…and maybe preventing some really painful concussions. It seems worth it for less than a dollar.

The post Heads Up! Texting and Walking: There’s an App For That first appeared on Gajitz.

We’ve all probably felt the urge to pick up our computers and try to shake some sense into them, which explains why the “shake to undo” feature on iPhones has proven so popular. But until now, that feature has been limited to smaller hand-held devices. Developer Nate Stedman figured it would be almost as useful on a MacBook, so he made it happen. Now your MacBook can be sort of like a really expensive, really breakable Etch-A-Sketch.

Stedman’s Shake-to-Undo for Mac OS X uses a portable Mac’s hard drive motion sensors – the ones used to stabilize the hard drive platters when the computer is in motion. The feature works just like it does on an iPhone: make a mistake and shake the device to undo your last action. Of course, it’s a truly terrible idea to shake your laptop every time you make a mistake so the app is intended more as a joke than an actual everyday utility.

The post Shake Your Mistakes: Shake to Undo Comes to MacBooks first appeared on Gajitz.

Our cars can already tell us so much about the world: which direction we’re heading, what kind of gas mileage we’re getting, the weather outside and even what the traffic is like up ahead. But Ford wants to make cars even smarter with a health-monitoring dashboard. The car company wants to introduce a whole suite of applications that could make our cars an even bigger part of our everyday lives. The apps could measure the day’s pollen count and, when appropriate, roll up your windows to keep the contaminated air out of your car.

The focus of Ford’s initiative is taking care of drivers with chronic conditions like hypoglycemia and allergies. They are not, however, interested in developing apps that would measure a driver’s blood alcohol level. But if your blood sugar is dipping, your car will gently remind you that it’s time to eat and even give you directions to the nearest restaurant. According to Ford, features like this could help cut down on blood sugar-related crashes. It seems to us that detecting the amount of alcohol someone has consumed might be more useful, but maybe Ford will come around eventually.

The post Dashboard Medical: Car Apps Know if You’re Hungry, Sneezy first appeared on Gajitz.

The iPhone has created a whole new era of amateur music. Apps that let you play all kinds of weird music have been fan favorites since the early days of Apple’s iconic communication/entertainment device. Barcodas is a new contender that will make your whole life – particularly the parts that you spend shopping – more musical.

Using the iPhone’s camera, Barcodas turns product bar codes into strange tinny little melodies. You can adjust the time signature and harmonic scale for the songs, turning any EAN or UPC bar code into a somewhat-customizable piece of music.

After creating an ear-pleasing melody off of your Wheaties box, you can share your musical creations on Facebook. For true music lovers, there is a whole world of compositional possibilities out there in every aisle of the grocery store just waiting to be brought to life. For the negligible price of 99 cents from the App Store, Barcodas seems like it offers up plenty of entertainment value for the cost.

The post Mobile Music: Cool iPhone App Turns Barcodes Into Beats first appeared on Gajitz.